Chapter 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 the pain 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 a day, 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.
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 the joint 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 under threat and 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.
She checks 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.