Thirty-Three: Wren

Time is subjective in the guts of Nightwind Manor—elastic, ugly, wound so tight it could snap at any moment. The cell’s nothing but a holding pattern, a way to kill the first hour of my new half-life, so when the door creaks open again I’m not surprised to see Jace’s silhouette backlit by a flicker of torchlight and a shadow that doesn’t belong to him.

He doesn’t speak right away. Just stands there, holding the knob with one hand, eyes roving over my posture on the cot: knees up, arms wrapped tight, hands ghosting the silver cuffs as if I could somehow warm them into surrender. The coat’s balled up beneath my skull, a bad pillow, and I’ve used the time to memorize every crack in the wall, every odd echo of sound that makes it through the stone.

He clears his throat. “You’re not sleeping,” he says, and it’s not a question.

“Didn’t think I was allowed.” My voice rasps, the words burning on the way out. The air in here tastes of dust and slow death, laced with the sweat of every prisoner who’s sat exactly where I am now.

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he gestures for me to stand. “Come with me.”

I push up, muscle memory more reliable than actual muscle at this point. The cuffs make it awkward, but I manage. Jace waits for me to approach, then steps aside and gestures to the corridor beyond. “Tour,” he says. “If you can call it that.”

The hallway is narrower than I remember, the air closer, but the bulb overhead is gone and we’re lit instead by a single torch in a rusted bracket. He pulls it free and hands it to me, which makes the guards at the end of the hall twitch, but he waves them off. “She’s not shifting,” he says. “And she can’t run.”

We walk. The flame makes the shadows writhe, crawling over the walls and lapping at the mold-blackened ceiling. The stone is damp and slick in spots, and the further we go the worse it gets—like the Manor is weeping from the inside out. Jace leads the way, pointing out things as if he’s narrating a museum exhibit for a tourist who doesn’t care about history:

“That’s the old cold store. Used to be for meat, now it’s mostly surplus medicine. If you need anything, that’s where it comes from.”

“Here, the archives. Most wolves don’t read, but if you want books, you can request them through the guard. They’ll have to be checked first.”

I trail the torch along the walls as we walk, watching the flame expose seams in the mortar and the outlines of old doors sealed shut. Sometimes the torchlight picks up a flash of graffiti—scratch marks, a name gouged deep, a tally of days or years. In the tightest part of the tunnel, the wall reads: WE BURY THE LIVING.

I reach out and touch the letters, tracing the groove with my thumb. Jace watches, then glances away.

We turn a corner and run into a pair of pack members carrying crates. They’re young—late teens, maybe, with the hungry look of wolves desperate to prove themselves. At the sight of me, they lurch away from the wall as if I’m contagious. One stares openly at my wrists, at the raw skin and the stink of burned hair, then spits sideways and mutters, “Should’ve just killed her.”

Jace bristles, but says nothing. He just keeps moving, and I have to trot to keep up. The two wolves glare at my back until we’re out of sight, and I feel their eyes burning holes between my shoulder blades.

Further on, the ceiling lowers again and the corridor angles downward—just enough to change the air from damp to dripping. Here the torch picks up mineral veins in the wall, pale streaks that catch the light like bones. The floor is uneven, and twice I nearly stumble; each time, Jace slows just a bit, but never offers a hand.

He points out a junction where three tunnels meet. “To the right: servant access. To the left: restricted.” He looks at me over his shoulder. “You go left, you don’t come back.”

I nod, not sure if that’s a threat or a warning or just a fact.

He pauses at the next door—iron, not wood, banded in a pattern that looks decorative but isn’t. He unlocks it with a long, awkward key, then pushes it open with his shoulder. The hinges squeal, and I hear the echo ripple down the tunnel for a hundred yards.

We step through, and the air changes instantly—thicker, stiller, the torch barely pushing the dark back more than a foot or two. I breathe through my mouth, because the smell is wrong: not just rot, but something older, a tang that triggers the wolf’s panic response and makes my skin itch.

Jace leads me to another door, this one smaller but even more fortified. He runs his hand over a small plaque nailed to the center, then turns to me. “The council was… specific about your accommodations.”

I tilt my head, watching him. “You mean this is the real cell?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he pulls the torch from my hand, sets it in a bracket above the door, and unlocks the bolts—three of them, each requiring a different key from the ring at his hip.

Inside is a room not even a dog would sleep in. The walls are cut from raw stone, left rough so you can’t even lean without scraping your back bloody. There’s no window, not even a vent, just a single slit at ankle height for air or food or whatever else they want to throw in. The cot is a board, not a mattress, and the blanket is shredded, the edges hard as rope. In one corner, a metal bucket. In the other, nothing at all.

Jace gestures me in. “You’ll want the left wall. The right’s colder.”

I step inside, and the floor crunches underfoot—salt, scattered thick as if to keep something from growing. I kneel, run my fingers through it, and find bits of fur, old nail, the flecks of whatever happened to the last wolf who lived here.

He follows me in, glances at the wall, then at the blank stretch of stone above the cot. Tacked there with a rusted spike is a parchment, written in a precise, formal hand:

CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL, STRAY MOON:

NO SHIFTING. NO UNSCHEDULED MOVEMENT.

MEALS AND WATER PROVIDED AT SCHEDULED TIMES ONLY.

SILENCE AFTER DARK.

MEDICAL CHECKS ON ALPHA’S ORDER.

NO CONTACT WITH OTHER PACK MEMBERS WITHOUT APPROVAL.

Any violation = immediate restraint or removal.

ALL GUARDS ENFORCE.

I stare at it, then at him. “No mention of parole.”

Jace shrugs, as if he’s seen worse. “They haven’t decided what to do with you yet.”

I sit on the board, letting the cold leech up through my spine. The silver cuffs make it hard to tuck my arms around my knees, so I just hold them in my lap and pretend I don’t care.

He stands in the doorway, blocking the light. “If you need anything—anything not on the list—you ask for me.” He doesn’t sound like he expects I will, but the offer’s real.

I meet his eyes, search for the crack in the mask. “Why bother?”

He hesitates, then: “Because I remember what it’s like to be caged.”

He pulls the door shut, leaving the torch outside. For a minute, the flame throws my shadow huge and ragged against the far wall. Then the lock clicks home, and all that’s left is dark, and the sound of my own breathing, and the promise that if I howl, no one will ever hear.

I run my hands along the seam of the board, feeling for weaknesses, and find nothing but splinters and the chill of stone. The salt stings my raw wrists, but I keep touching it, pressing the grains into the wounds until the pain settles me. I count out the rules again in my head, then count them backward, then count the minutes until I hear footsteps in the corridor again.

The wolf inside stirs, restless, but the silver keeps it chained. My human mind—what’s left of it—just waits.

Somewhere far above, a door slams. Somewhere even further, a wolf howls, and this time, I don’t try to answer. I just sit in the dark, watching the afterimage of the torch fade from the stone.

Let them cage me. Let them invent new rules and new punishments. I survived the first shift. I can survive this.

The only thing that scares me is how much I want to prove them right.