Chapter 10 – Questioned
1035 Words
The war room feels smaller tonight.
Maps sprawl across the table, pinned and scribbled over until the paper looks bruised. The burned scrap with the double sigil lies in the center like a dead thing, its edges flaring ugly against the lamplight.
Corin stands at the head of the table. Ardyn, Seræn, Marek, Vesha, a couple of senior patrol leads—his core. And me, not at his side this time, but one step down, between him and the others.
Exactly where you’d put a witness.
Or a suspect.
“We’re not leaving this room until we have something solid,” Corin says. “Not fear. Not guesses. A trail.”
He nods to Seræn.
She taps a printout. “Chemical analysis from the barn, the pups, and the new scrap all match. Same sedative base, same accelerant, same binding agent on the tape. Whoever’s organizing this is using a single supply line, likely human, possibly through a shell company.”
“And the symbol?” Ardyn asks, glaring at the burned sigils. “Varrow and us. That’s not sloppy. That’s a choice.”
“Exactly,” Vesha says. She leans forward, dark hair sliding over one shoulder. “Someone wants us thinking in absolutes. ‘Varrow did it’ or ‘Duskvale is compromised.’ They don’t care which way we jump, as long as we jump at each other.”
“Divide and sell the pieces,” Marek mutters.
Corin’s gaze swings to me. “Lysa. Start from the beginning. When did this feel wrong to you?”
A dozen eyes land on my face.
I draw a breath. “The first ‘leak’ we wrote off as bad luck. A freak rockslide, an ambush that could’ve been a coincidence. The second, maybe. But by the third…” I gesture at the map. “The timings. The targets. Whoever this is knows not just our patrol routes, but which ones we think are safe enough to improvise on.”
“And?” Vesha prompts. “From the Varrow side.”
I ignore the faint edge in her voice. “Maelin’s list lines up. Their storages were hit where they were thinnest. One of their patrols went dark on a shortcut only inner circle knew. Same pattern. Different forest.”
“And you believe this Maelin,” one of the patrol leads says. “A Varrow messenger suddenly shows up with ‘helpful’ information, and we’re supposed to—”
“Stop.” Corin’s tone is mild, but the room stills. “We validate what she brought. We don’t trust her. We trust data.”
Seræn slides another printout toward me. “You said there was a meeting between one of ours and an ‘impossible’ contact. Show me.”
I stare down at the grid of numbers and headers: dates, times, locations. Maelin’s scrawled notes transcribed into neat Duskvale shorthand.
My burned fingers itch.
“Here,” I say, circling a line. “Three weeks ago. This route was supposed to be a routine delivery to our allied farmstead. Instead, it stopped for forty minutes at a gas station that isn’t on any of our approved stops. The same station appears on Varrow’s logs, different days, different wolves.”
“That station is human-run,” Seræn says slowly. “We’ve never flagged it.”
“Because we never looked,” I reply. “No one thought to cross-check where bored drivers go when they want coffee and to flirt with cashiers.”
Marek grunts. “You’re saying the leaks are happening in the gaps. Not in war rooms. In bathrooms.”
“The best spies don’t need your secrets,” I say. “They need your habits.”
Silence settles, heavy and thoughtful.
Vesha’s pen taps once, twice. “You realize what this implies, right? Whoever’s facilitating these meetings from our side isn’t necessarily high-ranked. They just need access to routes and the freedom to…linger.”
Her eyes flick, almost imperceptibly, to a cluster of names on the roster pinned to the wall. Mid-level drivers. Supply runners. Patrol captains.
Wolves who’ve always been too boring to suspect.
Corin follows her gaze, then looks back at me. “How many of those runs did you design?”
“Most,” I admit. “You asked me to make them efficient. Discreet.” I swallow. “Predictable.”
His mouth tightens. Not in anger—more like a man realizing he handed someone a loaded gun and said, Here, hold this for me.
“We can’t interrogate every runner at once,” Ardyn says. “They’ll spook, whoever it is. Either bolt or bury evidence.”
“So we start with the routes that overlap both packs,” Seræn says. “Same gas stations. Same warehouses. Same human contacts.”
“And that,” Vesha murmurs, “puts our little traitor in a very small circle.”
The hair on my arms lifts. A hunt, then. One that uses my own maps as bait.
Corin nods once. “Seræn, Vesha—compile a list of crossover locations. Marek, quietly reshuffle assignments. I want our suspected routes manned by people we trust implicitly.”
“And me?” I ask.
He hesitates a fraction. “You stay close to me,” he says. “And to the data. You see angles we don’t.”
It sounds like protection.
It also sounds like a tether.
I open my mouth—to agree, to argue, I’m not sure—but the door bangs open so hard the maps flutter.
Bryn stumbles in, cheeks flushed, eyes huge.
“Corin,” she gasps. “You need to come. Now.”
His whole body tenses. “What happened?”
“It’s the pups,” she says, voice shaking.
For a moment, the world narrows to the pounding in my ears.
“Elrin?” I demand. “Are they—”
“They’re awake,” Bryn blurts. “And they’re asking for Lysa.”
My name hangs in the air like a dropped knife.
Every head turns.
Because if the first words out of two kidnapped children’s mouths are my name…
That’s either salvation for my innocence.
Or the final nail in my coffin.
- Writer
