Chapter 17 #2
He frowned but stayed seated, watching Nathan with the wariness of someone assessing a threat.
I walked far enough away that we wouldn't be overheard, though with Daska, I was more worried about him objecting to Nathan's tone than Daska understanding our words.
Nathan looked… strained. Thinner than he'd been two weeks ago, with dark circles under his eyes and a tightness around his mouth that spoke of sleepless nights.
Part of me wanted to ask if he was okay.
The rest of me knew better.
"You're spending a lot of time with them," he said, nodding toward the fire where Daska still sat, watching us.
"They saved my life."
"And now you're playing house?" His voice dropped, vicious and controlled. "You think you belong here? You're embarrassing yourself. We need to get out of here and you're practically whoring yourself out to a bunch of cavemen. Have you forgotten why we're here?”
I stood very still for a moment, letting Nathan’s words land, letting the familiar sting of them spread through my chest the way it always had.
I'd trained myself to absorb it quietly, to smooth my expression over so the hurt didn't show, to find the diplomatic response that would de-escalate and keep the peace and cost me nothing but my own dignity.
Old habit. Old, ugly habit.
"No," I said.
Nathan blinked. "What?"
"No." I kept my voice level, but I could feel something hardening underneath it.
"I haven't forgotten why we're here. I've been here every day, Nathan.
Learning the language, building trust with these people, which is the only reason they haven't thrown us out on our ears during their lean season.
While you've been working on the scanner, I've been making sure we still have shelter and food and people kind and willing to give it to us, despite the way you’ve treated them. "
“Really?” he snapped. "Because from where I'm standing, you're making us vulnerable.
Fraternizing with the locals, forgetting that we have a mission, that we need to get home.
You think they care about you? You're a curiosity, Ellie.
A pet. And the second we're not useful anymore, they'll throw us out to die. "
"Nathan—"
"The scanner is close. Three, maybe four days.
I've been working every hour of available light and I think I've isolated the—" He stopped himself.
"Never mind. The point is, we're nearly ready to move.
I need you focused. I need you available to translate when I need it, not sitting around playing games with children and—" he made a gesture toward Daska that managed to convey contempt in a single flick of his wrist—"that. "
"His name is Daska."
"I don't care what his name is."
"I know."
Nathan's eyes narrowed. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"It means I know you don't care. About Daska, about Rivik, about any of these people. They're obstacles to you. Resources." I paused. "Just like I was."
The muscle in his jaw jumped. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Make this about us." His voice dropped further, took on that particular edge I remembered from late nights in his office, when the door was closed and he was tired and I'd said the wrong thing. "This has nothing to do with us. This is about the mission. About getting home alive."
"I am trying to get home alive. I'm doing it by not alienating the only people standing between us and Broken Ridge wolves deciding we're fair game."
"Broken Ridge." He said it like I'd made it up. "You've been here five weeks and you've gone completely native. Listen to yourself."
"Nathan—"
"No." He stepped closer, and I had to stop myself from stepping back. That was the old reflex, the one that had kept the peace for three years, the one that had made me smaller and quieter and easier to manage. "You listen to me. We are leaving. In four days, maybe five. I need you ready."
"Dev can't walk that distance yet."
"Dev will manage."
"Nathan." I kept my voice steady, though my pulse had kicked up. "Dev has a broken leg that's been healing for less than five weeks. He cannot walk a full day's travel over rough terrain. Daska said—"
"I don't give a damn what he said." The words came out sharp and fast, and I saw the effort it cost him to pull himself back from the edge of something louder. "He's a—he's not a doctor, Ellie. He's a man who grinds up plants. Dev will be fine."
“You don't listen." I rolled my eyes, turning away. "You never listen."
He grabbed my arm and yanked me back round, leaning down to shout in my face. "Because you never say anything worth listening to!"
“Nathan, let go. You’re hurting me!”
His fingers had closed around my forearm hard enough to hurt, and he was still leaning down into my face, close enough that I could see the sleeplessness carved into the lines around his eyes, the desperate, fraying edge of a man who was losing control of something and knew it.
"Let go of me," I said. Very quietly.
"When you start making sense—"
"Let go of me, Nathan."
He didn't. His jaw tightened, and for one horrible, suspended moment I thought he was going to shout again, or shake me, or do something that couldn't be taken back. My heart hammered against my ribs. My free hand balled into a fist at my side.
Then something changed in the air behind me.
I felt it before I heard it. A shift in pressure, a sudden drop in temperature, the way the atmosphere changes before a storm breaks. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
Nathan's eyes moved past my shoulder. Whatever he saw there made him go very still.
“Take your hands off her.” Rivik's voice was calm.
Too calm. Nathan's grip didn't loosen immediately.
That was the thing I'd remember afterward, the half-second where he made the calculation, where I could see him deciding whether Rivik was a real threat or a nuisance he could dismiss.
His fingers stayed closed around my forearm, and his jaw stayed tight, and his eyes moved over Rivik's face with the particular expression he reserved for things he considered beneath him.
It was the wrong calculation.
I heard it before I saw it—a low sound, barely audible, more vibration than noise.
Not a growl exactly. More like the moment before a growl, the intake of breath before the storm.
Rivik stepped into my peripheral vision, and even braced for it, even knowing what he was, the sheer physical fact of him still hit me somewhere primal.
He moved like he always moved, economical and deliberate, but there was nothing casual about it now.
Every line of him was drawn tight. His grey eyes had gone gold.
"This doesn't concern you," Nathan said. “Tell him, Ellie. Tell him to back off. Now.”
