All the colour has drained from the jailor's face, his legs scrambling desperately, kicking against the cell-bars and creating a harsh, metallic bang. 

The Wolf in Quinn screams at him, begging for blood. 

Desperate to sink its fangs into the stranger's jugular, bite down until he heard the crack of bone and the mouse in his grip fell limp. 

Pleads with him to dominate the weaker creature, as was his right. 

It's what his parents would have demanded he do. 

And it is that thought that looses his grip, the jailor hitting the floor like a dropped rock. 

The moment his boots have met the stone, he is scrambling to his feet again. Lurching upright as through dragged by a fishing line, the fury blazing through the stranger in an instant. 

Had Quinn been kindling, he too would have been caught in the blaze. 

But he withstands the heat of the glare without buckling beneath it. 

The jailor reaches down, and for a moment Quinn thinks he is going for his blade, but he doesn't. Instead, he pulls up the cuff of his shirt, ever so slightly. Presses three fingertips to the patch of inked skin there. 

Still Quinn cannot quite decipher what the ink is meant to depict. 

It only takes a moment, however, for the sound of boots to start pummelling down the stairs once again. The door bursts open with a crack of wood against stone, and half a dozen more guards pool into the room, like water bursting through a cracked dam. 

The metal groans again as the cell-door is unlocked, yanked open. It is Quinn, not the Wolf, who allows them to open the gate to his den, and flood through the gap reaching for him.

Hands are on him, snatching at his clothes his skin, dragging him.

He has to suffocate the snarl that pulls from his lips, allows himself to go limp under the grip as they pull him from the cell. He barely notices the plethora of kicks and blows they deal him as they drag him into a smaller, isolated cell several metres further from the others. 

This one is windowless, the stench of urine and ammonia driving deep into his soul. 

This is a place he recognises in the pits of his soul, isolation. 

Only when the door is slammed shut again, the safety of metal bars separating them from the danger, does the tide of guards turn for him again. 

A sea of cackling faces, proud of their work, watching the wolf imprisoned. 

"You can't say I didn't warn you," the jailor is speaking again. Adjusting the lapels of his shirt, doing a poor job of hiding the embarrassment that clings to his skin like a shadow. 

Like he hadn't required a small army to deal with the Wolf. 

Quinn does not deign to provide the stranger with a response, watching the man with the half-lidded gaze of a cornered predator. 

When he realises he will not be getting a response, the jailor grunts. Nodding to the throng of guards who disperse wordlessly, with mutters that brings a slight crack of a smile to Quinn's features. 

"I'm sorry," he breathes into the quiet, his head ducked to his chest. 

"If it wasn't you, it would have been me," Astor's voice offers quiet reassurance, a certain bloodthirstiness lacing his soft tone. 

Like if he'd been given half the chance, he would have torn the jailor's jugular out with only his bare hands.

Quinn paces, short quick circles, in the confinements of his cell. Trying to force his breaths into a steadier rhythm, but the heat in his chest is such that he feels like he could breathe fire in those moments.

And only one, short sentence is enough to extinguish the blaze.

"What's with the tattoo?" 

It might have been nothing more than curiosity, possibly even some tradition among the fae he simply hadn't noticed on the others. He isn't sure what he is hoping for in asking.

But in the silence that follows, Quinn realises it might well be something more.

A silence, a tension he could have sliced clean through with only his own hands.

He cannot see the exchange of glances, but he can taste the tension of it on the air. A scrambling of emotion, mostly panic.

"What tattoo?" It is Maia's voice, for even at this distance Quinn can hear the other man trembling on the spot. The rattle of his bones as Astor tries to keep himself still, but the curiosity in the fae male was like a caged snake. 

The Wolf ceases in his pacing, so suddenly it is like his muscles have been pulled taut all at once. With a dancer's grace, he turns for the cell bars again, hesitant before answering quietly. 

"I couldn't catch enough of it to see," he rocks back on his heels, head in his hand. Trying to re-imagine what fleeting image he had managed to catch. "It didn't look like anything more than a scrawl of ink on the right hand..." 

He lets out a frustrated hiss, "Black, at first I thought he'd smudged his hand across fresh ink but it looked more purposeful than that... but still messy, a rushed job." 

The fae didn't strike the wolf as a people who would get drunk to the point of obliviousness, and seek out the nearest tattoo parlour. 

Which only lead to the question of why had it been such a rush job?

The reaction he can smell from the others is like he has dropped an unpinned grenade into the room, and they are trying to track down the ticking before it is too late. 

"Did..." Astor swallows his own eagerness, choking down his fear too. "Did it look in anyway like a dragon... open jaws, razor sharp... tendrils?"

It didn't help that even Astor didn't seem entirely sure what he was trying to describe. 

Astor's eyes dance about the prison, hoping to spot their captor and chop his hand clean clean from the wrist-joint. Examine it for himself. 

But the jailor has busied himself elsewhere, Quinn can hear the faint rustling of paper in the distance, some twenty metres away from their cells. 

Quinn's eyes narrow, as though trying to manifest more of the wrist to see more of the strange tattoo. But it stays painfully out of sight. 

"I don't know," his words come pained. 

It might have been a dragon, as much as it might well have been a bird, a beautiful flower, or the jailor's most recent regrettable one night-stand. 

The Wolf simply was not sure. 

Being wrong might well mean condemning an innocent man to die.

And though he by no means the jailor's biggest fan, something in the Wolf's bones told him this ran far further than just that. 

Then something else flickers into his mind, like a candle igniting in the depths of the dark. He swallows and offers quietly into the nothing. 

"He didn't have to call for help... when I grabbed him, all he did was touch that wrist and the others came running." 

The silence takes him in a death-hold, throttles him. 

And he can't breathe again until someone finally does him the courtesy of breaking it. 

Astor's snarl is a rabid beast that rips clean through his lungs, the following rattle of metal can only be the young fae male hurling himself at the bars. As though willpower alone could take him to the opposite side of them.

From the resulting groan, all it seems to have gained the man is a bruised set of ribs. 

The commotion is enough to draw the attention of the jailor again, his booming shout echoing through the jail. The thunder of it does nothing to deter the trio, only strengthen their efforts.

There comes a throng of further metallic clattering, then comes Maia's frustrated chastising.

Only silence follows in the next heartbeats, and the Wolf pushes as close to the bars as he can. Trying to catch sight of his companions in the distance, but they are only just out of his sight.

But their is mourning on the air, the taste of it a thing that freezes the blood in his veins.

"What does it mean?" His keeps his voice only just at the level needed to be heard, helped none by the slight tremble of it. "If the tattoo was a dragon?"

Maia's voice is gentler, the melody of it the lark's morning song. "It's old magic... and there's not much left of it these days as is," there is a shuffling of boots on cold stone. 

The fear on the air a thing that gets the wolf's heart pounding, in anticipation of the chase. Quinn has to bite down the instinct, hold it firm and reigned in his chest. 

"And the only reason its stuck around so long because its dark magic, one of Court Draco's many tricks." 

Something ignites at those words, cool dread enclosing its jaws around him until its all he knows. Even knew to these lands, he knew none of this could be good.

"I..." he hesitates, digesting what he's heard, turning it through the gears of his mind. "What does any of this mean?" His honesty feels like stupidity, but silence might well explode that fury inside his chest. 

"We may have just lead our Queen straight into the jaws of death."