Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 99: Huntsmen Knowledge

~LYRA’S POV~

His name was Callum.

Eren gave me that before we went in, one of the things Cade had managed to extract in the first round of processing. His twin was the one who’d run, which meant Callum was half a weapon without a partner, and I wasn’t sure whether that was making this harder for him or easier.

I went in with Eren and without Ryland. Not because Ryland wasn’t capable of this kind of conversation, he was, but because the Alpha presence in an interrogation room could shift the dynamic toward confrontation in ways that weren’t useful when what I needed was information rather than submission. Eren understood how to be present without pressing, which was what this required.

Callum was sitting in the corner of the cell on the floor, not huddled, nothing defeated in the posture. Just sitting with his back against the wall, legs extended, in the particular relaxed way of someone who’d been taught to conserve energy in any situation. He looked up when we came in.

Early twenties. He could have been anyone. That was the first thing I noticed, not the silver-edged training, not the mission, not any of the things I’d associated with the Huntsmen. Just a young man in his early twenties with his twin somewhere outside these walls and no visible indication that any of this had broken anything in him.

I pulled the chair to face him and sat.

"Callum," I said.

He looked at me. "You’re going to try to get information."

"I’m going to have a conversation," I said. "You can decide how much of it is information."

He considered that for a moment. Then he settled back slightly, which I read as the opening it probably was. "Fine," he said. "Ask."

"The original Moonborn," I said. "The one your founders were responding to. What do you know about her?"

He didn’t hesitate. "The pack raid. The town that was destroyed. The twin sisters and the gift they gave to their brothers." He said it the way you recited something you’d learned young, the rhythm of it was practised, not recalled. "That’s the founding. Everyone in the Silverhand knows the founding."

"What’s her name?"

A pause. "I don’t know her name."

"Which pack was it?"

Another pause, shorter. "I don’t know that either."

I looked at him. "You know the founding story but not the specific facts."

"We know what happened," he said. "The name and the pack weren’t..." He stopped. Thought about it. "They weren’t considered important to the mission. The mission is the same regardless of who specifically did it."

"Who told you the mission didn’t change based on who did it?"

He met my eyes. "Everyone who taught me anything."

Eren was standing slightly behind me and to the side, quiet, present without intruding. I could feel him tracking the conversation with the particular focused attention he brought to things he considered analytically significant.

"You don’t hate wolves," I said. It wasn’t an accusation. I’d been watching him since we sat down and the thing that was absent was the thing I’d expected to find. No contempt in how he looked at me, no heat, no disgust. "I expected hatred. What I’m seeing is something else."

He was quiet for a moment. "Hate is inefficient," he said finally. "We were taught that. You can hate something and still hesitate in the moment. Hatred is personal. The mission isn’t personal."

"What is it?"

"Prevention," he said. "That’s how it was explained to me. We prevent what happened to the town from happening anywhere else. We prevent the wolf ascendancy from reaching the point where another Moonborn does what the last one did." He said it cleanly, without embellishment. "That’s all it is."

I looked at him. At the young face, the certainty in it, the particular absence of the doubt that I’d been looking for and hadn’t found yet.

"You think I’m the same as her," I said. "As the Moonborn who destroyed the town."

He considered the question carefully. "I think you’re the same kind of thing," he said. Not cruelly. Not with satisfaction. With the specific measured tone of someone giving an honest answer they’d thought through. "I don’t know you personally. I know what Moonborns are capable of. I know what the last one did."

"What if you’re wrong?" I said. "About me specifically?"

He held my gaze. "What if I’m not?"

We went back and forth for a long time after that. I asked and he answered, and he asked and I answered, because when someone offers honest engagement you either meet it or you end the conversation, and I wasn’t ready to end the conversation. He knew the broad shape of the history without the specific facts. He knew the mechanics of what the Silverhand had been built to do without knowing the name of the person who’d caused it. He’d been given the mission the way other children were given trades, thoroughly, early, and without any expectation that the underlying premises would ever need to be questioned.

The premises had never been questioned because he’d never been given the space to question them, and the certainty he carried was the certainty of someone who had never been offered an alternative.

I didn’t break him. I hadn’t expected to and I hadn’t tried to. That wasn’t what this was.

When I stood up to leave, he said: "You’re not what I expected."

I turned and looked at him.

"What did you expect?" I said.

He thought about it. The particular honest pause of someone who was going to give a real answer rather than a safe one. "Someone who already knew what she was capable of doing," he said. "Fully. Someone who had already decided what she was going to use it for." He met my gaze steadily. "You still don’t know, completely. What you’re capable of. What you might do." He paused. "That either makes you safer than the last one. Or it makes you considerably more dangerous than us."

I held his gaze for a moment.

Then I walked out.

—

Eren fell into step beside me in the corridor. We walked without speaking for a few seconds, which was the particular kind of silence he used when he was deciding whether to say the thing he was already thinking.

"That was useful," he said finally. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

"In what way?" I said.

"His certainty has a crack in it." He walked steadily beside me, not looking at me, which meant he was still processing while talking. "He’s not performatively committed the way the others have been. He’s genuinely committed, but the commitment is based on premises he accepted rather than premises he verified. And he knows the difference between accepted and verified, which means the crack has always been there. Nobody’s ever used it."

"Can we use it?" I said.

He paused. The specific pause of someone who had already considered the question and was deciding how much of the consideration to share. "Possibly," he said. "Not yet. He needs time with the crack before the crack becomes a question he’s asking himself rather than one we’re asking him." He glanced at me. "But possibly."

I filed that away.

—

Eren was still in the corridor talking with Cade about the interrogation notes when the guard came.

He came fast, not running, but the specifically urgent walk of someone who had trained to control their response in situations that required control and was fighting that training. He was looking for me specifically, and when he found me his face had the quality I’d been seeing too often lately, the quality of news that needed to be delivered before the person delivering it had time to process it.

"The prisoners," he said.

I looked at him.

"All three of them," he said. "Found them on the floor about twenty minutes ago. Unconscious. Not attacked, nothing disturbed in the cell, no signs of forced entry, the guards heard nothing at all." He paused. "They’re breathing. Mira says they’re going to wake up. But there’s a mark."

"What kind of mark?" freёwebnovel.com

He held up his own palm, an involuntary gesture, demonstrating the location. "Burned into the skin. Each of them. Same mark. Silver-coloured, like silver was used but there’s no silver present." He looked at me steadily. "Same on all three. Whoever it was, they reached all three in the same moment."

I stood in the corridor and looked at him.

Someone had reached three separate prisoners through locked iron doors without the guards hearing anything, burned a matching mark into each of their palms simultaneously, and left them unconscious on the floor.

And we didn’t know who. Or how. Or what the mark meant.

"Get Eren," I said. "Now."