Chapter 135 Price of Pride
THIRD PERSON POV (HANNAH)
Hannah had never been good at taking orders. That was simply a fact about herself that she had accepted long ago, without apology either.
The only people whose authority she had ever genuinely recognized were her brother and Elijah. Her brother because blood demanded it and because she had watched him earn it over years of difficulty.
Elijah because she had wanted him for as long as she could remember, and wanting someone that much had a way of making you willing to defer to them in ways you wouldn’t otherwise consider.
This old man was neither of those things.
He was not her brother. He was certainly not Elijah. And sitting in this dim, close space listening to him outline plans she hadn’t agreed to in service of goals she hadn’t signed up for was producing in her a particular quality of irritation that she was finding increasingly difficult to manage quietly.
She had come here because she’d been offered something. She had been in that cell, in the dark, running out of patience and options, and the offer had seemed straightforward. Help with his plans, get what she wanted at the end of it. Clean. Simple. A transaction she understood.
What she had not agreed to was becoming an instrument in someone else’s scheme with no clarity about when or how her own interests were going to be served. And she had definitely not agreed to be sent on errands around a pack she already knew, looking for wolves she could have identified herself without any of this elaborate apparatus, reporting back to an old man who made her feel like one of several pieces on a board he was moving alone.
“Do you have something to say, young lady?”
He was looking directly at her. That was the other thing about him. He had an unnerving ability to hear the thoughts she hadn’t yet spoken, which she found invasive and deeply annoying in equal measure.
She met his eyes.
“I have something to ask. We came here with specific things we wanted. I wanted Elijah. Lisa wanted her sister dead. Luke wanted the girl for himself. Those were our reasons for agreeing to any of this. What I want to understand is how exactly what you’re asking us to do right now is moving any of us toward those things. Because it looks like you’re getting everything you need and we’re getting nothing except instructions.”
She said it evenly, without heat, which was harder than saying it with heat would have been. She wanted him to understand that this was a considered position, not a tantrum.
The Grandmaster looked at her for a long moment with an expression that communicated several things simultaneously, none of them warm.
“If this arrangement no longer suits you, you’re free to leave. The door is there.” His voice was unhurried and precise. “But I want to be clear about what leaving means. The protection I extend to the people working under me disappears the moment you walk out that door. Elijah’s forces are thorough. External threats in this region are not trivial. If something happens to you once you’ve left, that is entirely your own affair.”
It was a threat. A well-constructed one, she acknowledged internally, designed to make staying feel safer than leaving without ever being so crude as to explicitly say so. She could see the mechanism of it clearly.
The problem was that she didn’t particularly care.
She had spent years being careful, being patient, managing her desire for Elijah through acceptable channels while watching someone else stand in the position that was supposed to be hers.
Patient and careful had gotten her a cell. It had gotten her to this room, where she was being managed by an old man who looked at her like she was a useful annoyance.
She was done with patient and careful.
“None of you are going to say anything?” She looked at Lisa, then at Luke. “You’re both just going to sit here and let this happen?”
Lisa said nothing. She had always needed someone to lead her, had always been at her most dangerous when attached to someone who would tell her which direction to aim herself. The Grandmaster gave her that. She wasn’t going to bite the hand that oriented her.
Luke said nothing either. He had his own reasons for staying, his own calculations about what the endgame looked like, and they were apparently sufficient to keep him seated and quiet.
Hannah picked up her things.
She gave them one last look, then she huffed and she walked out.
The Grandmaster watched her go. He knew exactly what was waiting for her in the forest. He said nothing about it. Some lessons could only be learned by living through them, and some people would only learn from the experience of discovering, alone in the dark, that the protection they had dismissed was the only thing standing between them and a much worse situation.
He turned back to Luke and Lisa.
“The two of you. The task is simple and the reward is real. Find the wolf with the special powers. She’s no longer in Elijah’s pack, she has moved, but she hasn’t moved far. I’ve been picking up signals. She’s close.” He paused. “Don’t fail me. The consequences of failing me are considerably less pleasant than the consequences of leaving me, and you’ve both seen what I’m willing to do when I’m disappointed.”
Lisa looked at the orb on the table. Luke looked at his hands.
Neither spoke.
The Grandmaster settled into silence and fixed his attention on the orb, turning it slowly, watching the light move inside it. The image it showed him shifted and reformed, and then it found something interesting.
A woman standing in a field, moving through a training exercise with focused intensity.
He had been expecting to feel the pull toward the special wolf when the orb found her. He had felt it before, with others, and he knew what it felt like with a magnetic certainty.
This was stronger than anything he had felt before. Much stronger.
He leaned closer.
She didn’t look like anything extraordinary from the outside. But the energy around her was unmistakable. It pressed against the surface of the orb like something trying to get out.
“I believe the search just became considerably easier,” he said. “I’ve found her.”
He studied her face in the orb. There was a man nearby. He recognized Elijah instantly.
Lisa had come to stand beside him. She looked at the image and went very still.
“You know her,” the Grandmaster said. It wasn’t a question.
“That’s my sister.” Lisa’s voice came out flat and strange. “That absolute bitch went back home.”
“She is the wolf I have been looking for. She is the one.”
Lisa looked at him with an expression that was almost hunger. “Then you’ll let me kill her. That was the arrangement.”
“You’ll get what was promised to you.” He said it smoothly and without elaboration.
Lisa smiled and looked back at the orb.
She was still smiling when she fell.
It happened between one breath and the next, without warning, without sound. He looked down at her on the floor without any particular expression on his face.
He had never intended to share the wolf’s power with anyone. The promise had served its purpose. Lisa had served her purpose. There was no reason to carry either of them any further.
He straightened and turned back to the orb. In two days, he’ll get everything he has ever wanted.
Meanwhile, Hannah moved through the dark forest alone, telling herself she didn’t need any of them. The trees here were dense and the cloud cover had swallowed the moon entirely, and what had felt like confident independence when she was walking out the door was beginning to feel, in the complete darkness of the forest, like something more uncomfortable.
She heard things in the undergrowth that she couldn’t identify. The shadows moved in ways that shadows didn’t normally move.
She walked faster and tried not to let herself think about the specific words the Grandmaster had used about external threats in the region.
She was too proud to turn back. She had made her exit and she was going to see it through. But pride was cold company in a dark forest, and by the time she found shelter it had occurred to her, clearly and without comfort, that she had made a significant miscalculation.