chapter 2: Stonefang’s Welcome
1565 Words
POV: Riven Cade
Consciousness doesn’t return so much as it scrapes across the inside of my skull.
It’s slow. Ugly. Like drowning in glass.
There’s metal under my spine. Cold. Unforgiving. My wrists and ankles are shackled to something rigid—steel maybe—so tight it’s cutting off blood. I can’t move. My head’s swimming. Muscles twitch but don’t answer right. Everything inside me’s off.
The lights above me buzz like wasps. Fluorescent and sickly. Too bright in some spots. Flickering in others.
The air tastes of bleach, piss, and dried blood.
Welcome home.
I blink once. Twice. My eyes sting. Every inch of me is sore—bone-deep, like someone peeled my skin off and tried to staple it back on wrong. I test the cuffs, yanking weakly. They rattle. The table doesn’t.
Figures.
Somewhere above me, a speaker crackles.
A voice oozes through, warped and distant. Filtered. Robotic.
“Subject awake. Begin assessment.”
Assessment?
Footsteps.
Two shapes appear. Masked. White plastic faces, no eyes. Medical scrubs stained at the cuffs. They don’t say a word as they circle me, clipboards and syringes in hand.
One jabs something sharp into my arm. I flinch. They don’t react. Just draw blood and jot down notes like I’m not even there.
The other peels back my eyelid with a gloved thumb and shines a penlight directly into my eye.
“Get off me,” I rasp. My voice cracks like old vinyl. “Where the hell am I?”
Nothing.
Not even a glance.
I try again—louder. “What do you want? Why am I—”
A hand shoves my head sideways so they can get to a vein in my neck. I bite my tongue. Not from fear. Rage.
I’m not a person here.
I’m a specimen.
The room around me isn’t much of a room at all—more like a metal coffin stretched too wide. No windows. No clocks. Just steel panels and buzzing lights overhead. The kind of place where no one ever plans to let you walk out.
But there’s writing on the walls—etched, burned, carved deep.
Sigils.
Old ones. Ones I’ve only seen in half-burned books and whispered stories passed through gutters. Trial marks. Pack law branding. The kind that used to mean “fight or die.”
One symbol repeats.
A fang, wrapped in stone.
My last name.
No. Not mine.
Theirs.
They move me without words.
Uncuff the table restraints. Strap something heavier around my neck. Drag me upright—barely—and shove me down a corridor that smells worse than the last place.
Every step’s a fight. Not because I’m resisting. Because my legs aren’t mine right now. They buckle like they forgot how to stand. My stomach keeps trying to turn inside out, and my head’s spinning like someone drilled holes in it to let the heat escape.
We reach another door. Rusted. Thick. One of the handlers slams a code into the panel. It hisses open.
What waits inside isn’t a cell.
It’s a kennel.
Stone walls weeping with condensation. Bars twisted into sharp edges. Rows of bodies—dozens maybe—all huddled, some upright, some sprawled. All watching.
A few raise their heads as I’m shoved in.
Their eyes don’t blink.
They’re tired. Empty. But not harmless.
I get dumped in a corner and left there. The collar around my throat zaps once—subtle, like a warning—and I hear the door seal behind me.
Whispers ripple through the space.
“She’s new.”
“Another one?”
“Fresh blood.”
I press my spine to the wall and keep my eyes up. This place eats people who drop their gaze.
Across the kennel, two girls argue over a piece of bread that looks like it’s been dropped in mud. The bigger one snatches it and laughs. The smaller one doesn’t push back. Nobody does.
There’s a rhythm here. A structure.
Not enforced by guards. Enforced by teeth.
The bigger you are, the harder you hit, the more you eat. Simple.
I watch a thin boy slip his bowl to someone twice his size without a word. His face is bruised and stitched. Probably knows better than to keep his dinner.
When a bowl hits the ground near me—some thick, gray paste that smells like old meat and bleach—I don’t move.
The scent alone makes me gag.
I shove it away with my boot.
A sound blares. The collar zaps again—sharper this time. My muscles seize for half a second.
I grit my teeth and breathe through it.
Another voice slinks close. Female. Rough.
