🗡️Chapter 04🗡️

Vordheim was not on G****e Maps.

Obviously.

I spent the first hour of my journey in the back of a bus trying anyway, zooming in and out on satellite images of the coordinates my mother had written down, watching the little blue dot hover over what looked like nothing but dense, unbroken forest. No roads. No buildings. No indication that anything lived there beyond trees and whatever wildlife was unfortunate enough to share the space.

I switched to the hand-drawn map I'd photographed from my mother's wall before I left.

That was more useful. There were landmarks. A river that bent in a particular way. A ridge. A specific intersection of roads that didn't appear on any official map but which I found eventually after two buses, a train, and a four hour ride in the cab of a truck driven by a man who asked zero questions and smelled faintly, distinctly, of wolf.

He dropped me at the edge of a forest without being asked to.

"End of the road for me," was all he said.

I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He was already looking straight ahead.

"You know what's in there," I said. Not a question.

A pause. "I know what's in there."

"And you're not going to warn me off?"

Another pause, longer this time. He had the particular stillness of someone who had lived a long time and learned which battles weren't his to fight.

"Would it work?" he asked.

I picked up my backpack and got out of the truck.

---

The forest swallowed me immediately.

That's the only word for it, swallowed. One moment I was on the gravel shoulder of a road that barely existed, and the next I was surrounded on all sides by trees so tall and dense they turned the afternoon light into something green and cathedral-dim. The temperature dropped. The sounds changed. The ordinary background noise of the human world, distant traffic, wind, birdsong, faded out and was replaced by a different kind of quiet.

A watching kind of quiet.

My wolf was wide awake. Had been since the tree line, pacing and alert and reading the air with an intensity I hadn't felt since I was a teenager, before I'd learned to keep her pressed down and quiet. I let her run now. Let her do what she was built to do. Every instinct she had was information I needed.

The territory markers started about a mile in.

I almost missed the first one,a stone half-buried in moss with markings carved into it that looked old enough to predate anything I could name. But the scent was fresh. Pack scent, heavy, the werewolf equivalent of a neon sign that said YOU ARE BEING WATCHED AND WE WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW THAT.

I kept walking.

The second marker. The third. Each one a little more prominent, a little more pointed, like whoever maintained them was turning up the volume. The forest grew denser and then, almost without transition, it didn't, it opened into something else entirely.

I stopped at the treeline and stared.

Vordheim.

I don't know what I had expected. Something hidden, maybe. Something that looked like it was trying not to be seen. Instead what spread out in front of me was a settlement that wore its existence with complete confidence, stone buildings that looked like they'd grown out of the ground rather than been built on it, wide paths between them, fire burning in iron brackets along the main thoroughfare even in daylight. It was enormous. It was old. It breathed with the particular energy of a place that had never once in its entire existence been afraid of anything approaching it from the outside.

Because nothing that approached it from the outside was a threat worth fearing.

The three wolves who appeared at the tree line were not a surprise. I had smelled them for the last ten minutes.

What surprised me was their size.

They were young, I could see that in their faces, but their bodies told a completely different story. Built like walls. The kind of muscle that didn't come from a gym but from years of shifting and running and fighting in a world that didn't forgive weakness.

They stood without any apparent coordination, no signal, no formation, just three large wolves who happened to be blocking my path in a way that felt entirely intentional.

The one in the centre looked me over once. Slow. Thorough. The kind of look that was taking inventory.

"You're alone," he said.

"Yes," I said carefully.

His eyes stayed on me. "State your purpose."

I kept my chin level. My wolf pressed forward instinctively, responding to the dominance in his posture, but I kept her in normal state. Not submissive or aggressive. Even. Like I belonged exactly as much as he did and we both knew it.

"I'm here to see Alpha Drakan," I said.

The one on the left shifted his weight almost imperceptibly. The one on the right said nothing but something in his jaw tightened.

The centre one looked at me for a long moment before he spoke.

"Alpha Drakan is dead."

The words landed like a stone dropped from height.

I heard them. Processed them. Stood completely still while my entire carefully constructed plan quietly folded in on itself like a building with its foundation pulled out.

"When," I asked. My voice came out flat and I was distantly grateful for that.

"Two months ago."

Two months.

My parents died last night.

The math assembled itself in my head with horrible mechanical clarity. If Drakan had been dead for two months he hadn't ordered my parents deaths. He couldn't have. Dead men don't send killers. Dead men don't burn down houses and rip out hearts.

Which meant either my mother had been wrong about the name...

No. My mother was not a woman who said things she wasn't certain of. Especially not with her last breath. Especially not with her eyes holding mine the way they had.

Which meant someone else had done it. Someone connected to Drakan. Someone inside this territory, inside this pack, who had either acted in his name or used his name as cover.

The real killer was somewhere in the settlement spread out behind these three wolves.

I smoothed my expression and kept my voice careful.

"And his son," I said. Like I was just filling in information rather than rebuilding an entire plan from scratch. "He holds the throne now?"

"Alpha Damir. Yes." Something shifted in the centre wolf's posture when he said the name. Not fear. Something heavier than fear, the particular weight of a man who respects something completely and without reservation. "He has ruled Vordheim for two months."

Alpha Damir.

I turned the name over in my mind and felt nothing.

Good. Nothing was useful. Nothing was a clean surface to work on.

"I'd like to speak with him," I said.

The centre wolf looked at me for a long moment. The other two stayed exactly where they were, Three large wolves with young faces and absolutely no intention of stepping aside until they decided to.

"On what grounds?" he asked.