My reflection stares back at me from the mirror, and I barely recognize the woman I see there. Dark circles shadow my eyes despite the hours I've spent sleeping. My skin looks pale, almost translucent, and there's a flush high on my cheeks that won't fade no matter how many times I splash cold water on my face. My hair hangs lank around my shoulders, and my fingers won't stop trembling.
Three days in this fortress, and my body is falling apart.
The symptoms started small. A heightened sensitivity to smell that made the food too pungent, the wolves themselves almost overwhelming in their musk. Light that seemed too bright, sounds that rang too loud. Temperature fluctuations that left me shivering one moment and burning the next. A persistent awareness of where Stellan is in the keep, even when I can't see him, as if some invisible thread connects us across the stone walls and locked doors.
I tell myself it's stress. Captivity. The natural response of a human body to an unnatural situation.
The rational explanations comfort me, even when they don't quite fit.
I calculate how long I can stretch the remaining pills. If I take one every other day instead of every morning, I can make them last sixteen days instead of eight. Sixteen days to figure out what they really are, what they're suppressing, what happens when they run out.
Sixteen days to find a way out of this cage.
My hand closes around the pills, and I sweep them back into the bottle with unsteady fingers. Eight pills. Eight days if I stick to the schedule Helena established. Sixteen if I ration.
The smart thing would be to ration. The cautious thing. The disciplined thing.
But Helena also told me these were vitamins. Helena also sent documents to Stellan Varen before she died. Helena alsospent my entire life preparing me for a fate she never bothered to explain.
I don't trust her anymore. I don't trust anyone.
The bottle disappears into my bag, hidden beneath a fold of clothing where the guards won't find it during their daily inspections. My secret. My lifeline. My countdown to something I can't name and don't understand.
Eight pills.
The number haunts me as I dress and prepare to face another day in this fortress.
The armory lies at the heart of the fortress, down three flights of stairs and through a corridor that smells of smoke and hot metal. I discovered it on my second day of exploring, when a wrong turn led me past the forge and into a room filled with more weapons than I'd ever seen in one place.
Helena would have loved it here.
I slip through the door and pause to let my eyes adjust to the dim light. Racks of swords line the walls, their blades gleaming dully in the glow of the forge fires. Axes hang from hooks beside them, their heads polished to a mirror shine. Spears stand in wooden holders, their points sharp enough to pierce steel. And everywhere, scattered across workbenches and displayed in glass cases, knives of every size and shape wait for hands to claim them.
My fingers itch to touch them. To test their balance, their weight, the way they would feel in my palm during a fight.
A hunting knife catches my attention, its handle wrapped in dark leather, its blade curved slightly at the tip. Perfect for close combat. Perfect for someone my size, who couldn't rely on brutestrength to win a fight. I reach for it without thinking, my hand closing around the grip with familiar ease.
"Human." The voice comes from behind me, low and threatening. "That doesn't belong to you."
I turn slowly, keeping the knife at my side. The wolf standing in the doorway is built like a battering ram, with aggression rolling off him in waves. His hair is the color of rust, cropped close to his skull, and his beard covers a jaw that looks like it was carved from granite. A scar runs from his temple to his chin, bisecting his left eye, and the eye itself is milky white, blind and unseeing. His good eye fixes on me with undisguised hostility.
"I was just looking," I say, keeping my voice calm. "There's no rule against looking."
"Humans don't belong in the armory." He steps closer, and I can smell him now, sweat and iron and the musk of wolf underneath. "Humans don't touch pack weapons. The alpha might have brought you here, but that doesn't give you the right to wander where you please."
"Funny. No one mentioned that rule when they gave me the tour."
His lip curls back from his teeth. "You think this is a joke? You think you can walk into our home, our sacred spaces, and put your hands on things that belong to us?"
"I think you should step back before this becomes a problem."
He laughs, the sound harsh and ugly. "A problem? What are you going to do, little human? Scream for help? Run back to your gilded cage and hide under the covers?"
He reaches for me, probably intending to grab my wrist and wrench the knife away.
I move.
My body flows through the motion before my mind catches up. I sidestep his grab, use his momentum against him, andtwist in a maneuver that sends his own knife clattering from the sheath at his hip. The blade spins across the floor, and before he can recover, I've put three feet of distance between us and changed my grip on the hunting knife into a fighting stance.
