Chapter 403 Only One Pack Chains Women In Silver

DARKHOWLER KEEP

Finnick Shadowclaw was mid-sentence when the pain hit.

It came without warning, a white-hot lance through his chest that dropped him to one knee on the stone floor of Darkhowler’s eastern corridor. His hand slammed against the wall for balance. Every muscle in his body seized with the specific agony of a shift that was happening inside a body that was miles away.

Garrett Darkhowler stopped walking. His hand went to his sword on instinct, scanning the corridor for a threat that did not exist, because the man beside him had just collapsed and there was no visible enemy.

“What the hell? You alright?”

Fin’s voice came through his teeth. “I’m fine.”

The pain held for twelve seconds.

At thirteen, it stopped.

Fin stood. Straightened his jacket. Resumed walking at the exact pace he had been maintaining before his knees had betrayed him, and the resumption was so seamless that it would have been impressive if Garrett had not just watched the King of North Skardos crumple against a wall.

Garrett stared at him for two full seconds, then matched his stride. The question on his face was loud. The question stayed on his face, because Garrett Darkhowler was a man who understood that some questions waited for the right room.

They moved through the keep in silence. Guards posted at intersections acknowledged both Alphas with crisp salutes that neither man returned because both men were thinking about different things and the salutes were background noise.

The war room was on the second floor. Garrett pushed the door open.

Officers were already seated. Four Darkhowler captains, Garrett’s Beta, and a logistics commander whose name Fin had memorized on arrival because memorizing names was a habit and habits were how empires stayed organized.

Agnes Viremont was in the far corner.

Fin noticed her immediately. She was seated at the end of the table, and her posture suggested she was comfortable and felt entitled to it. Then again, Garrett was about to crown her, so that was fitting. Attempted murder of his mate multiple times. Drugged a crown prince. Now at the head of the war room like a Luna Queen.

Meanwhile, Serena had saved a war camp, saved the lives of two Alphas, a Beta, a Gamma, and others in Orosia, and was a magical prodigy, but was still acting like a guest in Shadowclaw. The contrast bothered Fin.

He did not comment. He did not greet her. He sat at the opposite end of the table and placed his hands flat on the surface, and the placement was deliberate, because Finnick Shadowclaw’s hands communicated what his face chose to withhold, and flat hands on a table meant I am here and I am listening and I have formed no opinion that I intend to share.

Xeon: That entitled woman commands attention by being loud. Mate commands loyalty without lifting a finger. Which one do you think will be the better queen?

Fin: Xeon, that is genuinely the smartest thing you’ve ever said to me.

Xeon: I know.

Fin: Now tell me why the smartest wolf in my head turns into a goddamn feral raccoon every time Drakenfell’s wolf looks at him.

Xeon: He started it.

Fin: He did NOT start it.

The meeting began.

Fin listened, his military mind activated, filing relevant details, discarding redundancies, cross-referencing Darkhowler’s positioning with Shadowclaw’s own southern deployments.

Seven minutes in, the second shift hit.

This one was worse.

The pain detonated behind his sternum like a fist punching through his ribcage from the inside. Fin’s body pitched forward, his hands slamming flat on the table as his torso folded, a grunt tearing out of him that he could not contain because the pain was beyond containment. His vision whited out at the edges. His jaw clenched so hard he tasted copper.

Every officer at the table stood.

Chairs scraped stone. Hands went to weapons. Garrett was on his feet in a blur, his eyes scanning Fin’s body for blood, for a wound, for the source of whatever had just driven the King of North Skardos face-first into his war table.

“Get a mage healer,” Garrett ordered, his voice carrying the sharp efficiency of a commander who did not waste time on confusion.

“Yes, Alpha.” His Beta was already moving.

“I’m fine.” Fin’s voice was a rasp, scraped raw, pushed through a jaw that refused to unclench. His hands were white-knuckled on the table’s edge, arms trembling with the effort of keeping himself upright through pain that had no origin point on his body and no wound to show for it.

Garrett looked at him. Looked at the table. Looked at the floor, where Fin’s knees had buckled enough to drop him halfway off the chair.

“You are on my war table bleeding from the nose and telling me you’re fine. Why are you on the floor?”

“Serena is shifting right now.” Fin forced the words out between his teeth. “I feel her pain.”

The room went quiet. Officers who had been reaching for weapons lowered their hands. Garrett’s Beta stopped mid-stride toward the door.

Twelve seconds.

Fin counted every one of them. His nose dripped blood onto the table. A single red drop on the tactical map, landing squarely on the southern border, which would have been symbolic if Fin had the bandwidth to appreciate symbolism while his matebond was trying to kill him.

At thirteen, the pain stopped.

Fin stood. Wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand. Looked at the red smear on his knuckles.

“You feel her pain,” Garrett repeated. His voice was different. The commander’s efficiency had been replaced by something rawer, something that lived in the part of Garrett Darkhowler that understood matebonds from personal experience and had watched his own mate die and knew exactly what it meant to feel a body that was not yours breaking inside your own. “To THAT degree?”

“Yes.”

Garrett’s jaw worked. His eyes moved to the blood on the table, then back to Fin. The calculation happening behind those eyes was military and personal simultaneously, a man measuring the distance between what he had just witnessed and what it implied about the woman causing it.

“And THAT was the length of her shift,” Garrett said.

“Yes.” Fin pulled a cloth from his pocket and wiped the blood from the map. “A year in silver before her first shift.”

The sentence landed on the room with the weight of a stone dropped into still water. Officers exchanged glances. Garrett’s Beta, still standing by the door, lowered his hand from the handle.

A year in silver. Every wolf in the room understood what that meant. Silver suppressed the shift, poisoned the wolf, corroded the bond between human and animal until the connection was damaged at a level that took years to repair if it repaired at all. A year of it before a first shift meant the first shift was agony. Every subsequent shift was agony. The twelve-second duration that should have been two was a wound that announced itself every time Serena’s body tried to do what every other wolf’s body did instinctively, and the woman enduring it had been enduring it in silence.

Agnes Viremont’s eyes went wide. For the first time in months, Agnes Viremont had connected the most obvious dots and it was because Fin accidentally let that detail slip. A year in silver meant she was chained. Only one kingdom in Skardos put women and children in silver and it was Viremont.

Fin clocked her reaction immediately.

His eyes moved to Agnes with the cold precision of a scope finding a target. The look was brief, narrow, carrying no warmth and no accusation and no trust. She had poisoned Serena, drugged Dexmon, and operated a spy network inside the very keep they were sitting in, and the fact that she had subsequently freed a child and helped Darkhowler fight Viremont did nothing to adjust the ledger in his mind. The ledger was open and the balance was negative.

Agnes held his gaze.

“I have no reason to tell my father anything. Let alone that,” she said flatly.

Fin held her gaze for three more seconds. The three seconds were a measurement. He was reading her the way he read treaties and troop deployments and men who sat across from him at negotiation tables, looking for the fracture line, the tell, the place where the performance ended and the person began.

He looked away without responding.

The absence of a response was its own response.

“Continue,” Fin said to Garrett, and his voice was level again, and the blood was cleaned from the map, and the meeting resumed as though the King of North Skardos had not just bled on a tactical surface because a woman miles away was learning to become a wolf.