Chapter 4: Careful eyes

Isadora's POV:

I didn't sleep.

I told myself it was cold. The thin mattress. The torchlight that never fully went out. I told myself it was the stone walls and the iron door and the sixty miles between me and everything familiar.

It was not any of those things.

It was Cole's voice through the barred window, low and urgent, cutting through the silence right before he disappeared 

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

I had pressed my back against the wall after that and sat with those words for a very long time.

Not because they frightened me. Because of what they implied.

The Alpha stopping at my door was significant enough that his own Beta couldn't know about it. A man powerful enough to make three hundred wolves fall quiet when he walked past a cell and something about him stopping outside mine was dangerous information.

Why?

I pulled the blanket tighter and watched the torchlight shift on the ceiling.

What are you, I thought at the memory of those dark eyes. What are you and why did you stop?

The silence gave me nothing back. It never did.

Cole came with breakfast when the light through the small barred window shifted from black to grey.

He looked tired. Like he hadn't slept either or hadn't been allowed to. There was something careful in the way he moved this morning, something wound tighter than yesterday, and when he set the tray down and straightened up I saw it.

A new bruise. Fresh and purpling along his left cheekbone, still swollen at the edge.

"Don't," he said before I could speak.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

He wasn't wrong. I picked up the bread and gave him a moment. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and I noticed he did it without thinking of positioning himself between me and the door. Like protection had become a reflex he'd stopped noticing.

"Who hit you?" I asked quietly.

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

He looked at me then really looked, the way people do when kindness surprises them. Like he'd trained himself not to expect it.

"I said something I shouldn't have," he said carefully. "Last night. Through your door. Someone heard."

My chest tightened. "Cole, I'm sorry

"I'm fine." Quick. Practiced. The ease of someone who had been fine through worse. "Eat, Isadora."

I ate. But I watched him and I thought about what kind of place punished a boy for apologizing to a prisoner and I added the bruise to the growing list of things I was storing away carefully.

We talked while I ate. Small things first the keep, the pack, the hierarchy. Over three hundred wolves. Alphas at the top, then Betas, then warriors, then omegas at the bottom carrying the weight of everyone above them.

"Where do you sit?" I asked.

His jaw shifted slightly. "Omega."

I looked at the bruise on his face and said nothing. He appreciated that more than words.

"The Alpha," I said after a moment, keeping my voice completely even. "How long has he led?"

"Four years." Cole stared at the wall. "Since he was twenty two."

"That's young."

"He wasn't young when he took it." Something shadowed his expression. "He was different before. Everyone who knows him says so." A pause. "He used to laugh."

The words landed quietly between us. I turned them over.

He used to laugh.

"What changed him?" I asked.

Cole opened his mouth. I closed it. Looking at the door with that particular expression I was starting to recognize the one that meant the answer existed but lived somewhere he wasn't permitted to go.

"That's not my story to tell," he said softly.

Before I could respond, footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. Cole straightened immediately, all the ease draining out of him, replaced by something careful and alert. He grabbed my empty tray and moved toward the door with a speed that told me everything about who those footsteps belonged to.

"Cole 

"Remember what I told you," he said under his breath. Then louder, normally: "I'll come back later."

The door opened. Cole slipped out.

And Daxton stepped in.

He was nothing like the Alpha.

Where Evander was all cold stillness and carved edges, Daxton was warm and easy and smiled like a man who had spent years perfecting it. Tall, broad-shouldered, with sharp green eyes that moved over the cell and landed on me with something that looked like friendliness and felt like an assessment.

He leaned against the doorframe like he had all the time in the world.

"Isadora," he said pleasantly. Like we were old friends. Like I was not sitting in a stone cell in his pack's territory against my will. "How are you settling in?"

"I'm in a cell," I said.

He smiled wider. "Temporary. I promise." He tilted his head. "I wanted to introduce myself properly. I'm Daxton. The Beta. I believe my men were the ones who collected you."

"Kidnapped me."

"Relocated you." His smile didn't waver. "For everyone's safety."

I looked at him steadily. He was charming. Genuinely, deliberately, practised charming the kind that worked on most people because it was wrapped in enough warmth to feel real. I had met men like Daxton before. Men who smiled most when they needed something most.

"What do you want?" I asked.

Something shifted in his eyes. Quick and small and carefully hidden. "Just to talk."

"About what?"

"About your experience here. Whether you're comfortable. Whether there's anything you need." He paused. "Whether anyone has said anything to you that's concerning you."

There it was.

I kept my face completely neutral. "Everyone has been perfectly fine," I said.

"Cole treating you well?"

"He brought me food. That's all."

Daxton nodded slowly. Watching me the way you watch water to see if it's moving. "Good," he said. "Cole is sweet. A little talkative, sometimes. Says things without thinking." He smiled again. "You know how young people are."

I smiled back. "I do."

We looked at each other across the small cold cell and the air between us was perfectly pleasant and absolutely loaded with everything neither of us was saying.

"The Alpha will want to speak with you soon," he said, straightening from the doorframe. "I'd encourage you to be cooperative. He isn't a patient man."

"I'll keep that in mind."

He held my gaze for one moment longer than necessary. Then he nodded once and left, the door clicking shut behind him with a sound like a full stop.

I sat very still in the silence he left behind.

My heart was steady. My hands were steady. But something cold had settled in my stomach that had nothing to do with the stone walls, the quiet, certain knowledge that Daxton had come to my cell this morning with one specific purpose.

He wanted to know what Cole had told me.

And somewhere in this keep, Cole had a new bruise on his face for saying eleven words through an iron door.

I looked at the ceiling. Breathed slowly.

Be careful, I told myself. Everyone in this place is playing a game you don't know the rules to yet.

Learn the rules.

Then win.