“You stealin’ air now, girl?”
She’s tall. Broader than me. Nose crooked like it’s been broken twice and never healed right.
“You don’t eat, you die,” she sneers. “You die, I get your space. Simple.”
I don’t blink.
She steps closer. “Say somethin’.”
I say nothing.
Her lip curls. “Thought so.”
She walks off, muttering about how “new ones always break or bleed. One way or another.”
My fingers twitch in my lap.
I’m not broken.
And I’m not bleeding.
Yet.
The air shifts.
It’s subtle. Like the temperature drops without warning, but not cold—quiet. Thick. The kind that presses on your chest and makes you instinctively lower your voice.
Every mutter in the kennel dies.
Even the big one who threatened me sits straighter.
I don’t move.
I feel him before I see him.
Boots echo on stone. Not rushed. Not heavy. Precise.
A man steps into view. No armor. No weapons. Just a simple dark coat and gloves.
His presence is a blade—quiet but lethal. It cuts without drawing blood.
He walks past the bars without looking at anyone.
Until me.
His eyes find mine, and something buckles inside my gut like a trap snapping shut.
He doesn’t stop. Doesn’t speak.
But I know his name before anyone whispers it.
Ghost.
The one they shut up for. The one they don’t test. The one who doesn’t answer to collars or chains.
His gaze doesn’t linger, but it burns. Not like heat.
Like recognition.
My hands go clammy.
Not fear. Not exactly.
But it stirs something in me. Ancient and unfinished.
By the time he disappears down the corridor, breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding escapes me.
And that’s when they come.
Doors screech open. Three handlers enter. No orders. No introductions.
They haul me up again.
My collar buzzes but doesn’t burn.
I’m moved to a new space—colder than the last, if that’s possible.
A chamber carved like a perfect circle. Steel chairs bolted to the floor. One-way mirrors lining the upper walls. Lights bright enough to sting.
They plant me in a chair and chain my wrists to it.
I yank once. Nothing gives.
A whir starts. Some kind of lift.
A platform at the back of the room descends.
One figure stands on it.
Broad-shouldered. Tall enough his head nearly brushes the ceiling when he steps off.
Hair buzzed short. Black. Eyes like polished granite.
He doesn’t speak.
He just watches me.
The pressure in the room doubles. Like every molecule of air suddenly obeys him.
Alpha.
I don’t need a label to know it.
It radiates from him—control, weight, expectation.
Not loud. Not blustering. Absolute.
This is him.
Kellen Stonefang.
He circles me once. Slow. Measuring.
I bare my teeth.
Not a snarl. Not a warning.
A mistake.
But it’s the only thing I have left.
He doesn’t flinch.
Not when I bare my teeth. Not when I lean forward, chains creaking.
Kellen circles once more. Stops behind me. Silent.
The room hums with that same pressure, but sharper now. Focused.
He’s testing me.
Pushing without touching.
My skin itches. Muscles twitch. Part of me wants to snap. The other part wants to kneel.
I bite down on both instincts.
He leans in, his breath brushing my neck. “Feral,” he murmurs, voice low and scraped raw with authority. “But not broken. Yet.”
The handlers shift. Uneasy.
One whispers near the edge of the room, barely audible. “She resisted the aura.”
Like I’m not here. Like I’m a thing, not a person.
Something in me bucks.
I jerk forward, rattling my chains, voice sharp and jagged. “You want broken? Come closer.”
Kellen doesn’t laugh.
He steps back. Straightens.
“No need.”
He turns to the handlers. “Put her in the Pits.”
My stomach sinks.
The words don’t hit right away—but when they do, they detonate.
He’s not bluffing.
“Let the blood tell us what she is,” he says, already walking toward the exit.
“No!” I lunge against the cuffs, metal biting into skin. “You want tests? Run them on yourself!”
He doesn’t turn.
My eyes flare—hot, burning silver. I know they glow. I want him to see.
And I think he does.
Because he stops in the doorway. Just for a second.
“If she survives,” he says, almost bored, “we talk again.”
His gaze slides to one of the handlers.
“If not… burn the body.”
The door seals behind him.
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