Page 65 of The Iron Alpha

Then the silver mist takes him.

It happens faster than I've ever seen a transformation occur. One heartbeat he's a man with heavy shoulders and a brawler'sjaw. The next the mist swirls through the doorway like smoke in a windstorm and where the man stood there's a wolf the color of dried blood, enormous, lips drawn back from teeth longer than my fingers.

The growl that rolls through the hall doesn't register as sound. It registers in my sternum, in my bones, a vibration that tells every cell in my body to run.

The servants scatter. The human ones, anyway. The wolves in the hall go rigid, caught between instinct and hierarchy, their attention snapping between the red wolf and me.

Thane is across the room. Too far.

The red wolf takes a step toward me. The claws on the flagstones make a sound like blades being drawn. His lips are peeled so far back his gums are visible, and the growl drops an octave into something I feel in my teeth.

The heat rolling off his body reaches me from paces away, and the amber eyes fix on my throat with a focus that reduces me to anatomy. Pulse point. Windpipe. The things a predator looks for when it's deciding where to bite.

He's telling me what I am. Meat. Human. Prey that forgot its place and started running the den while the predators watched.

My body screams at me to move. Every survival instinct I possess, every lesson my species has learned across millennia about what to do when something this large and fast fixes on you, fires simultaneously: run, hide, submit, curl small, show your belly, make yourself nothing.

I don't move.

I look at the red wolf the way I looked at Ryland the day he pointed at me in the treaty hall. Direct. Level. I've been measured by wolves before. I'm still standing.

"I know where your wolves go on the patrols that aren't on Thane's rotation charts." My voice comes out quiet. Steady. No tremor. The calm surprises me, because inside I'm vibrating at afrequency that should shatter glass. "The settlements they visit. The routes they take that don't match the ones logged. I've been tracking the variance."

The red wolf stops. One ear flattens. The growl stutters, breaks rhythm, and the massive head pulls back a fraction.

"I also know that the supply gaps in the corridor between here and the coast correspond to the settlements your patrol wolves visited before those settlements went dark. The pattern isn't conclusive. But it's enough to present to Thane. Or to Ryland when he returns."

The wolf's growl dies entirely. The ears flatten against the skull, and the paws that were advancing lock against the flagstones.

At the edges of the hall, two of Aldric's wolves exchange a glance so fast it's barely movement, and the one nearest the door takes a half-step backward. They heard what I said. They know what it means for them.

I hold the wolf's gaze. My heart is slamming so hard my vision pulses at the edges, but my hands are at my sides, and my feet are planted and I won’t look away first.

Looking away from a wolf is submission. Looking away now is surrender.

I don't surrender. I learned that from the man whose absence this wolf is trying to exploit.

The silver mist takes the wolf again. Aldric stands where the animal stood, naked, his clothes destroyed by the transformation, his skin flushed dark with fury. He's breathing hard. Every wolf in the hall is watching.

He's on two legs. He came back to human form in response to a human's words. Whether he meant it as submission or not, that's what the pack just witnessed.

The hall knows it. Aldric knows it. I know it.

He turns and walks out without speaking. Naked, furious, and outmaneuvered by a woman who doesn't have teeth or claws or the mass to fight what he is.

She has numbers. She has patience. She has weeks of guard rotation counts and supply variance data, and those are weapons a wolf can't bite through.

Thane appears at my shoulder. His hand is on his blade. He didn't need it.

"I handled it," I say.

"You did." His voice is neutral, but something in the set of his jaw has changed. It takes me a moment to identify it because I've never seen it directed at me from any wolf in this Tower except one.

Respect.

That night I sit alone in Ryland's chamber. The fire burns low. The bond hums from somewhere north, thin and steady, carrying nothing I can read.

My hands are shaking.