Page 6 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"The war strategist is the key. She held them together during the retreat. She was directing their defense during the capture. Remove her from the population and the column would have scattered. She’s the infrastructure."
"Then take personal custody if you have to. Do what you need to do to break the resistance. Use whatever pressure is necessary." Stellan straightens. "Grimnir has also expressed interest in a mating alliance. He wants a high-value Blackridge she-wolf as a permanent bond to cement border cooperation. If the strategist proves more useful as a trade than as a conversion, I’ll authorize a forced mating bond to the Ashvald alpha. Her body for his border. Make sure I don’t have to make that calculation."
The words land clean and cold. Custody. Pressure. Forced bond. A she wolf's body offered to an outside alpha as a line item in a territorial negotiation. I hear each word and slot it into the place where I keep every order Stellan has ever given me: interrogations, surveillance, executions, the quiet dismantling ofthreats he needed removed without spectacle. This one slides in alongside the rest.
Except my hands, resting at my sides, have gone still in a way that has nothing to do with discipline.
"Timeline?" I ask.
"Use your judgment. I trust your methods." He holds my gaze, and the trust in the words carries the weight of a man who has never had to verify whether his beta would comply. "But Torben. The result is not negotiable. These holdouts submit or they are removed. I will not have a faction inside my territory waiting for the right moment to fracture what we’ve built."
"Understood."
Stellan studies me for a beat longer than the exchange requires. He’s reading me the way he reads every wolf: with the casual thoroughness of an alpha who learned decades ago that what wolves say and what they carry in their posture are rarely the same thing. Whatever he finds, he lets pass without comment.
I descend to the eastern barracks.
The corridors narrow as I go deeper into the fortress. The upper levels are built for authority: wide passages, high ceilings, torchlight generous enough to see faces clearly. Politics requires visibility. The lower levels are built for containment. The walls close in. The ceilings drop. The light thins to single torches at longer intervals, and the shadows between them grow dense enough that a wolf could stand in one and vanish.
My shoulders drop as the corridors tighten. My center of gravity lowers. My breathing levels into something slow and measured. The adjustment is automatic. I’ve made this descent for other prisoners and other assignments, and my body knows the preparation.
The eastern barracks sit at the base of the fortress's outer wall, a converted storage hall with narrow windows set high inthe stone and a single heavy door. I nod to the guard on duty and step inside.
She’s reorganized the room.
The detail registers before the rest of the scene assembles itself. When we brought the captives in hours ago, the barracks held the disordered sprawl of wolves dumped into an unfamiliar space. Now the sleeping pallets have been repositioned along the walls in orderly rows. The injured have been grouped near the door, where any healer arriving would reach them first. The wolves who fought hardest during the capture are positioned at the back, farthest from the entrance, where their restless energy is contained by the bodies between them and the exit.
She did this. In the hours since the capture, while I processed her wolves and interrogated Gareth and ran the dawn patrol, Revna Kassdóttir walked into a room full of defeated wolves and imposed order. She didn’t use force. She used architecture.
I scan the room and find her at the center. She sits on a pallet with her back against the wall and her legs drawn up, one arm resting across her knees. The posture is designed to look relaxed while being anything but. Her auburn hair is pushed behind her ears, damp from whatever limited washing the basin allowed. The scar through her eyebrow catches the thin light from the high windows.
She looks up when I enter. Those amber eyes find mine and hold, and the assessment that runs behind them is so thorough that for a fraction of a second I have the disorienting sensation of being the one in the cell.
Then she stands.
The movement is fluid and unhurried, a wolf rising to meet a wolf rather than a captive rising for a captor. She unfolds from the pallet with a controlled grace that brings her to her full height, which falls well short of mine and does nothing to diminish the impression. The lean lines of her body carry theangles of a she-wolf built for speed rather than force, and the way she holds the space around her, shoulders square, chin level, weight balanced on both feet, tells me she has stood in rooms full of wolves with larger teeth and walked out with the intelligence she came for.
The tunic she wears hangs loose at the neckline where the collar has stretched, baring the line of her collarbone and the hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse is visible. I watch it beat. The rhythm is steady, controlled, and completely at odds with the scent that reaches me across the distance between us. Underneath the musk of confined wolves and the mineral smell of the barracks, there is a trace of the warmth I caught in the mountains. It’s faint, buried, almost imagined. My nose pulls at it before I can shorten the breath, and my awareness narrows to the specific planes of her face and the steady amber of her eyes before I can redirect it.
I sort the scent underproximityand set it aside.
Her gaze tracks my hands first, where they rest, whether they are fisted or loose. Then she reads my weight distribution, my posture, the distance between my body and the nearest wall. She reads me the way I read wolves in interrogation rooms. The recognition of my own methodology reflected back at me from a she-wolf standing in the eastern barracks produces a response in my chest that I don’t have a name for and don’t intend to find one.
I’m here to assess the captive. To begin the process of breaking her resistance, or bartering it, or packaging it for trade to an alpha whose territorial ambitions include a claim on the body of a she-wolf I bound in the mountains hours ago.
The red marks are still visible on her wrists. The cord left impressions in the skin that will take time to fade. I put those marks there. My hands, my cord, my efficiency appliedto the specific task of reducing a she-wolf's freedom to a set of bindings.
The observation produces no guilt. It produces something adjacent that I don’t examine.
"Kassdóttir." I use her surname. The professional distance of it is necessary because the alternative is the given name I have been turning over in my mind since I pulled it from her intelligence file, and given names are for wolves who have earned proximity. She hasn’t earned proximity. She’s earned custody.
She tilts her head. The scar catches a different angle of light. "The Wolf Prince."
The title sits between us like a blade laid flat on a table. She’s heard it from the Blackridge survivors; the mocking name they gave the beta who kneels to one alpha and makes everyone else kneel to him. She delivers it now with the measured precision of a she-wolf testing the edge of a new weapon, watching my face for the cut.
My jaw doesn’t move. I built this control in rooms harder than this one, across from wolves with longer teeth.
"Your wolves will be processed. Injuries will be treated. Conditions are adequate."
