Page 9 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
The Wolf Prince did that. The grey-eyed wolf with the voice like a closed door and the hands that took my knife in the space of a breath walked Gareth into a room and walked him out empty.
I know Gareth. I sat at the same war council for years. He’s loud and he’s proud and he would have endured a beating with his jaw set and his dignity intact. Whatever the beta did to him was not a beating. The absence of bruises tells me he used leverage rather than force. The only leverage Gareth carries is Brigid. His mate was captured in the initial sweep. She is pregnant. Anyone with access to the intake records would see it. A wolf who reads everything would use it.
The efficiency of the work tells me everything the Wolf Prince's measured courtesy did not. He is not cruel. He is something more dangerous than cruel. He’s precise, and a precise wolf with a pregnant she-wolf's safety in one hand and her mate's cooperation in the other doesn’t need to raise his voice or his fist to get what he wants.
His hands surface in my memory before I can stop them. The rough warmth of his fingers wrapping my wrist during the disarm. The grip that knew exactly how much pressure thejoint required. The competence of a man whose violence is so practiced it has become indistinguishable from calm.
My wrist aches where the cord left its marks, and the ache is complicated by the fact that I can’t think about his grip without thinking about the heat that followed it, the flush that climbed my neck while his chest pressed against my back. My strategist wants to file the Wolf Prince underthreatand leave him there. My body insists on cross-referencing him with a category that has no name and no business existing in the middle of an escape plan.
I will keep Gareth in mind when the beta delivers his briefing. I will also remember the warmth of his hands, which is less useful and more persistent and is going to be a problem I don’t currently have the bandwidth to solve.
The healer arrives. She enters through the barracks door with a leather satchel over one shoulder and a brisk, unhurried stride that claims the room without asking anyone's permission. She is silver-blonde with pale eyes that carry the focused attention of a wolf who reads bodies the way I read battlefields.
Her name is Signe, and her dossier in my files was thorough enough to include her specialties, her training background, and the notation that she’s served the Northern Pack for a long time.
I didn’t expect the dossier to be inadequate. I was wrong.
The file described competence. What walks into my barracks is authority, quiet and clinical and wearing the healer's satchel like other wolves wear rank insignia.
Signe doesn’t announce herself. She doesn’t ask who needs treatment. She scans the room, identifies the injured wolves by posture alone, and goes to Maren first because the broken rib is the most urgent concern. She read the shallow breathing from the doorway.
I watch from across the room while she works. Her hands are steady and skilled, her touch efficient without being rough. Shechecks the rib alignment, applies a compression wrap, murmurs instructions about breathing exercises that will prevent the lung from collapsing. The care is genuine. That isn’t the part that concerns me.
The part that concerns me is the scenting.
Signe lingers over each wolf she examines. Not long enough to be obvious, not short enough to be accidental. She leans close while checking Maren's wrap and breathes in with a slow, measured pull that has nothing to do with diagnostics and everything to do with cataloging. She does the same as she examines the injuries of every she-wolf whose body she touches during the examination.
She’s building a baseline. She’s recording what healthy Blackridge wolves smell like so that any deviation from the norm will stand out against the data she’s compiling. The thoroughness of it is professional and alarming, because a healer who builds scent baselines on captured she-wolves is a healer who expects to need the comparison later.
I add Signe to my assessment of the threats in this fortress and place her near the top, beside the Wolf Prince and above the guard rotation. The guards are the visible cage. Signe is the invisible one, and the invisible cages are always harder to escape.
Erla finds me after the healer leaves.
The elder does not approach directly. She waits until I have finished checking on Maren, waits until Halvor's attention is fixed on the guard change happening beyond the door, and then she appears at my shoulder the way she’s been appearing at my shoulder since I was old enough to sit at Korren's war council. Erla has always had the gift of arriving at exactly the moment her presence is needed and in exactly the position where her words will carry farthest and be overheard by the fewest.
We settle into the corner farthest from the door, our backs to the wall, our voices pitched below the ambient noise of the barracks.
"How much do you have left?" Erla does not waste time on preamble. The question is about the suppressant, and we both know it.
"Enough for at least several more weeks at the current dosage. I’ve been halving it since the fortress fell."
"And at half dosage, the suppression is incomplete."
"The suppression holds. The margins are thinner."
"The margins." Erla's pale eyes carry no judgment and no sympathy, only the flat pragmatic assessment of a wolf who has been calculating survival odds since before my mother mixed the first batch of compound. "I helped your mother source the original ingredients, Revna. I know what the formula requires, and I know that nothing growing within reach of this fortress can replicate it. When the supply runs out, the margins do not thin. They vanish."
"I‘m aware of the timeline."
"Are you aware of the variable?" Erla does not look at me when she says it. She looks at the door, at the passage beyond it where the guard rotation is running with the mechanical consistency of a system designed by a wolf who thinks in structures. "The wolf who brought you in. The one who runs the fortress."
"What about him?"
"You tell me. You’ve been thinking about him since you sat down, and you aren’t a she-wolf who wastes thought on captors unless the captor has given you a reason beyond the professional."
The observation is so precise it feels like a slap. Erla has been reading me since I was old enough to have secrets. The fact thatshe can still cut through my composure with a single sentence is one of her less endearing qualities.
It is also one of the reasons I trust her more than any other wolf alive.
