Page 35 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"And if I can't separate the two?"
"Then I've made a mistake, and I'll deal with the consequences the way I deal with everything else. On my own terms."
His jaw works. The muscle at the hinge jumps once and settles. "I'll seal the tunnel tonight. The hot spring vent gives us an approach that won't alert the runners. Your wolves' involvement stays out of the report."
It's not a concession. It's not a kindness. It's the calculated decision of an intelligence officer who recognizes that burning a source network produces less value than maintaining the channels for future use. But the way he says'your wolves'carries something that the calculation doesn't account for, and the way his eyes hold mine when he says it has nothing to do with operational methodology.
"Thank you," I say, and I mean the word in more directions than I'm willing to enumerate.
I sit across from him while he works the map, and the intelligence I pulled from my own wolves becomes operational advantage in his hands, and the fact that it was the right call sits alongside the fact that the barracks will never see it that way.
The afternoon light has shifted by the time I leave him to his maps and his protocols. The corridors carry me back to the one place in this fortress that's still mine alone, if only by the technicality of a door that no longer locks.
My quarters. The pallet, the basin, the window. The wall that is warm because his fire feeds it.
I sit on the pallet and run the numbers.
Suppressant doses: a handful at most, and fewer if I reduce the concentration and gamble on the margin. Days until Grimnir's emissary expects an answer about the mating alliance: more than the suppressant will cover. The mountain faction's operational tempo: accelerating. Halvor's threshold for doing something reckless: dropping by the hour.
Every number is bad.
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. I catch the movement halfway and redirect, pressing my palm flat against the stone wall instead. The rock is warm. It is always warm.
Footsteps in the corridor. His gait, unhurried and certain, recognizable before the sound of his door confirms it. Through the stone I hear him settle into his quarters. The creak of floorboards, the scrape of a chair. The same sounds as this morning, the same patterns, except now I know what he's carrying: every tunnel, every runner, every timeline I handed him across that table. By tomorrow the perimeter will be redrawn and every vulnerability my wolves created in his security will be sealed shut.
I gave him a weapon forged from my own people.
I sat across a table from a man I can still feel inside my body and delivered an intelligence briefing like what happened between us was a footnote and the silence was a strategy and the agreement we made was something either of us believes.
'This doesn't happen again.'The warmth of the wall says several things about the likelihood of that.
I drop my hand. Lie back on the pallet. Close my eyes. The soreness between my thighs settles into a dull ache that carrieshis rhythm in it, and the omega turns toward the wall the way a compass needle finds north.
A handful of suppressant doses. Fewer days than I need. And the beta on the other side of this wall, whose scent is still threaded through my skin at a depth that soap can't reach, is the only variable in the entire equation I can't account for.
12
TORBEN
The spy network she handed me confirms what the border patrol suggested. The mountain faction and Grimnir's wolves are operating a joint staging area in the high passes, and it's closer than anyone guessed. I've spent the hours since she left the war room tracing the tunnel route against the topographical maps, overlaying the faction's supply lines with the patrol gaps in my perimeter, and the picture that assembles is clean and ugly: a coordinated staging operation positioned less than half a day's march from the northeastern wall.
I need eyes on it. And the woman who built Korren's campaign infrastructure knows this terrain the way I know fortress security, by touch and by instinct and from years of reading the landscape for tactical advantage. Revna is the difference between a blind search and a surgical strike.
Stellan would not approve this. Taking a captive outside the fortress walls for an unauthorized reconnaissance is the kind of decision that ends careers and starts tribunals. Stellan values the intelligence she provides, values it enough to delay Grimnir's mating alliance while the information keeps flowing. But the explanation for why I need her outside the walls would unraveleverything else. I've been sleeping with her. I've known her designation since her suppressant slipped and chose to protect the secret rather than report it. My professional judgment regarding her containment has been compromised beyond recovery. The explanation would end with her in a locked cell and me relieved of command.
I don't clear it with Stellan.
She's waiting in her quarters when I knock, and the door opens fast enough to confirm that she wasn't sleeping either. Her eyes are sharp, alert, already reading the tactical posture of a man who knocks on her door before dawn wearing patrol gear with a field pack slung over one shoulder. Her gaze drops to the pack, then to my boots, then back to my face with the rapid calculation I've watched her run in every debriefing since the first one.
"You're not dressed for a debriefing," she says.
"No. You're coming with me."
She doesn't ask where. The question lives in the assessment of her gaze, but what comes through the door with her is Dag's blade, drawn from wherever she's been keeping it since the forge, already belted at her hip with the comfortable weight of a weapon she's been handling in private. I note the blade, note the fact that she's been armed inside the fortress for days without my knowledge, and file both under the long list of things about this woman that I'm choosing not to report.
We leave through the eastern gate in the grey light before the guard rotation. The air outside the fortress walls hits differently than it does through windows and arrow slits, cold and moving and thick with the green smell of pine and snowmelt and the faint mineral trace of high-altitude granite. Revna breathes it in with the controlled steadiness of someone who hasn't tasted open air in weeks and doesn't intend to let the relief show.
It shows anyway. The tension she carries in her shoulders, the careful architecture of posture that serves as armor inside stone walls, loosens by degrees as we climb above the tree line and into the passes. A recalibration rather than a relaxation, the settling of a blade into the hand it was forged for.
