The wolf freezes. His good eye widens, and I watch him reassess me the way you'd reassess a rabbit that just bared fangs.
"My grandmother put a blade in my hand before I could walk." I keep my voice steady despite the adrenaline surging through my veins. "You really want to find out what she taught me to do with it?"
For a long moment, neither of us moves. The flames crackle in the silence. In the distance, a hammer rings against steel.
The wolf steps back.
"This isn't over," he growls, but his voice has changed. Wariness has crept in where contempt used to live.
"I'm sure it isn't." I set the hunting knife back on the rack where I found it and walk past him without looking back. My heart pounds against my ribs, and my hands shake with the aftermath of the confrontation, but I don't let him see.
Never let them see you're afraid. Never let them smell your fear.
I make it halfway down the corridor before I hear him call after me.
"Ragnar."
I pause but don't turn.
"My name is Ragnar," he says. "When you decide you want to learn how to use those weapons properly, come find me."
I keep walking. But I store the name somewhere useful.
Word travels fast in a den of wolves.
By dinner, every wolf in the Pack Commons knows what happened in the armory. The conversations don't stop when I enter this time. They pause, just for a moment, and then resume with a different tone. The looks I receive aren't all hostile anymore. Some of them hold curiosity. A few might even hold respect.
The human has teeth. Let them remember it.
I eat alone again, but the isolation feels different now. Less like exile and more like strategy. I'm learning how this world works, how these wolves think, what they value and what they despise.
The meal sits heavy in my stomach as I climb the stairs to the room that’s become my prison. My body aches in ways I can't explain, joints throbbing, muscles twitching beneath my skin. The temperature fluctuations have gotten worse over the past few hours, swinging from chills that leave me shaking to waves of heat that make me want to tear off my clothes and press my burning skin against the cold stone walls.
By the time I reach my room, sweat beads along my hairline and my breath comes in shallow gasps. I stumble through the door and slide the bolt slide home behind me. The fire blazes in the hearth, filling the room with warmth that feels suffocating. Too hot. Everything is too hot.
I strip off my outer layers and splash water on my face from the basin by the bed. It helps, but only for a moment. The heat returns almost immediately, building beneath my skin like a fever that won't break. I dig the pill bottle from my bag and count again with unsteady fingers.
Eight pills.
I should wait until morning. I should stick to the schedule. I should be rational and careful and disciplined.
Instead, I shake one pill into my palm and swallow it dry.
Seven pills now.
The relief doesn't come. Whatever these pills are supposed to do, whatever they're supposed to suppress, the single dose isn't enough anymore. The heat keeps building, and the ache in my joints spreads to my bones, and my skin feels too tight, like something inside me is trying to claw its way out.
I throw off the heavy furs and sprawl across the bare mattress, but sleep won't come. My body writhes against sheets that feel like sandpaper, and my mind races through possibilities I can't quite grasp. Something is wrong. Something is changing. Something is happening to me that I don't understand and can't control.
When I finally drift off, I dream of wolves.
They hunt me through endless snow, their eyes gleaming silver in the moonlight, their howls splitting the frozen air. I run until my lungs burn and my legs give out, until I collapse into a drift and feel the cold seep through my clothes to my skin. They circle me, these wolves, closing in with patient inevitability.
And when the largest of them steps forward, when he pins me beneath his massive paw and lowers his muzzle to my throat, I stop fighting. Some treacherous part of me wants to be caught.
I wake with Stellan's name on my lips and heat pooling between my thighs, and the shame of it burns worse than the fever consuming me from within.
Seven pills. And a body that's burning from the inside out, craving something I refuse to name.
