Page 39 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
Halfway down the pass, in the full dark between the tree line and the fortress, my hand finds hers. Not her arm, not the professional grip of a man guiding a captive through rough terrain. Her hand. My fingers lace through hers, and the contact is not strategic and not professional and not anything I can file under operational necessity.
She doesn't pull away. Her fingers tighten around mine, and we walk through the dark like that, hand in hand, two wolves coming home through hostile territory who have stopped pretending the touching is anything other than what it is.
The fortress appears through the trees as a scatter of torchlight against stone. The gate grows from a glow to a shape to a structure, and the closer it gets, the more the outside world narrows back into the architecture that defines us inside those walls. Captor and captive. Adjacent rooms. The debriefing table between us.
Neither of us lets go until the torchlight reaches our feet.
13
REVNA
The last pellet of my mother's compound sits in my palm like a period at the end of a sentence that's been running my entire life.
It's smaller than I remember. Or my hand is larger, or the years between the first dose and this one have compressed the memory into something grander than the reality. In reality, it's a dried lump of ground herbs, barely the size of my thumbnail, packed with the same formula my mother refined in a kitchen that smelled like rosemary and iron and the love that expresses itself through chemistry rather than words. She spent her life perfecting the compound that would keep me invisible.
I know the formula by heart. I could recite the proportions in my sleep. But the alpine bloodroot and the glacier moss that form the base don't grow in Northern Pack territory, and even if they did, a captive foraging the mountainside for omega-suppressant ingredients would answer every question I've spent my life keeping unasked.
I swallow it dry. The bitterness coats my tongue, familiar as my own name, and the pouch that held it sits in my other hand, empty. I turn it inside out. Run my fingers along the seams. Check the corners the way I've checked them every morningsince the supply started running low, as though a dose might have lodged itself in the stitching and been overlooked.
The pouch is empty. The corners are clean. The math I've been running for weeks has arrived at its answer, and the answer is zero.
I fold the pouch and tuck it into the pocket of my trousers because throwing it away would mean accepting a finality I'm not ready to perform, and keeping it means nothing except that my mother made it and my hands aren't willing to let go of the last thing she touched.
The suppressant will hold for a day, maybe two, at diminishing strength. After that, the compound clears my system entirely, and every nose in this fortress will know what my mother spent her life hiding. The strategist turns the timeline over, looking for angles. There are none. The math is the math, and the answer says I'm out of road.
My left hand lifts to the hollow of my throat, fingers drifting to the skin just left of center where the bone angles toward the clavicle. The spot is unmarked. It has been unmarked my entire life. The omega in me presses toward the touch with a hunger that the last dose is already too weak to fully suppress, and I drop my hand and stand up and go find something useful to do with the hours I have left before the mask comes off.
The courtyard is the useful thing, as it turns out. Or rather, the courtyard is the place where useful things have stopped being available and all that remains is cold air and weak sunlight and the view of a mountain that doesn't care about my calculations.
I've been sitting on the stone bench for a while, turning variables that don't produce new answers, when the Luna of the Northern Pack settles onto the opposite end of the bench as though sitting next to captives is something she does on ordinary afternoons.
Iris Varen is not what I expected. I built a profile of her from intelligence gathered before the war, the way I built profiles of every significant figure in Stellan's inner circle, and the profile described a woman taken from her previous life through a blood pact she didn't consent to, bonded to an alpha who surveilled her for years before claiming her. The profile suggested someone broken into a shape that fit Stellan's requirements.
The woman on the bench doesn't look broken. She looks like someone who walked through a fire and decided the heat was livable. Her dark hair is pulled back from sharp features, and the lean lines of her body speak to combat training received from someone who expected her to need it. The blade strapped to her thigh catches the light when she adjusts her seat. The Luna of the Northern Pack, armed on an ordinary afternoon, sitting next to a captive as though the political implications are someone else's problem.
She doesn't introduce herself. She doesn't explain why she's here. She settles onto the bench and looks out at the mountain with the patient focus of someone who has learned that some silences are worth more than most conversations.
The silence holds for a while. Iris sits with the particular stillness of someone comfortable occupying space she didn't ask permission to take. The blade on her thigh isn't decorative. The calluses on the hand resting beside it aren't either.
"You're the Luna," I say, because someone has to break the silence and it might as well be the captive.
"I'm Iris."
"Those aren't the same thing."
"No." The word is simple and free of defensiveness. "They aren't. One is a title the pack gave me. The other is the name I kept."
A line drawn between what belongs to the pack and what belongs to herself. The strategist in me catalogs it and files it under useful.
"Torben's been summoned to Stellan," she says, and the information is offered without preamble, the way one woman gives another the intelligence she needs without waiting to be asked. "This morning. I don't know what it's about, but Stellan's been quiet for two days, and when Stellan goes quiet, the decisions he's making are the ones nobody's going to like."
"You're telling me this because you think I need to know, or because you think I deserve to know?"
"I'm telling you because I sat on a bench like this one and nobody told me anything, and the not-knowing was worse than whatever Stellan eventually decided." Her gaze meets mine, steady and free of pity. "I'm not your ally. I'm not your friend. I'm the woman who lives with the wolf who runs your life, and I remember what it feels like to have your future negotiated in a room you can't enter."
The honesty is so clean it stings. I've spent weeks navigating layers of strategy and subtext and the careful political choreography of captivity. Iris offers her information the way Dag offers his forge: here it is, use it or don't, the tool doesn't care either way.
"How long has he been in there?" I ask.
