Page 34 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"How long has this been operational?"
"Since the snow retreated. Weeks, at minimum."
I close my eyes. Open them. The variables reassemble with the cold clarity the situation requires, the personal calculus stripped from the tactical one and set aside to be dealt with in its own time.
"Thank you, Erla."
"I'm not doing you a favor. I'm doing this fortress a favor." She meets my eyes with the pragmatism that makes her both the most trustworthy and the most dangerous wolf in this barracks. "The faction endangers all of us. Grimnir's wolves at the gate benefit no one in this room. You have the beta's ear, and apparently several other parts of him. Use what you have."
I leave the barracks with the spy network mapped in my head and the weight of what I'm about to do pressing against my sternum. The intelligence Halvor and Erla gave me belongs to my wolves. Carrying it to Torben is an act of alliance that the barracks will read as betrayal.
The math says it's the right call. Grimnir's timeline is compressing. The mountain faction's tunnel compromises the fortress security that keeps my wolves alive alongside every Northern Pack member inside these walls. And the man who needs this information most is the man I can still feel on my skin despite the soap, whose scent is woven into mine now at a depth that scrubbing can't reach.
'This doesn't happen again.'
The intelligence isn't what happened between us. The intelligence is survival. I can give him the spy network without giving him anything else.
The walk from the eastern barracks to the war room takes a few minutes through corridors I could navigate blind by now. By the time I reach the war room door, I've organized the intelligence into the order he'll need it, stripped clean of anything that would identify Halvor or Erla as sources. Protecting my wolves is a habit I can't afford to lose, even when the person I'm protecting them from is the person I'm about to arm with their secrets.
Torben is alone at the map table. He looks up when I enter, and the neutral expression he wears like armor settles into place so fast I almost miss what was underneath it. Almost. The fraction of a second before the mask landed carried something raw and unfinished, and it looked the way the silence between our rooms felt all day yesterday: full of things being held at arm's length.
This is the first time we've been face to face since I walked out of his quarters. Since'this doesn't happen again'and the long, stubborn quiet that followed.
"I need to talk to you," I say from the doorway.
"Then talk." His voice carries the same spare, unhurried cadence it always carries, but there's a tension beneath it that I've learned to read the way I read fortification schematics: by looking for the stress points. He's holding himself still the way he holds himself still when something is testing his control. His hands are flat on the map. His jaw is set.
I step inside and pull the door shut behind me. Without the corridor and its helpful current of mountain air between us, the confined space does what confined spaces have been doing since he moved me into the room next to his: it traps our scents together. His reaches me first, the familiar composition that my body has been cataloging for weeks, and the omega chemistry responds with the predictable enthusiasm of a designation that doesn't care about agreements made in the aftermath ofmistakes. The pull is low and immediate, heat gathering at the base of my spine, and I sit down across from him at the map table before the pull becomes visible. The same configuration as every debriefing we've conducted over the past weeks, except that every debriefing before this one happened in a version of this room where I didn't know what he sounds like when he comes apart.
His nostrils flare. He smells me too, his scent still woven through mine despite the soap, and the recognition registers in the way his fingers press harder into the map's surface. He doesn't comment. I don't either. The agreement stands. The biology doesn't care about the agreement, but we're both disciplined enough to pretend it does.
"The mountain faction has a tunnel under the eastern curtain wall," I say, because the intelligence is the reason I'm here and the intelligence is the thing I can give him without crossing any of the lines we drew yesterday. "It connects to a route through the lower passes that Grimnir's scouts have been using since the snow retreated. Your perimeter wolves have missed it because the entrance is masked by a hot spring vent that confuses the scent markers."
His stillness changes quality. The holding-himself-still becomes the focused stillness of a man receiving operational intelligence, and the shift is visible in his shoulders, his hands, the way his gaze sharpens from guarded to calculating.
"Source?"
"My wolves. I learned this morning. The spy network runs through supply tunnel routes that the mountain faction has been using for weeks to coordinate with Grimnir's people." I hold his gaze, because this part requires looking at him when I say it. "I didn't know about it until today. I'm giving it to you because Grimnir's wolves in the high passes threaten every wolfin this fortress, including mine, and because a tunnel under your perimeter is a vulnerability that kills indiscriminately."
He's quiet for a long moment, studying me the way he studied the integration proposal that started the argument that ended on the table in his room and then in silence. Searching for the hidden clause, the embedded advantage, the thing I'm holding back.
His gaze drops to my mouth, holds for a beat too long to be tactical, and returns to my eyes with the sharp correction of a man catching himself.
"The mating alliance," he says. "Grimnir is using the tunnel to coordinate the timeline?"
"His scouts are. The she-wolf he'll want most is the one with the highest strategic value to both packs. He doesn't need to know anything else about me to put my name at the top of that list."
The tendons in Torben's forearms shift as his fists tighten against the map. The controlled force of a man directing fury into a surface that can take it. "How many runners?"
"A few, rotating. The hot spring vent masks the scent trail on the approach."
He nods, slow and certain, and his hand moves across the map, tracing the eastern curtain wall to the point where fortified stone meets natural rock face. He begins working the problem. His forearm passes within inches of where my hand rests on the table, and the proximity is a current that the agreement does nothing to discharge. Not a spark. Something steadier than that. The low-voltage hum of two bodies in a confined space that have learned each other's frequencies and can't stop broadcasting, no matter what promises were made in the wreckage.
I give him the rest. Every detail Halvor and Erla provided, organized and delivered with the clean precision of an intelligence briefing that both of us are using as scaffolding fora professional interaction we're building over the rubble of a personal one. He listens the way he always listens. Still, focused, absorbing. When I finish, the silence in the war room holds for several seconds.
"You're trusting me with this," he says.
"I'm trusting you to use it against the external threat rather than against the wolves who carried the messages."
