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He stopped walking. She felt the pause through the bond before her feet registered it, a slight pull behind her sternum. She turned.

“What?”

“You said the watching matters more.”

“It does.”

“Why?”

She stood on the gravel path with her arm pressed to her ribs, the compound settling into post-alarm quiet around them. The question sat between them. She could feel him waiting for the answer, his attention focused with the same care he brought to everything, patient without pressing.

“Because the fourth wolf wasn’t there to fight,” she said. “It was there to observe. To report back.”

“Report what?”

“How fast we moved. How well we coordinated. How easily we won.”

Chris studied her face. She watched the thought arrive behind his eyes, watched him run it forward, test it against what he knew.

He frowned. “Do you think he wanted us to win?”

Sloane shrugged. “I think we won too easily.” She pulled the shirt away from her ribs, checked the cut in the dim light from the barracks window. The bleeding had slowed. She pressed the fabric back. “That second wolf I took down barely fought. One hold on the neck and it stopped resisting. A wolf Garrett trained would have bitten through my foreleg before it quit.”

“Maybe they were uncertain, maybe they underestimated...”

“They were expendable.” She shook her head. “My father doesn’t send fighters he needs on a test run. He sends the ones he can lose. The ones who serve him better as information than as soldiers.”

Chris was still. The radio crackled again behind them, tinny in the cold air.

“He wanted to see us win quickly,” she said. “He wanted us to stand in the dirt afterward and feel strong. Tomorrow, we wake up believing we can handle whatever he sends. The day after that, we train a little less hard because last night told our bodies we’re ready.” She swallowed. “That’s the play. He gives us easy victories until we stop preparing for the real one.”

“You’re describing conditioning.”

“I’m describing my father.”

The space between them went quiet. She could hear his breathing, steady from the run, slowing now. His eyes moved across her face, reading her, and she let him because the alternative was looking away, and she was tired of looking away from the things that mattered.

“Then we train harder,” he said. “We train tomorrow like tonight was a loss.”

He held her gaze a moment longer. Then he turned toward the patrol office, his stride carrying the same even rhythm it always did, as though he hadn’t just fought four wolves at a gate with blood on his teeth.

“I’ll tell Viktor,” he said over his shoulder.

“Chris.”

He stopped.

“The report. Leave my name off the analysis. Let Viktor draw the conclusion himself. It’ll hold more weight if it comes from inside his own head.”

His mouth pulled at the corner. She saw it in the barracks light, the brief flex of muscle that preceded a smile he didn’t let finish.

“Tactical to the bone,” he said.

“Always.”

He left. She stood on the path with her arm against her ribs, watching him walk toward the patrol office, his shoulders loose, his hands in his pockets. He moved through the compound at this hour with the confidence of a man who belonged to the ground under his feet, and she envied that, the ease of it, the absence of calculation in his stride.

She went to the infirmary. Cleaned the cut herself at the sink, pulled the edges together with butterfly strips, and taped gauze over the top. Her hands were steady. Her ribs ached when she lifted her arm, a deep pull beneath the skin that told her the muscle underneath had taken more damage than the surface showed.