Page 27 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
Erla studies me with the particular intensity of a woman who watched my mother die. She promised my mother she wouldkeep my secret and has been carrying the weight of that promise ever since. The promise has been costing her more with every day the compound thins.
"The wolf you're living next to," she says. "Does he know?"
The question cuts cleaner than I expect. I consider the lie. The lie is there, ready, shaped and polished the way I shape every lie I tell in this fortress. But Erla sat beside my mother's body in the forge and helped me burn it, and the debt I owe her is older than strategy.
"Yes."
The single word reshapes her entire face. The fear arrives first, swift and deep, followed by something harder to name. She reaches for my arm again, and the grip isn't clinical this time.
"And?"
"He didn't report it."
The silence between us carries the weight of every conversation my mother and Erla ever had about what would happen when the secret came out.
"Why?" Erla asks.
The same question I asked through the wall. The same silence I received.
"I don't know."
Erla releases my arm. Her eyes are wet, and she does not wipe them. She has never wiped them, not when my mother died, not when the fortress fell. The tears stay where they are and she talks through them.
"Be careful, Revna."
"I'm always careful."
"You're always strategic. That's not the same thing."
Brenna signals the hour from the doorway. I leave the barracks with Halvor's accusation and Erla's warning sitting side by side in my chest, and neither one is wrong.
The escort takes me back through the fortress by a route I haven’t walked before. The corridor opens onto a south-facing walkway where the mountain drops away and the sky stretches wide above the valley. The air hits my face clean and cold, carrying pine and snow and nothing else, and the relief of it is physical after the close warmth of the barracks.
I stop walking. Brenna stops behind me, patient.
Below the south wall, where the mountain drops into timber before leveling into the river valley, wolves are running. A patrol returning, moving through the tree line in loose formation, their bodies low and fluid against the snow. The lead wolf sets a pace the others match without visible effort. They run in pairs, flanks close, and the coordination carries the ease of wolves who have done this together so many times that the running itself has become a language.
I scan the formation for the dark-furred wolf with the broad shoulders and the controlled precision that separates him from the others. He isn't among them. The scanning is involuntary, and the disappointment that follows it is worse.
My wolf slams against the inside of my ribs so hard that my hand goes to the walkway railing.
She wants out. She wants the snow and the timber and the open ground beneath her paws and the wind through her coat, and the wanting is so acute that my vision blurs and my breath catches and for a terrible, perfect second the woman standing on the walkway and the wolf caged inside her body are the same being, reaching for the same thing with the same desperate hunger.
I haven't shifted since before the capture. The compound works on human biochemistry. In wolf form, the molecular binding sites don't exist. If I shift, the suppressant fails. If the suppressant fails, my scent broadcasts omega to every wolf within range. My mother explained this when I was youngenough that the explanation was theoretical. It's been practical ever since.
The wolves below disappear into the timber, and the walkway is empty, and my wolf presses against my ribs with a patience that is worse than urgency. She's been waiting. She'll continue to wait. She has no choice, and the absence of choice is the thing I carry most carefully because it's the thing that would break me if I looked at it directly.
I look at it directly.
That night, after the whetstone goes quiet on the other side of the wall and his breathing changes to the slower rhythm of approaching sleep, I take the compound. The dose is small. The dose is always small now. I swallow it and sit in the window alcove and look down at the cliff face below.
The seam is still there. The junction between the carved stone and the mountain's natural rock, the gap barely the width of my smallest finger, running along the transition line in an uneven thread. I noted it the first day. I filed it and did not revisit it, because escape required a plan and the plan required more than a crack in a cliff face.
I'm not escaping tonight. I'm doing something worse.
The wool blanket from the pallet tears into strips that braid into a rope long enough to reach past the polished section. I tie one end to the stone lip of the window alcove, test the knot with my full weight, and lower myself over the sill. The worked stone is as smooth as it looked, offering nothing. The rope takes my weight and the braided wool bites into my palms as I descend hand over hand past the section Torben's people carved clean. When the rope runs out, the seam is within reach. My fingers find the gap and hold, and the natural rock beyond the worked surface offers enough texture to continue the descent.
The ledge sits below the worked section where the mountain reasserts itself, a shelf of rock wide enough for a wolf to standand deep enough to be invisible from the window above. The mountain curves around it on both sides, and the air here smells like stone and pine and cold sky and nothing human.
