Page 8 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
The assignment is clear. The captive is contained. The intelligence from Gareth is committed to memory. Everything is in order.
I sit in the chair. I pick up the whetstone and the blade. The rhythm of steel on stone fills the room the way Dag's hammer fills the fortress, steady and reliable, a pulse I can set my discipline to. The scraping smooths the edge. The edge doesn’t need smoothing. The blade has been sharp for days, and the ritual serves the man more than the metal.
My quarters are in the upper residential wing, far from the eastern barracks. No sound from the holding area reaches this level. I shouldn’t be aware of the distance between my chair and her pallet. The assignment doesn’t require me to track her location through stone and silence, to calculate the number of corridors and staircases that separate the room where I sit from the room where she is reorganizing defeated wolves into something that will cause me problems.
The whetstone scrapes. The blade turns. The steel doesn’t need this attention. Neither does the distance. Neither does the pulse I can’t stop hearing, the one that kicked against my palm in the mountains and has been running underneath every other sound in this fortress since.
I sharpen the blade. I don’t examine why the sharpening no longer fills the silence the way it used to.
3
REVNA
The Wolf Prince left my barracks an hour ago, and I’ve been working since the door closed behind him.
Working is the wrong word. Working implies tools, materials, something external to shape. What I’m doing is closer to breathing: the automatic, sustaining process of a mind that cannot be still when there are variables to control. The barracks gave me walls. The guards gave me a rotation. The Wolf Prince gave me a timeline, even if he didn’t intend to.Tomorrow morning.A full briefing on conditions and expectations. Which means I’ve got today to understand the shape of the cage before the wolf holding the key tells me how much room I have to move inside it.
I start with my wolves.
The assessment is quiet and systematic, conducted while I help distribute the thin blankets the guards provided. I move through the room the way I moved through Korren's war councils: speaking to each wolf in turn, reading what their words tell me and what their bodies tell me louder.
I go to the injured first. Maren has a broken rib from the capture. Her breathing runs shallow on the left side, and her face carries the particular stoicism of a she-wolf who won’t admit thepain is worse than she’s reporting. I note the rib and I note the stoicism, because both are data. Oskar took a bite to the thigh that has stiffened badly. Two others have wrist injuries from the binding cords, deep enough to swell. The injuries are survivable but limiting. Injured wolves run slower, fight worse, and make noise when they should be quiet.
The psychological inventory comes next, and it matters more than the physical one, because a wolf with a broken rib who is mentally sound will follow a plan. A wolf with no injuries who is mentally fractured will detonate at the worst possible moment.
I count the wolves who meet my gaze and the wolves who don’t. The ones who sit facing the door and the ones who sit facing the wall. The ones who ate the rations the guards brought and the ones whose portions sit untouched. The math is not encouraging. Roughly half the barracks is functional, held together by loyalty or stubbornness or the simple absence of a better option. A quarter is wavering, their commitment to resistance eroding with every hour spent inside Northern Pack stone. The remaining quarter is dangerous, either too broken to follow orders or too angry to care about the orders being given.
Halvor belongs to the last group, though his version of dangerous comes with the advantage of being directable.
He finds me before I find him, which is itself a problem. A wolf who seeks his commander out before being summoned is a wolf whose leash is fraying.
"What did he want?" Halvor's voice is low, pitched for privacy, but the fury underneath it carries to every ear in the barracks. He has never learned the difference between quiet and contained. "The Wolf Prince. What did he say to you?"
"He told me our conditions are adequate. I told him his vocabulary needs expanding."
"That’s not an answer."
"It’s the answer you’re getting." I meet his gaze and hold it until the heat in his dark eyes settles from a boil to a simmer. The art of managing Halvor is knowing when to pull rank and when to redirect. Rank without purpose produces resentment. Purpose without rank produces chaos. The balance requires both, and it requires them delivered with the kind of flat certainty that leaves no room for the argument he is always composing.
"I need you to do something that requires patience. If you can demonstrate that you possess any, I’ll tell you what it is."
His jaw clenches. The injured arm flexes against the sling Maren improvised from a torn blanket. He wants to snarl. He wants to tell me that patience is a luxury for wolves who are not locked in a room. He wants to do anything other than what I’m about to ask him to do, which is sit still and pay attention for hours.
He waits.
"Map the guard rotation," I tell him. "Every change, every pattern, every gap between one pair of boots leaving the corridor and the next pair arriving. I need timing, and I need it accurate."
"You’re planning something?"
"I’m always planning something. That’s why Korren kept me at his table and why you’re still alive to resent it. Map the rotation, Halvor. Bring me the pattern, not the commentary."
He goes. The tension in his shoulders recedes by a degree as purpose replaces the directionless fury, and I watch him settle into a position near the door where the sounds from the corridor carry clearest.
Halvor is angry. He’s grieving. He’s twenty-two years old. The only reason he hasn’t picked a fight with the nearest Northern Pack guard is that I gave him a task that uses the same energy for a different purpose. The management will hold for aday, perhaps two. After that, the pressure will need a new outlet or it will find its own.
Gareth sits in the far corner with his face to the wall. He hasn’t spoken since he returned from whatever room the Wolf Prince took him to, and the silence isn’t the silence of a wolf conserving energy. It’s the silence of a wolf who came back from somewhere with less of himself than he went in with.
His hands have a tremor that was not there before the capture. His eyes, when they track movement at all, carry the flat, evacuated quality of a wolf who has been opened by someone who knew exactly where to cut.
