Chapter 3

The triangular shard of loose concrete bit deep into the soft pine of my cot's rear leg. With a slow, deliberate drag of my wrist, I pulled the stone down, carving the final vertical line. One. Two. Three. Four. Then, with a heavier, more satisfying scrape, I drew a diagonal stroke right through the center of the cluster.

Five.

I brushed my calloused thumb over the fresh groove, catching a tiny splinter in the pad of my skin. I didn't pull it out. The small, sharp sting was a grounding reminder that I was still flesh, still bone, still breathing. I leaned my head back against the wood and stared at the massive collection of tallies stretching up the leg of the bed like a disease. Two hundred and seventy-one horizontal lines, grouped in neat little graves of five.

Nine months.

Nine months of waking up to the same sweating cement ceiling. Nine months of inhaling the stagnant, fouled stench of old iron, rot, and the bitter copper tang of our own unwashed bodies. Nine months of a silent tongue, the invisible weight of the witchcraft sitting on my vocal cords like a lead coin that refused to melt.

The dungeon wasn't the quiet, empty tomb it had been when Harlow and I first established our silent code. The darkness had grown crowded. The narrow corridor between our bars was thicker now, heavy with the suffocating scent of ozone, damp fur, and a restless, high-strung energy that made the skin on the back of my neck prickle with every shift in the air.

First had come Reese, a tall, fiercely muscular girl with sharp green eyes who spent her first three weeks pacing the length of her small cell like a cornered panther. Then came Anika, smaller, quieter, but radiating a dangerous, coiled intensity. Both of them were wolves. Both of them underwent the same agonizing, bone-snapping transformations that Harlow did whenever the moon reached its peak, their muted, suffocating groans echoing down the concrete hall.

It had taken weeks of patience to teach Reese and Anika the basics of our hand-signals. Harlow and I had to repeat motions over and over through the bars, correcting their clumsy gestures until they could finally string together basic thoughts: food, guard, sleep, danger.

And yet, even after learning our language, the wolves spent their free hours staring at me with a lingering, frustrating doubt. I watched the silent whispers pass down the line, their fingers cutting through the dim torchlight like pale moths.

“She still smells like old pine and river silt,” Reese had signed to Harlow just yesterday, her green eyes cutting over to my dark corner with an unmistakable edge of suspicion. “No wolf. No spirit.

No scent of the pack. She is entirely fragile, a thin reed in a den of iron. Why is she here?”

Harlow had only shaken her head, her hands moving in a defensive, protective blur. “She is the hunter. She got us this far in the code. Do not question her purpose.”

But the question hung over us like a layer of low, suffocating fog. Why hoard three powerful, fully developed werewolves and one human girl from a forgotten forest city? I was a glaring, dangerous anomaly. I had no beast sleeping beneath my skin. I didn't have claws. I was just Lara—the girl who knew how to balance a blade and keep her family from starving.

The puzzle pieces became entirely tangled on a rainy Tuesday when the heavy oak doors at the end of the hall violently banged open, vibrating through the stone floors.

Two burly guards in dark leather armor dragged a new prisoner down the corridor. She was fighting like a demon, her bare feet skidding against the stones, her head thrashing as she tried to sink her teeth into a guard’s forearm. They threw her into the empty cell next to mine with enough force to make the iron bars rattle in their mortar sockets. "Stay down, bitch," the larger guard grunted, wiping sweat and rain from his brow before slamming the heavy iron bolt into place with a loud, metallic clank.

The girl scrambled to her feet instantly, her chest heaving against the fabric of her torn tunic. She spat a glob of blood and saliva at the retreating guards, her shoulders rising and falling as she smoothed her short, sheared dark hair. When she turned around, a pair of piercing, icy blue eyes immediately locked onto the rest of us.

Harlow immediately moved to the front of her bars, her hands flashing a welcoming sign. Safe. We friend.

The new girl didn't respond. She stared at Harlow's moving hands with total blankness, her expression morphing into absolute confusion, then irritation. She snapped her jaw, letting out a frustrated, soundless exhale, and threw her back against the concrete wall of her cell. She didn't know the code. To her, Harlow was just waving her hands in the air like a madwoman.

It took days. Insufferably slow, grueling days.

Harlow and Reese took the lead in trying to break through to her, pointing at objects, mimicking the guards, and demonstrating basic signs. The new girl—who eventually managed to spell out her name, N-O-V-A, by scratching a single letter into the dirt each day—was frustratingly slow to pick it up. She was stubborn, aggressive, and deeply mistrustful of everyone in the corridor. While Reese and Anika had been desperate to communicate, Nova treated the hand-gestures like a chore she didn't want to learn.

But what she lacked in speed, she made up for in raw instinct. Her nose was constantly twitching, cataloging the scents of the dungeon. She easily recognized the wolf-scent bleeding off Harlow, Reese, and Anika. But every time her icy blue eyes drifted over to my cell, her brow would furrow into a deep, aggressive scowl.

Finally, after nearly two weeks of training, Nova managed to string her first clumsy, trembling signs together. She pointed a blunt finger at her own chest. Wolf, she signed, her hands jerky and unrefined. Then, she pointed across the narrow gap at Reese, and then at Harlow. Wolf. Wolf.

Then, her icy blue eyes drilled into mine. She pointed a stiff finger straight at my face. She made a horizontal, flat slicing motion through the air, followed by a dismissive wave. Not wolf. Human.

She turned her face toward Harlow, her hands moving in a slow, halting, but deeply accusatory sequence. “Why... human... here? Why... cage... with... wolves?”

Harlow tried to sign back, defending me as she always did, but Nova didn't have the vocabulary to understand the nuances. She just kept shaking her head, staring at me through the bars with an unyielding, icy suspicion. In her mind, the math was simple: four wolves, one human. The human didn't belong. Therefore, the human had to be a trap.

I didn't move from my corner. I sat with my wrists resting on my knees, watching Nova struggle to understand the very language that kept us sane. Five girls. Four wolves. One human hunter. The search for a motive was making less and less sense to the wolves, and Nova's slow, brooding paranoia was starting to infect the rest of the hall like a poison.