Captured

Wren and I managed to get ourselves up and moving. Every step we took felt like a trap, it felt like stones were tied on our feet and we had to bare the weight to get ourselves moving. We were starving. We saw what we smelled first.

Woodsmoke first —  a fire that had been burning for hours. Then meat, roasted and seasoned, the smell of something that had been slow-cooking since afternoon and was now exactly right. Then voices, layered and warm, and underneath them the low pulse of celebration music.

Wren and I stopped at the tree line and looked at each other.

"We shouldn't," I said.

"I  haven't eaten since yesterday," she said.

She was already moving toward the light. The village sat in a natural clearing ringed by ancient oaks, and what was happening inside it was a proper feast — long tables draped in deep cloth, loaded with food and drink, torches driven into the ground casting everything in amber warmth. Wolves moved through the crowd in both forms, relaxed and loud, the specific euphoria of a pack that had recently won something and was still riding the current of it. Several wolves at the nearest table carried fresh, half-healed marks. A dented shield hung from the nearest oak, its symbol unfamiliar.

A battle, I thought. Recent. They won.

Which made this pack large, organized, and in exactly the kind of mood that could go either way — generous to strangers, or looking for a reason to prove the victory wasn't finished.

I pulled a shawl from an unattended fence post. Wren let her hair down around her face. We kept to the outer edges and moved like people who belonged there.

It worked, until it didn't.

I had just closed my fingers around a round of bread at the edge of an abandoned plate when the air changed. That specific shift — attention, which had been pointing elsewhere, turning.

I looked up.

Two wolves at the far end of the table had gone still. Not looking at their food. Not looking at each other. Looking at me, with the quiet focus of predators.

One leaned to the other and murmured.

"Wren," I breathed.

"Don't run," she said.

The crowd restructured around us — not dramatically, no shouting, just that quiet inevitable shift, like exits becoming walls. A woman to my left turned to her companion, and I caught the word clearly.

“Spies”.

Before I could think we were captured and taken to the alpha.

Alpha Ronan was built like a verdict. This was something different, something that took up space in a room without needing to fill it. He was lean and precise in his stillness, the quiet of a man who had learned long ago that the most dangerous thing in any room never needs to announce itself. Dark hair, a jaw cut sharp as flint, and eyes that were gold so deep they read almost amber in the firelight. No ceremonial marks of rank. No performance of authority. He simply stood there.

There was a scar that ran from his left jaw to the corner of his mouth — old, clean, the mark of someone who had survived something that came very close. It did not make him look damaged. It made him look like a man who had met the worst thing that ever came for him.

He looked at us. At me specifically. Three seconds of concentrated attention that felt considerably longer than three seconds, a gaze that moved over my face and catalogued everything it found without offering anything in return.

"Names," he said. His voice was low and even, because it didn’t need to compete.

"Elara." I held his gaze. "She's Wren. We're not spies."

"Everyone brought before me says that."

"Everyone brought before you might be telling the truth."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Gone before it arrived.

He looked at the guard briefly —  an entire conversation compressed into a glance.

"Lock them up," Ronan said. "We question them in the morning."

He had already turned back to his maps before the guard seized me and before I knew it, I as locked up.