Chapter 17: Chapter 17
(Rhydian)
Elena tells me about the confrontation in pieces.
Not all at once — she’s not someone who unloads things all at once. She comes and finds me in the yard where I’m still counting wolves and she says *walk with me* in the tone that means it’s not a request, and we walk the long way around the settlement perimeter where no one is close enough to hear, and she talks.
I listen.
I don’t interrupt. I’ve learned that about her — she needs to get through the shape of a thing before she can deal with the parts of it. So I walk beside her in the cold and let her talk, and I watch her hands, because her hands tell me things her voice doesn’t. They stay too still at her sides for most of it. Then she gets to the part about him against the wall, the part where he said *you’ll never see the blade that kills you,* and her right hand closes into a fist briefly and then opens again.
She stops walking.
I stop too.
We’re at the far edge of the yard, near the fence line, the settlement spread below us under a sky that hasn’t decided whether it’s going to snow again. Nobody’s near us. Just cold air and the sound of her breathing and the thing she just told me sitting between us like a lit fuse.
"He’s got an antidote," I say.
She looks at me.
"Has to. He wouldn’t poison the water without protecting himself — he needs to function when Shadowpine comes. He needs to be the one standing while everyone else is flagging." I look back at the settlement. The main house. Marcus’s wing. "He keeps it somewhere close. Somewhere he can dose himself every morning without anyone seeing."
She’s quiet for a moment. "His quarters."
"That’d be my guess."
Another pause. "We can’t search his quarters. Not openly. If he finds out —"
"He already knows you’re looking." I turn to her. "He told you as much. He’s not scared of what you’ll find, he’s counting on not finding it before Shadowpine arrives." I hold her gaze. "Which means I need to find it today."
"Rhydian—"
"Elena." I say her name the way she says mine sometimes — just the word, just the weight of it. "You can’t go. He expects you. He’s watching you." I pause. "He’s not watching me. He thinks I’m a rogue playing at being a mate. He’s been underestimating me since the day I got here."
She looks at me for a long time with those grey eyes that are doing the thing where they’re processing faster than her face is showing.
"His room is in the east wing," she says finally. "Third door past the elder’s study. He locks it." She stops. Starts again. "He keeps a spare key under the iron bracket outside the door. Left side. Viktor told me years ago when Marcus was— it doesn’t matter." She presses her mouth together. "If his chest is locked, there’s a tool kit in the kitchen stores. Bottom shelf, wrapped in leather."
I nod.
"Don’t get caught," she says. Very quietly. Like she knows that’s not adequate and she’s saying it anyway.
"I’ll be fine."
"That’s not—" She stops. Her jaw tightens. "Just be fast."
I go.
---
The east wing is quiet.
Midday — Marcus will be at the council hall for the daily briefing, which Elena told me runs long without fail and never less than two hours. I’ve got time. Maybe. The kind of time that feels solid until it suddenly isn’t, and I’ve learned the hard way that trusting that feeling is the fastest way to get dead.
I move like I used to move in the mountain territories. Deliberate. Light-footed. Aware of every surface before my weight commits to it. The corridor is empty, a few wall sconces burning low, the stone floors cold and echoey in that way that old buildings are. Third door past the study. Left side of the iron bracket.
There.
The key is small and dark with age, sitting in a gap in the bracket so small you’d miss it if you didn’t know exactly where to look. I take it. Turn it in my fingers once.
The lock opens without protest.
Marcus’s room is nothing like I expected and exactly like I expected — spare, organized, nothing on the surfaces that doesn’t belong there. The bed is made with military precision. Books stacked by height on the shelf. No personal effects to speak of, nothing that says *this is a man who loves anything.* Just the architecture of function.
I do a fast visual sweep.
Desk. Clear except for papers, which I don’t touch. Bookshelf, nothing behind the volumes — I check, one hand tilting them forward, quick. Bedside table, empty drawer. Wardrobe, clothes only, coat pockets empty.
Then the chest at the foot of the bed.
It’s locked.
Of course it is.
I go back to the kitchen stores, find the leather roll on the bottom shelf without breaking stride, and I’m back in his room inside four minutes which is longer than I wanted but it can’t be helped. I kneel in front of the chest. The lock is old — good quality but old, the kind that was built to last rather than built for complexity.
I’ve picked worse. You learn things in four years of surviving in contested territory. Lock-picking isn’t a skill you look for the opportunity to acquire. It’s just something that becomes necessary one afternoon when you need the supply shed of an abandoned outpost and there’s nobody to ask nicely.
