The Shattered Pack

Chapter three

Chapter three

The dark gold of his eyes swirled violently, bleeding into pitch black at the edges. The ancestral curse I had spent years reading about in smuggled Timber Claw archives was right here, suffocating me. His inner beast was a frayed, angry thing, looking for a reason to tear the world apart.

My vision began to blur into a dark vignette. I couldn't breathe. My fingers, small and pale against his massive, scarred wrist, were useless. I couldn't pry his fingers open. I couldn't shift and claw at his face.

But I could think.

If he wanted me dead, my neck would already be snapped, my mind whispered through the panic. He’s testing the tribute. He's looking for a reaction.

Instead of clawing at his hand, I let my arms drop to my sides. I forced my muscles to relax, completely giving up any pretense of physical resistance. I stopped struggling. I looked directly into that swirling storm of chaotic gold, keeping my expression entirely flat, entirely still. I gave him no fear of feeding on him. No defiance to crush.

A flicker of surprise cut through the feral rage in his eyes.

Kaelen’s grip loosened just enough for a gasp of air to scrape down my raw windpipe. He lowered me slightly, but he didn't let go. His thumb traced the sharp line of my jaw, his skin boiling hot against mine.

"You do not whimper like a dog," he muttered, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that rattled my teeth. "You do not possess a scent. What did Hector do to you?"

"Nothing," I choked out, the word burning my throat. "I was born... empty, Alpha."

A collective intake of breath rippled through the kneeling crowd behind him. To confess to a warlord that you were a Latent was practically begging to be culled. In the northern packs, weakness was a contagious disease.

Kaelen’s eyes narrowed, his nostrils flaring as he dragged in a deep breath, trying to catch even a fraction of a wolf’s aura from me. He found nothing. To his heightened senses, I must have felt like a phantom.

"A Latent," he spat, the word dripping with pure disdain. He released his grip entirely.

I hit the gravel hard, my knees scraping against the sharp stones. I coughed violently, pressing a hand to my bruised throat, drawing in the cool evening air.

"Hector thinks he is clever," Kaelen said, turning his back on me. He addressed his enforcers, his voice carrying effortlessly across the silent courtyard. "He sends me a broken female to show complete submission, hoping I will waste my time slaughtering her so he can claim the Obsidian Crest kills the defenseless. He wants to play the victim to the High Council."

He stopped at the base of the stone steps and looked back over his shoulder at me. His gaze was cold, calculating, and entirely stripped of the feral rage from moments before. The warlord was back, replacing the beast.

"Take her to the servant’s quarters in the eastern wing," Kaelen ordered. "Lock her in. She is not to leave the grounds, and she is not to be touched by any member of this pack. If she dies of her own frailty, so be it. But no one gives Hector the satisfaction of a drop of her blood."

"Alpha," the leader of my escort team bowed his head, immediately stepping forward to grab my arm.

This time, his grip wasn't as brutal. The Warlord's command was absolute—I was off-limits. I was a political artifact, a useless piece of wood on a grand chessboard, but I was alive.

As the enforcer dragged me up the steps and through the massive, arched timber doors of the fortress, I looked back one last time. Alpha Kaelen Vane stood in the center of the courtyard, the wind whipping his heavy fur cloak around his towering frame. He was looking at his hands, his brows furrowed in a strange, troubled expression, as if my touch had left a mark he couldn't scrub off.

The eastern wing of the manor was cold, damp, and smelled of old stone and tallow candles. The room they threw me into was barely bigger than a storage closet. It contained a low cot with a thin wool blanket, a bathroom sink, and a single high window barred with thick iron.

The heavy oak door slammed shut, and the unmistakable thud of an iron bar dropping into place echoed through the small space.

I was a prisoner.

I sat down on the edge of the cot, my whole body trembling as the adrenaline finally began to fade. My throat throbbed where Kaelen’s fingers had dug into my flesh, and I knew it would be a deep, ugly purple by morning. Without the accelerated healing of a werewolf, I would carry those bruises for weeks.

But as I looked around the dark room, a small, sharp smile cut through the exhaustion on my face.

I had survived the first hour. I had looked the Butcher of the North in the eyes, and I was still breathing.

I pulled my small canvas sack toward me and reached into the secret lining I had painstakingly sewn into the bottom before leaving Timber Claw. My fingers wrapped around a small, leather-bound journal and a charcoal pencil.

I opened it to the first blank page. I didn't need to write down the layout of the courtyard or the number of guards—those were already burned into my photographic memory. Instead, I began to map out the cracks I had already seen in the Obsidian Crest's armor.

Alpha Kaelen’s curse is volatile. He reacts to scent and presence, but his beast is confused by things it cannot classify.

The enforcers are disciplined, but they fear him more than they loyalize to him.

The High Council is watching.

I closed the book and tucked it under the thin mattress. They thought they had locked away a useless defect. They didn't realize that by putting me in the heart of their castle, they had given me a front-row seat to their destruction—or their salvation.

I lay down on the hard cot, staring up at the stone ceiling as the howling of distant wolves began to echo through the mountain passes. The game had begun