Page 20 of Curvy Sold Mate

He spent the afternoon reinforcing the eastern ward anchors. Physical work—hauling the iron stakes that held the ward crystals, driving them deeper into ground that had softened with the spring thaw, checking resonance frequencies against the calibration chart Caitlynn had updated after the boundary breach. His shoulders burned. The dirt packed under his fingernails, dark crescents he’d scrub out later.

He drove the last stake and knelt beside it, pressing his palm flat against the iron and feeling the ward pulse beneath his hand. This he understood. This followed rules.

He washed his hands at the barracks pump, changed his shirt, and went to the evening briefing with the mud still drying on his boots.

Olivia was already there.

She sat in the chair she’d claimed three days ago—second from the end, close enough to the map table to read the topographic markers, far enough from Viktor’s position to establish that her presence was professional and the proximity was incidental. Her notebook was open. The pencil was in her hair again, a detail he refused to find endearing, which was itself an admission he would need to deal with at a later time.

He began the briefing. Patrol rotation updates. Ward status on the eastern boundary. The crossing screen, which he described in operational terms stripped of the three-in-the-morning loneliness that had produced the overlay it was drawn on.

Fourteen minutes in, Olivia interrupted.

“The resupply theory assumes Marcus is moving goods north to south through the crossing,” she said. “What if it’s the other direction?”

The room shifted—the subtle recalibration of attention that happened when someone said something the ranking officer hadn’t considered. Viktor felt it move through the wolves at the table, felt their eyes travel from Olivia to him, measuring.

“Explain,” he said.

“The rations at his camp were external, you said. Outside the region. That means he has a supplier, and the supplier is using the crossing because the crossing is the only viable ford.” She pulled the notebook toward her and turned it so the table could see a rough sketch—the northern corridor, the crossing, the road network beyond. “But you’re screening for goods coming in. What if Marcus is also moving something out? Intelligence, people, whatever currency he’s using to pay the supplier. The crossing works both ways, and if his supply line is also his communication line, a moving screen gives you his logistics and his network in the same operation.”

Viktor looked at the sketch. At the annotations in the margins, a notation system she’d built for herself. At the line she’d drawn connecting the crossing to three secondary roads he hadn’t included in his analysis because his focus had been on Marcus’s inbound supply chain, and hers, apparently, had been wider.

The silence held for a four-count while he recalculated.

“The screen would need an additional element,” he said. “A fixed observation point south of the crossing, concealed, monitoring outbound traffic. That means a fifth pair and a different rotation interval.”

“I know. I drew up the modified rotation.” She flipped to the next page. “You’ll lose six hours of coverage during the changeover if you use the existing schedule, but if you stagger the fixed point’s rotation against the moving pairs, the gap closes to under a minute.”

The page was meticulous. Every shift accounted for, every stamina ceiling referenced, even Mercer’s knee factored in—she’d assigned him the fixed point, where the terrain was flat, and the watching was stationary.

She’d been working on this since the morning briefing. Maybe longer. She’d sat in the room where he presented his plan, identified the gap he’d missed, built the correction, and brought it back without announcement, without asking permission, without framing it as anything other than the work itself.

He looked at her across the table. She met his gaze and held it.

“The modified rotation is better than mine,” he said.

The words landed in the room with a weight the other wolves registered—spines straightening, glances exchanged, the quiet recognition that Viktor Hale had just said those words out loud, in front of witnesses, about someone who was not Kahn.

Olivia’s expression didn’t change. But the pencil between her fingers stilled, and she closed the notebook with a care that suggested the pages inside it had just become more valuable.

“I know,” she said.

The briefing ended. The wolves filed out. Viktor stood at the map table gathering his materials, and Olivia stood at the other end gathering hers. The room that had held eight people five minutes ago held two now, the distance between them both too far and not far enough. He folded the overlay, and she capped her pen. The silence stretched between them for excruciating minutes before she left without a word.

Viktor stood in the empty briefing room for thirty seconds after the door closed. Then he gathered the last of the reports, turned off the lamp, and walked to quarters that smelled faintly of chamomile and graphite pencil shavings. The combination sat in his chest with a warmth he couldn’t attribute to the ward work or the evening air or anything else that would have been simpler to carry.

Chapter 13 - Olivia

The infirmary ceiling had a crack she hadn’t noticed the first time, running diagonally from the overhead light to the corner above the window, thin as a pencil line. She’d been staring at it for six minutes because Caitlynn had told her not to move, and the crack was better than thinking about what was happening inside her forearm.

“Breathe,” Caitlynn said.

“If you tell me to breathe one more time, I will stop doing it out of spite.”

“I believe that completely.” Caitlynn’s fingertips hovered above the shard’s entry point, golden light pooling in her palms. The warmth of it sank through Olivia’s skin. “I’m going to start on the second anchor. This one is deeper.”

Olivia stared at the crack in the ceiling. She didn’t ask how much deeper, because asking would mean she was bracing, and bracing would mean this was something she needed to brace for. She refused to admit it.