Forty seconds. Maybe fifty.
The lock clicks.
I lift the lid.
Inside, wrapped in cloth, is a small collection of vials. Not many — five, six, neatly arranged. I pick one up and hold it to the light from the window. Clear liquid. No color, no obvious smell when I work the stopper loose for a second and put it back immediately.
This is it. This has to be it.
He counted them. I can see how they’re arranged — the cloth underneath molded slightly to the shape of each one, the kind of impression that comes from habit, from setting things down the same way every day. He’ll know if one is missing. He’ll know if I take the whole set.
But Senna can work with one. Senna, who spent three hours identifying the compound in the water, can identify this in a fraction of the time and tell us exactly what it is and what it counteracts and how much of it these wolves need.
One vial. That’s all I need.
I reach in.
The door opens.
Not the main door — the side door, the one I didn’t know existed because it wasn’t in Elena’s description of the room, a narrow servant’s entrance cut into the far wall that’s been papered over or painted over or something, invisible until it isn’t, and it opens and two men step through it and I know immediately they’re not Pack wolves.
They’re Shadowpine.
Not in colors — dressed plain, nondescript, the kind of unremarkable that means they’ve been living in this settlement for at least a few days without anyone clocking them. Marcus’s plants. His insurance, sitting in the walls of this place like rot.
The first one is big. Really big, the kind of big that means whoever sent him is not worried about subtlety. The second is smaller, quicker-looking, and he’s got a knife already out, which tells me they were told to expect someone.
Marcus knew I’d come.
Of course he did.
I’m still holding the vial.
I pocket it in the same motion I use to stand, one fluid movement, and I get to my feet with my hands loose and my weight forward and my back to the window because I’m not letting them have the door and the window both.
"Rhydian Alma," the big one says. Like he knows me. Maybe Marcus described me. *Skinny rogue, golden eyes, will bite you if cornered.* More or less accurate.
"You’ve got about four seconds," I say, "to reconsider."
They don’t reconsider.
The big one moves first — always the big one, always, they think mass is the argument and sometimes it is but not when you’ve been fighting off rogues in mountain territory for four years, not when your entire survival has been predicated on being faster than whoever wants what you have. I drop under his first swing and drive my shoulder into his ribs and shove, hard, using his own momentum against him the way Elena showed me, and he hits the desk and the papers scatter and he goes down hard on one knee.
The smaller one is already close. The knife comes in low — smart, they know about wolf healing, they know to go for something debilitating rather than clean — and I get my forearm up and the blade catches the outside of it instead of my stomach.
The pain is immediate and white and clarifying.
I grab his wrist. Twist. The knife doesn’t come free but his angle changes and I use that to pull him into my elbow, which connects with his cheekbone, and he staggers. Not down — he’s too trained for down — but enough.
The big one is back up.
This is the part where four years alone works against me. In the mountains, one-on-one was the equation. Two trained fighters with coordination and a knife between them is a different equation entirely, and I know within the first thirty seconds that I’m working harder than I can sustain.
But I don’t need to sustain it. I just need to get out.
The door — the main door, the corridor, the Pack house where Marcus’s men can’t follow without exposing themselves — is behind me and to the left. Six feet. Maybe eight.
The big one swings again. I let it catch my shoulder instead of my face, which hurts enormously and rocks me sideways, and I use the momentum to turn and cover the distance to the door in two steps and my hand finds the handle and I’m through it and pulling it shut behind me with my whole weight before either of them can reach me.
Corridor. Empty. Still.
I don’t run — running draws attention and I can’t afford attention — so I walk. Fast, controlled, the way Elena walks when she doesn’t want anyone to know something is wrong.
My arm is wet.
I already knew that. I’ve known it since the knife connected, the specific wet warmth of it, but I haven’t looked because looking makes it real in a way that changes how your body responds and I needed my body to stay functional for another sixty seconds.
I look now.
The sleeve of my jacket is dark. Not a little dark. The kind of dark that means the cut is deep enough to matter, that means something below the surface is open and disagreeing with the situation, that means I need to find Elena or Senna or anyone who knows what to do with this in the next few minutes before the decision gets made for me.
I stand in the corridor of the east wing and I look at my arm and I think, with a clarity that only pain produces, that Marcus had a contingency for everything.
Except Elena.
And I reach into my pocket with my good hand.
The vial is still there.
Small and cool and whole.
I close my fingers around it and keep walking.
