I stopped counting days by the light, because there wasn't any. I counted by the needle instead.
Grant came twice a day, sometimes with Dr. Holloway trailing behind him, mostly alone. He'd crouch, pin my arm against the stone, and press the syringe in without a word. The wolfsbane burned going in — a green, bitter cold that spread up through my shoulder and settled behind my eyes. After the third day I stopped flinching. There's no point flinching at weather.
My wolf was still there. I want to be clear about that, even to myself, especially to myself, because the wolfsbane wanted me to believe otherwise. She was under the surface like a hand held beneath water — I could feel her twitch sometimes, a knuckle brushing up against my ribs, a whimper so small it barely qualified as sound. Not dead. Held down. There's a difference, and some nights in that dark I held onto the difference the way you hold onto a splinter of wood in open water.
I made myself eat everything they brought, even when my stomach turned on it, even when the bread tasted like it had been dipped in the same green cold as the needle. I made myself track the hours by pressing my palm flat against the stone floor and waiting. The den was beneath the pack house, and stone carries sound the way water carries scent — if I stayed still enough, breathed shallow enough, I could feel the vibration of footsteps overhead, the far-off bass hum of an assembly bell, once, unmistakably, the low rolling pressure of Mitchell's Alpha tone rattling down through the foundation like something underground shifting in its sleep.
I built a schedule out of vibrations. Morning bell. Midday quiet. Evening footsteps, heavier, more of them — pack dinner. It wasn't information. It was just proof that time was still moving up there, that the world hadn't stopped just because mine had.
On the third day the footsteps changed pattern. More of them, earlier than usual, moving with the particular weight of a gathered crowd. I pressed my whole body flat against the floor and listened until my ear ached, and I understood before Holloway ever confirmed it two days later, offhand, like he was commenting on weather.
"Alpha's mated again," he said, screwing the cap back onto a vial. "Small ceremony. Quick."
I didn't ask who. I already knew.
No mourning period. No pretense that anything unusual had happened six days before. I lay there and thought about how fast it must have looked from the outside — the bonfire, the rejection, the blood on my collar, and then, within days, a new mate standing where I'd stood, taking vows in front of the same fire pit, the same pack, some of the same faces that had watched them drag me down the hill.
Holloway mentioned, again offhand, that Petra had walked out before the ceremony ended. I knew Petra. I'd trained her myself, watched her take down warriors twice her size with nothing but patience and good footwork. She'd looked at me once during a training run and said, *you make this pack feel like something worth staying for.* I held that sentence in the dark like a coal.
"She's up on the northern patrol now," Holloway added, not looking at me. "Two others too. Asking questions."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't cost someone else a transfer, or worse. But I filed it away — the pack's face said one thing to Mitchell, and its private mouth, in the kitchens and the barracks, said something else. That gap was small. It was also the only weapon I had left.
On the fifth day, something cracked open at the edge of my skull that wasn't wolfsbane and wasn't grief.
It came in like static first, a pressure behind my eyes, and then a voice, thin and broken up, fighting through distance like a radio signal dragged across bad weather.
*Kora —*
I sat up so fast my head spun.
*Dane?*
The signal buckled, dropped, came back thinner. I hadn't heard his voice — hadn't heard anyone's voice that wasn't Grant's or Holloway's — in five days, and it hit me like light after dark, painful and enormous.
*— can't hold this long — signal's —*
*Dane, I'm here. I'm here.*
Static swallowed half of it. I pressed both palms flat against the stone like that would help, like I could brace the connection with my own hands.
*I found something.*
Three words, and then the link folded in on itself and went dark, and I was alone in the cell again with my heart slamming against my ribs and my wolf, somewhere below the water, lifting her head for the first time in days.
