Chapter3
1329 Words
The men who found her were not the kind who helped strangers out of mercy.
She understood this before she was fully conscious.
There was something in the quality of the voices above her, clipped, businesslike, the tone of men making rapid calculations, that told her, even through the fog of blood loss and cold, that she had not been found.
She had been acquired.
By the time she understood where she was, a cage, narrow, wooden, on the back of a moving cart, it was already too late to do anything about it.
Her wrists were not bound, which meant they weren't afraid of her.
That was a mistake she intended to let them keep making for as long as possible.
She lay still and listened.
"Breathing's steady," one of them said.
He was closest to the cage, she could hear his boots on the ground.
"She'll make it."
"Barely."
A second voice, further away.
"Not worth much if she doesn't recover."
"She'll recover. Look at her, she's been surviving something for a long time."
"You can tell that from looking at a body?"
"I can tell it from the scars."
She filed this.
Four of them total, she'd counted the distinct footsteps.
A camp somewhere ahead, based on the smell of woodsmoke drifting back.
They were moving east.
On the second day, she sat up.
The narrow-faced man closest to the cage stopped walking.
"Good morning," he said, with the professional pleasantness of someone who dealt in things rather than people.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked.
"Somewhere you'll be comfortable," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed, "it isn't."
She looked at him steadily.
He looked back with mild interest, the way someone watches an animal they're not yet sure how to classify.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"That depends on what you are." He tilted his head.
"We found you with three broken ribs and a significant amount of blood that should have been on the inside of you. You look considerably better than that now."
She said nothing.
He crouched down to her level, studying her forearm through the cage bars, the gash that had been deep enough to worry about two days ago and was now a thin, pink line of closing tissue.
"Abnormal healing," he said, mostly to himself.
Then, louder, to the others:
"Come look at this."
They came and looked.
She sat very still while they discussed her like a text they were trying to interpret, and she memorized faces, names they used for each other, the particular rhythm of how they made decisions, who deferred to whom, who spoke first, who watched longest.
The narrow-faced man was in charge but tried not to look like it.
The largest one did what he was told.
The one with the grey in his beard was the most dangerous, he was the only one who kept looking at her face rather than her arm.
"She heard everything we just said," Grey Beard said.
"Of course she did," the narrow-faced man said, almost admiringly.
"That's fine. Doesn't change anything."
"You'd be surprised," Elara said.
They moved her to a smaller, heavier cage that evening.
She had expected this.
"Comfortable?" Grey Beard asked, securing the lock.
"About as comfortable as before," she said.
He almost smiled.
"You're strange for an omega."
"I've been told."
"It's not an insult."
"I didn't take it as one."
He studied her for another moment.
"If you cooperate, the journey will be easier."
"For whom?" she asked.
He didn't answer.
But he left a blanket near the bars, which she took without comment, because she was cold and pride was only useful when it wasn't competing with survival.
She worked the new lock for three nights.
It was a better lock than the first one, someone had anticipated a first attempt, which meant they were smarter than they'd initially presented.
She adjusted her approach.
She had nothing but time and the old, patient anger she'd been carrying for years, and she was willing to spend both.
On the fourth night, the cage opened.
She crossed the sleeping camp on her hands and knees, below the firelight, breathing through her mouth to avoid making sound.
She slipped into the trees while all four of them slept, and she walked north because north was away from everything she knew, and away was the only direction she had.
She walked until she found a clearing.
There was a man standing in it.
Tall.
Dark-haired.
The particular stillness of someone who had been aware of her approach for considerably longer than she had been aware of his.
He had the bearing of an Alpha, that specific quality of a person who occupies space differently than others, but no insignia.
No markers she recognized.
His hands were loose at his sides and his expression was doing something she couldn't immediately name, which was unusual.
She could name most expressions.
He looked at her for a long moment.
She looked back.
She was past the point of being afraid of men who stood in her way.
You ran out of that resource eventually.
"You're bleeding," he said.
"I'm aware."
"How far did you come from?"
"Far enough."
He nodded slowly, as if this were a reasonable answer.
"There's a camp half a mile east," he said.
"You can eat. Sleep. No one will touch you."
She studied him.
He let her study him, which was the first interesting thing about him.
"Why?" she asked.
Something moved through his expression.
Brief.
Controlled.
Gone before she could name it.
"Because you look like someone who has had enough of the alternative," he said.
She thought about it for exactly as long as it took to inventory her options, which were few and none of them appealing.
"If anyone at that camp touches me," she said, "I'll make it a problem."
"I'll make sure they know that," he said, without irony.
She walked past him toward the east.
He fell into step slightly behind her.
Neither of them spoke again until the camp came into view, orderly, firelit, wolves moving through it with purpose rather than ceremony.
"What's your name?" she asked, without looking at him.
"Kael," he said.
"Kael what?"
"Draven."
She knew the name.
Every wolf with any awareness of the territories beyond Silvercrest knew the name.
Alpha of Shadowfang, risen from nothing after his original pack was destroyed, known for winning conflicts that should have gone the other way.
She didn't let recognition show.
"Elara," she said.
"I know," he said.
She stopped walking.
He walked two more steps before stopping as well, and turned to look at her with that same still, unreadable expression.
"How?" she asked.
He held her gaze.
"Get some rest. We can talk in the morning."
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she walked into the camp, because she was exhausted and her ribs were still knitting themselves back together and she needed to think, and she thought better when she wasn't also freezing.
But she did not sleep fully that night.
She was almost asleep when she heard it.
A voice.
Outside the tent.
Low, careful, meant for someone else's ears.
"She doesn't know yet," Kael said.
A pause.
Then another voice, quieter.
"And when she finds out? That you've known all along?"
Silence.
"We'll deal with that when it comes."
Elara opened her eyes.
She stared at the ceiling of the tent, her heart very still, her mind very loud.
He had known something.
Something about her.
Something he had chosen, deliberately, not to tell her.
She thought about the way he'd said her name in that clearing before she'd introduced herself.
I know.
She thought about how he'd looked at her since, careful, watchful, like a man waiting for something specific to happen.
She sat up slowly.
Whatever Kael Draven knew about her, she was going to find out.
Tonight.
- Writer
