Chapter 180 The Golden Blade
THIRD PERSON POV
The room smelled like cold stone and something that had been damp for too long.
The girls had stopped noticing the smell weeks ago, which was the mercy of prolonged exposure — the senses eventually stopped registering what they could not change. What they had not stopped noticing was the guards, who stood in the corners with their guns held across their bodies and their eyes moving over the room with mechanical regularity. Men who had been told to watch and had decided that watching meant never letting their attention settle anywhere for too long.
There were over thirty of them of them now, varying ages between fourteen and seventeen, sitting or lying in the configurations they had developed over time — small clusters of two and three. The ones who had been here longest looked more accepting that the newer arrivals had not yet developed. Not resignation. Something more like patience, which was different.
They got fed twice a day. It was not food in any meaningful sense — a paste of something grey and a crust of bread so dry it had to be soaked in the water they were given to be swallowed without injury.
The girls who had been here longest had developed a system for distributing it equitably, which was one of the first things Leo noticed when the door opened and the guards threw him into the room.
He landed on his hands and knees on the stone floor and stayed there for a moment, breathing, taking stock of himself. His shoulder hurt where they had grabbed him and his knee had caught the edge of something on the way down and was bleeding slightly.
He looked around at the multiple faces looking back at him with varying expressions ranging from curiosity, wariness, and a blankness that he recognized from his training as the expression of someone who had learned to reveal as little as possible to anyone who might be watching.
“You have a new roommate,” one of the guards said, and they laughed, and the door slammed, and the lights came on for their hour.
The girl across from him was the one who spoke first. She had short hair and direct eyes.
“Hi,” she said.
Leo looked at her and debated if he wanted to make friends there or not. In the end, he found his lips moving and he responded with a simple, “Hi.”
“Are you a Lycan?”
He was. He was also the Crown Prince and the son of the Lycan King and the heir to a pack that was currently, he had no doubt, turning itself inside out to find him. He was also in a room full of teenagers who did not know who he was, and he understood with the instinct that had been trained into him since he was old enough to understand what being the heir meant announcing his identity was the most dangerous thing he could do in this room until he understood the situation better.
“Yes,” he said. “What do they want with us?”
She shrugged with the economy of someone who has been asking the same question for two months without receiving an answer. “The guards don’t say anything except orders. Most of us don’t know why we’re here.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Two months. Some of the others longer.” She looked at him carefully. “They took you from somewhere specific. I could hear the commotion before they brought you in.”
He didn’t answer that directly. “Where are we?”
“Nobody knows. They moved us at night with coverings over our heads. We’ve been trying to work out the direction from the light but it’s not enough to determine—”
The door opened and the room went more quiet and still. Leo didn’t even know that was possible. The guards who had been standing in the corners straightened.
The man who came in was not a guard.
He was average height, with a goatee. His eyes moved over the room with the speed of a comprehensive assessment and settled on Leo. his expression shifted, like he’d found exactly what he was looking for.
The girls around Leo moved instinctively — not away from him exactly, but slightly, the unconscious shift was clear they did not want to be near whatever was drawing attention.
The girl with the direct eyes did not move.
The man crouched down in front of Leo, bringing himself to the boy’s level, making himself seem less threatening while simultaneously communicating that he had no need to appear threatening because the power differential was so obvious it required no demonstration.
He looked at Leo for a long moment.
“So it’s you,” he said.
Leo met his eyes. He was afraid. But his father had told him once that fear was information and what you did with information was use it, not be used by it.
“Who are you,” Leo said, “and what do you want with us?”
The man’s expression shifted into something that was not quite a smile but was in that direction. He stood.
“Bring him,” he said to the guards. “My legs hurt.”
The guards came roughly and Leo was pulled to his feet and he looked back at the room and he straightened his shoulders and walked.
They took him through corridors that he memorized as he went. The number of turns, the direction of the light through the high narrow windows, the texture of the floors transitioning from stone to something smoother. He was building a map and he was going to keep building it until he understood the shape of the place he was in.
The room they went to was large and cold and had it held an emptiness he couldn’t explain.
The man settled into the throne which was at the front of the room with the ease of long practice.
“You don’t know who I am,” he said. “But your father does. I am the Alpha of Golden Blade.”
Leo was quiet for a moment. He was putting things together and came to one conclusion. Everything that happened was not random.
“And the other children?” Leo said. “What do you want with them?”
A guard moved to strike him for the interruption. Leo moved faster, stepping into the guard’s reach and driving his elbow into the man’s midsection, and the guard went back into the wall with more force than he had expected from a fifteen-year-old.
The Alpha watched this with the expression of a man who has just had a hypothesis confirmed.
“You’re exactly like him,” he said. He did not sound displeased. He sounded like someone making a calculation. “I’m going to tell you something, Leo. I am not your enemy. I am a man who wants something that belongs to me returned. It was taken through methods that were not legitimate and I intend to have it back.”
“Nothing that belongs to you is inside our pack,” Leo said.
“You’re wrong about that.” He paused, then met Leo’s steady and stubborn gaze. “Your mother.”
The room was very quiet.
Leo looked at the man and felt the ground of his understanding shift, not disbelief exactly, because he had been raised by people who had taught him to assess rather than dismiss, but rather, a suspended state of a mind receiving information that will take time to integrate.
He did not let any of that show on his face.
He stored it carefully, in the place where he put things that needed to be examined in private, and he waited for the guards to come and take him back to the room.
He was going to need to think.