I swallowed, turning my head to Rivik. He didn’t look away from Nathan, but I knew he was listening.
"He…he’s just…"
"Truth."
My eyes flicked back to Nathan, who’s grip was getting tighter, and my old urge to defend him, make excuses for him, simply faded away.
“He said… this…” I searched for the words quickly. “This not your fight. Leave.” I looked back at Rivik, his eyes still fixed on Nathan.
"I said," Rivik repeated, each word measured and deliberate, "take your hands off her."
“I’ll tell him,” I whispered.
“He knows what I said,” Rivik answered.
He was right. I looked up at Nathan. He didn't speak Rivik's language. But he understood that. Something in the human brain, I supposed, was wired to recognise that particular tone regardless of the words it arrived in.
“Fuck you,” Nathan spat, glaring at Rivik.
Every person within twenty feet had stopped what they were doing.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. But I watched it happen, the way awareness rippled outward from where we stood, the way heads lifted and conversations died and hands stilled over their work.
Children who had been chasing each other between the shelters had gone quiet without being told.
Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.
I'd been here five weeks. I knew these people.
I knew the rhythms of this camp, the way the pack functioned, the way authority moved through it like water finding its level.
I had watched Rivik lead, watched him speak and be obeyed and carry the weight of eighty lives with a steadiness that never seemed to waver.
But I had never seen this.
"Rivik," I said, very quietly.
He didn't look at me. A sound came from the back of his throat, something I’d never heard before.
A low, resonant pulse of sound that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than a throat, somewhere older, and it moved through me like a struck bell, vibrating in my back teeth and the hollow of my chest and somewhere at the base of my spine where the oldest, most animal part of my brain still lived. Every hair on my body stood up at once.
Nathan went white. His hand dropped from my arm and he took a step back, before dropping to his knees.
Not slowly. Not with any dignity. One moment Nathan was standing, and the next his legs simply stopped working, folded beneath him like wet paper, and he was kneeling in the dirt in front of Rivik with an expression on his face I'd never seen before. Pure fear.
I watched wide eyed, as Nathan slowly took his wolf form, the body twisting and cracking.
I’d seen many wolves shift before. Here in the camp, there were usually at least a third of the pack in wolf form at any time, but this was different.
Shifts were usually smooth, following, fast. This was jerky, and slow, and with a start I suddenly realised that Nathan was being forced to shift. By Rivik.
I stared at Rivik, mouth dropping open. I had heard rumours that alphas could once do this, but I had never heard of it being actually documented.
Forcing a shift by sheer dominant strength of will was spoken of in my time like some kind of mythical wolf super power.
And yet, I watched my ex fold in on himself, taking his wolf form at the alpha’s will.
Nathan made a strange keening noise as he reached full wolf, and to my shock, he rolled over on the ground, baring his soft underbelly.
The sound Rivik had made stopped. The absence of it was almost louder.
I became aware of my own breathing. Shallow, too fast. I pressed my fist against my sternum and made myself take a slower one.
Around us, the camp had gone utterly still.
Daska had appeared from somewhere to my left.
I hadn't heard him move. He moved immediately to my side, his expression utterly unreadable.
His eyes moved between Rivik and Nathan's wolf form on the ground, and I saw something pass through them—not surprise, not quite—something more complicated than that.
Nathan lay on his back in the dirt. His wolf was smaller than the pack wolves, leaner, with a rangy, city-dog quality that looked wrong against the packed earth of the camp.
His legs were in the air. His muzzle was turned aside.
Every line of him screamed submission, and the worst part, the part that I suspected would haunt me later when I had time to process it, was that he couldn't stop it.
Whatever Rivik had done, whatever that sound had been, Nathan wasn't choosing this.
His body had simply obeyed an authority older and deeper than his own will.
I didn't know how to feel about that.
Rivik stood over him for a long moment. Not crowing. Not performing. He simply stood there and let the silence do the work, let every person in the camp see it and understand it, and the calm on his face was somehow more terrible than rage would have been. Then he looked away.
That was all. He simply looked away from Nathan as though Nathan had stopped being interesting, and turned to me.
"You are hurt?" His eyes dropped briefly to my forearm, where Nathan's fingers had been.
I glanced down. There would be bruising tomorrow, I suspected. Not bad, but there. "I'm alright."
Rivik's jaw tightened fractionally. He looked back down at Nathan, who was still in wolf form, still on his back, and something flickered across Rivik's face that I thought might be contempt. Not hot contempt. Cold. The kind that didn't bother raising its voice.
He looked at Daska. “She needs care. He grabbed her, laid his hands on.”
Daska reached out and put his hand in Rivik’s shoulder.
I watched them, slightly confused. It almost seemed as though Daska was comforting the alpha as he leaned forward and spoke in low tones I couldn’t hear.
Rivik took a shaky breath and pulled back.
He looked over to me and his face was unreadable.
He reached up, slowly, and adjusted the fur cloak that had slipped off my shoulder.
His fingers brushed against my collarbone, warm and careful, and I froze at the tremor that ran through my body at his touch.
“Ellie, tell your alpha that if he touches you again, I will kill him.”
My mouth dropped open, but Rivik was already turning away. I stood there, confused, watching him go.
"He doesn't like me."
I hadn't meant to say it out loud.
Daska made a soft sound of protest and smiled.
I looked at him. "Rivik. He… he doesn't want me here, but then he defends me."
Daska shook his head. “Wants to not want.”
“What?”
“Come. Come rest.” I sighed, and without looking behind, I followed him.