POV: Lyra Voss
Two days of walking blind teaches you things about yourself that you'd rather not know.
I learned that my patience had a floor. I learned that the binding on my wrists itched worse on the second day than the first. I learned that I could map a route through sound and air pressure and the way echoes changed shape around structures, and that by the time the blindfold came off I already knew I was inside a fortification of significant size with at least three internal courtyards and a water source running somewhere below the eastern wall.
What I didn't know was what he wanted.
The room they put me in was stone, clean, with one window too narrow to fit through and one door that locked from outside. They cut the binding cord. They left water and food, which told me they intended to keep me functional, which told me I was here for a purpose that required me conscious and cooperative, which told me I had something they needed and hadn't taken yet.
That was the part I kept coming back to.
I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, running the numbers for the fourth time, when the door opened.
He was not what I expected. That was the first thing, and I noticed it before I could stop myself from noticing. Kade Ashver was large the way structures were large, like the size was just a fact about him rather than something he was using. He came in and sat down on the only chair in the room across from me and put nothing on the table between us, no documents, no weapons, no props of any kind.
He just looked at me.
I looked back.
"You sold patrol coordinates to a werewolf contact three nights ago," he said, "coordinates that came from inside this operation."
Not a question. So I didn't answer it.
"The soldier those coordinates got killed," he said, "was twenty-three."
"I didn't kill him," I said, "I sold information. What the buyer does with it isn't my ledger."
Something moved across his face, too quick to read. "Tell me who commissioned the purchase."
"I don't know the name. I never do. That's how the arrangement works."
"How did you get the coordinates in the first place?"
And there it was. The question I had been waiting for, because the honest answer to that one was complicated, and the complicated answer was the only one that was going to help me in this room.
I said, "I bought them. From a source inside Soren Vael's network."
The silence that followed was a specific kind of silence. The kind that meant he was reorganising something in his head fast and didn't want me to see it.
"You're saying one of Soren's people sold you Beast patrol intel," he said.
"I'm saying exactly that."
"Why."
"Because Soren's people sell to everyone. That's what they do. I didn't know whose operation it came from until I had already moved it."
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "What did you charge for it?"
It surprised me enough that I almost smiled. Of every follow-up question available to him, that was not the one I had prepared for. "Forty silver," I said.
"The information was worth two hundred."
"The buyer didn't know that."
He looked at me with something that wasn't quite assessment and wasn't quite anything else I had a word for. It made me want to look at a different part of the room. I didn't.
The questions kept coming after that, and the thing about them, the thing that started making the back of my neck feel strange somewhere in the second hour, was that they were exactly right. Not aggressive, not circular, not designed to confuse. He asked the thing that logically followed the thing before it, and when I answered he absorbed the answer completely before moving, and when I tried to slip something past him he caught it without making a performance of catching it.
I had been questioned by werewolf intelligence officers, Beast border commanders, and two different mercenary organisations. None of them had questioned me like this.
At the two-hour mark he asked, "The source inside Soren's network. Did they know what they were selling you?"
I stopped.
Because that was the question I hadn't let myself fully ask, and he had found it in two hours of conversation that I had spent nine years not having. "I don't know," I said, and it was the first completely unguarded answer I had given him.
He nodded slowly, like that answer confirmed something. "I think they did," he said, "I think you were used to move information that was meant to reach that specific werewolf faction, and I think whoever inside Soren's operation sold it to you knew you'd sell it again because that's what you do."
The room felt different after that. I was trying to work out if he was right, and the more I pulled at it the more I thought he probably was, and that meant someone had run me without my knowing, and that was a thing I did not have a comfortable response to.
"So what do you do with me now," I said.
He didn't answer immediately. He was looking at me with that same unreadable quality, and I was aware suddenly that my back hurt from sitting on stone for two hours and that I was tired in a way the last two days of walking hadn't fully accounted for, and I didn't want him to see either of those things so I kept my posture exactly where it was.
Then he went still.
Not the stillness of thinking. A different kind, sudden and total, like something inside him had just stopped.
His hand moved to his shoulder. Slowly, almost without meaning to, the way you touch something you've been trying not to touch.
He said it quietly, not to me, not really to anyone, his voice dropping to something almost private, "The pain in my shoulder."
A pause.
"It stopped."
He looked up at me then, and for the first time since he walked into the room, I couldn't read what was behind his eyes at all.