Chapter 6 - “Impossible”

SIENNA 

I didn’t sleep.

I lay on the thin mattress and stared at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster the way I used to count enemy positions. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

Every time I closed my eyes, I heard it again. Something heavy hitting the wall.

He had believed me. For one second, in that empty hall, Kieran had looked at my face and seen her.

I knew because I watched the color leave his skin.

Then he did what Alphas always do with things that frighten them. He buried it.

The knock came at dawn. Three sharp raps, no pause between them.

I opened the door expecting Kieran. It was Damien.

The Beta stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his expression as flat as a closed door. He had a way of looking at people that made them feel measured, not judged. Measured, and filed away.

“The Alpha wants you in the main hall for breakfast,” he said. “Then the east yard. You’ll be assigned work.”

“Work,” I repeated.

“Everyone eats here because everyone works here.” His eyes moved over my face once, slow and thorough. “Even the ones under protection.”

I gave him the small, grateful smile I’d practiced. “Of course. Thank you.”

He didn’t smile back.

The main hall was louder than the night before, but the noise changed when I walked in. Conversations dipped. Spoons stopped. A few wolves looked at me the way you look at a stray that has started to growl.

I took a tray and found a seat at the far end of a long table.

Selene sat near the front, surrounded by her usual circle. She caught my eye and lifted her cup in a lazy salute, her smile pure sugar.

I ate my bread slowly.

Kieran sat at the head table with the elders. He didn’t look at me once. Not when I came in. Not when I sat. Not even when Selene leaned across the table and whispered something that made two wolves laugh.

That was how I knew he was thinking about me.

Kieran never ignored anything he didn’t fear.

Damien appeared at my shoulder before I finished eating.

“He wants a word.”

He led me through a narrow corridor behind the armory and stopped at a door with no markings. He knocked once, opened it, and stepped aside.

Kieran stood at the window with his back to me. Dark shirt. Straight spine. The same posture he’d held for every execution order I’d ever watched him give.

“Close the door.”

I did.

He turned, and my eyes dropped to his hands before I could stop them. The knuckles on his right fist were split and scabbed, the skin around them swollen purple.

The wall.

“Sit,” he said.

“I’d rather stand.”

His jaw flexed. “Then stand.”

The silence stretched. He studied me the way you study a map you’ve read a hundred times and suddenly found a new road on.

“Last night,” he said at last. “You said a name in my hall. In front of my pack.”

“I said it in front of you. Your pack had already left.”

“Don’t play with words.” His voice stayed low. “Ravenna Voss was the finest commander this pack ever had. Everyone in this stronghold knows her name. Everyone knows how she died. Any wolf with a loose tongue could have told you the story.”

“Is that what you need it to be?”

The air tightened.

He crossed the room in three strides and stopped close enough that I had to tilt my head back. Heat rolled off him. Wolf heat. I held my ground.

“You heard it from someone,” he said. “Gossip. A story passed around over rations. That’s all it was.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.” His eyes flashed gold, quick and controlled. “And you will never say that name again. Not in my hall. Not in front of my wolves. Not to me.”

I tilted my head. “Or what?”

“Or I stop being patient.”

It should have frightened me. The fragile girl I was pretending to be would have trembled.

Instead I looked at his bleeding knuckles, then back at his face, and I let him see that I’d noticed.

“You hurt your hand,” I said softly.

Something flickered across his expression. Gone before I could name it.

“Get out.”

I walked to the door. My fingers closed around the handle.

“Sienna.”

I stopped. I didn’t turn.

For a moment I thought he might say something honest. The quiet stretched thin enough to snap.

“Report to the east yard,” he said.

I left.

The corridor was empty, lit by one buzzing bulb. I made it as far as the corner before his voice carried through the door he hadn’t quite shut.

“Damien.”

“Alpha.”

“Pull everything on Ravenna’s death. Reports. Witness lists. Who stood on the southern line that day. Do it quietly.”

A pause. “And the human?”

A longer pause. I pressed my back to the wall and held my breath.

“Watch her.”

The door swung wider. Damien stepped into the frame and nodded once to his Alpha.

But his eyes were already on me, through the gap, calm and patient and not the least bit surprised.

I stood there with my pulse steady and my hands cold.

Let them dig.

Every grave they opened would have my name on it.