Chapter 2:Blackthorn

The boy who brought my food looked more scared of me than I was of him.

He couldn't have been older than eighteen. Slight, with warm brown skin and eyes that kept darting to the door behind him like he was expecting someone to burst through it at any moment. He carried a tray with both hands of bread, a bowl of something hot, a cup of water and set it down just inside the door with the careful precision of someone defusing something dangerous.

He straightened and looked at me.

I looked back.

"You don't have to be afraid of me," I said.

"I'm not afraid of you."

"You haven't stopped looking at that door since you walked in."

His mouth did something complicated. "That's not because of you."

I studied with him. He had genuinely kind eyes the sort that couldn't be faked and a faded bruise along his jaw, yellow-green, at least a week old. Someone had hit him hard enough to leave a mark that was stubborn.

I filed that away.

"What's your name?" I asked.

Surprise flickered across his face. Like people didn't usually bother asking.

"Cole," he said.

"Cole." I nodded. "I'm Isadora. You probably already know that."

"Everyone knows." He shifted his weight. "You're all anyone's talked about since last night."

"Last night." I absorbed this. "So I was out all night."

"Almost fourteen hours." He said it like an apology. "You should eat. The stew is better than it looks."

He turned to leave.

"Cole."

He stopped.

"Where am I?"

A long pause. He turned back, his expression careful the look of someone choosing words the way you choose footing on unstable ground.

"Blackthorn Keep," he said. "Sixty miles north of Coldveil. Deep forest. Pack land."

Pack land. I turned the words over slowly. "Pack," I repeated. "As in wolves."

He met my eyes steadily. "As in wolves."

I picked up the bread. I needed to eat if I was going to think clearly and right now thinking clearly was the only weapon I had.

"Are you one?" I asked. "A wolf?"

Something complicated moved across his face and vanished. "Yes."

"You don't look like one."

"We don't walk around looking like wolves. We look like people. We are people. Just " He searched for the word. "More."

I chewed slowly. I watched him. "The man with grey eyes. The one who ordered them to bring me in. Who is he?"

Cole stilled immediately. A subtle tightening around his eyes that told me everything about how carefully that name needed to be handled.

"Daxton," he said. "The Beta."

"And the Alpha?"

He looked at the door again. This time it wasn't nerves. It was something closer to warning.

"You'll know," he said quietly, "when you meet him."

He was gone before I could say another word.

I ate everything on the tray.

Then I stood and paced. Six steps to the wall. Six steps back. Over and over until the number felt like something solid to hold onto.

Sixty miles from home. No phone. No way to reach anyone. Sasha would assume I'd taken a sick day. My landlord wouldn't notice for a week. I had no family to file a report with.

I was completely, utterly alone.

I sat back on the cot and pressed my hands against my eyes.

I had survived an empty house at fourteen. A children's home at sixteen. Three cities in four years and a life that had never once made the mistake of being easy. Stone walls were not going to be what broke me.

I dropped my hands. Straightened my spine.

Information. That was what I needed. And information started with one nervous boy named Cole who had kind eyes and looked at doors like they frightened him.

That was where I would begin.

I was still sitting there, jaw set, mind working, when the corridor outside went quiet.

Not the ordinary quiet of an empty hallway. Something different loaded and charged the way air charges before lightning. My skin prickled. The back of my neck tightened.

Footsteps.

Not Cole's careful tread. These were slow and deliberate and heavy with an authority that had never once hurried for anything. They moved down the corridor with the absolute certainty of someone who owned every surface they walked on.

They stopped outside my door.

I stood up without deciding to. Some reflex I didn't know I had pulled me upright, spine straight, chin lifted, heart suddenly loud in my ears. The presence on the other side of that door pressed through the air like something physicap and cold 

Seconds passed.

Five. Six. Seven.

I crossed the cell, stood on my toes, and looked through the small barred window.

One moment. Just one.

Tall. Dark. A profile cut from something harder than stone sharp jaw, black hair, shoulders that blocked out the corridor light. He was looking straight ahead. Not at my door. Not at me.

And yet I knew. Somehow I already knew that he had stopped here deliberately.

Then he turned his head.

His eyes found mine through the bars.

Dark. So dark they swallowed the  light and in the space of one single breath the cold cell and the stone walls and the sixty miles between me and home simply ceased to exist. There were only those eyes and something inside my chest splitting open like a fault line slow, inevitable, and terrifying.

He stared at me like I was something he had never seen before.

Like I was something that frightened him.

Then his jaw hardened. He looked away. Those slow, deliberate footsteps resumed without hesitation as if he hadn't just stopped the entire world outside my cell door — and faded down the corridor until there was nothing left but silence.

I lowered myself from the bars on legs that weren't entirely steady.

My heart was slamming against my ribs and I absolutely refused to think about why.

I sat back on the cot. Stared at the iron door. Pressed my back against the cold stone and told myself very firmly that whatever that was, it meant nothing. He was the Alpha of a pack that had kidnapped me. Whatever I had felt looking into those dark eyes was fear and nothing else.

It was fear.

It had to be fear.

I was still lying to myself when Cole's voice came quietly through the barred window, low and urgent, cutting through the silence like a blade 

"Isadora. Whatever you do , do not let Daxton know that the Alpha stopped at your door.”