Page 10 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

I meet his gaze, and for one measured breath, I consider the truth. The truth is a door I've kept locked since girlhood, and opening it for a wounded stranger whose uncle is hunting him through the mountains would be the most profoundly stupid clinical decision I've ever made.

"Drink your broth," I tell him. "And then sleep. Your body needs rest more than it needs answers."

He drinks. He doesn't sleep. His gaze stays on the pressed flower, and the questions behind his eyes are already outpacing the answers I'm willing to give.

The blizzard howls. The fire pops and settles. Somewhere in the mountains beyond my walls, wolves are hunting the man on my table, and he's looking at my grandmother's handwriting with the recognition of someone who has walked the territory those notes describe.

The broth sits in his hands.

My hands are steady around the pestle as I resume grinding, the rhythm measured, constant, the only heartbeat I've allowed this space for years.

Tonight, the grinding doesn't quite fill the room. His breathing occupies the spaces between the strikes, and the cottage, which has been mine alone for so long, holds a second rhythm that my own adjusts to accommodate without my permission.

I grind harder. The pestle obeys. The compound obeys.

My hands are steady. The steadiness is what I have.

Outside, the wind changes. The blizzard's pitch drops by a quarter tone, and I know what that means because I've weathered enough storms in this cottage to read them the way I read wound drainage. The storm is weakening. By morning, the passes will begin to clear.

He heard it too. I don't need to look. I can feel the change in his breathing from across the room.

4

EIRIK

My wolf has been trying to tell me something for two days, and I've been too busy bleeding to listen. The message isn't complicated. He doesn't do complicated. He does scent and sound and threat and hunger, and he's been running them all at full volume since Signe pulled the first stitch through my deltoid. That's when I caught a thread of something underneath the herbs and the blood and the mineral bite of this cottage's stone walls.

I filed it under irrelevant because I was busy not dying, and he filed it under important and has been circling back to it every time she gets close enough to touch. This morning, my mind catches up.

She's changing the bandage on my shoulder when it happens. Her fingers are cold and precise against the wound margin, professional to the bone. He's tracking every point of contact with the focus and patience of a scent trail: the absolute certainty that this leads somewhere worth going.

The fur has slipped again. I haven't pulled it up. She hasn't commented on it, which tells me more about her discipline than any amount of clinical terminology.

Her fingers lift the old linen, and the air between us changes.

It's faint. Buried under the comfrey and calendula from the earlier poultice, under the copper residue of my own dried blood, under the herbal compound she carries like a second skin. But my wolf doesn't care about the layers. He's been sorting them for two days, and what's left after the subtraction is a frequency as familiar as my own name.

Omega.

The word arrives without drama. My wolf has known for longer than I have, and the knowing has been sitting in the back of my skull like a low hum I mistook for the blizzard. She's omega. The healer who doubled her medication last night when she thought I was watching the fire, who can make the word "drink" sound like a clinical directive. She's omega, and she's been hiding it long enough that the hiding has become the bones of her life.

I don't say anything.

The knowing is too new and too large. I'm not ready for what it means, and I've never been a wolf who says a thing before he's ready to stand behind it.

So, I hold still while she wraps the fresh bandage. The howl in my chest goes unanswered. I let her fingers finish their work without giving her any reason to look up from the wound and see what's on my face.

My left hand closes at my side. Loose. Just the fingers curling in, holding something I can't put down.

She doesn't notice. She's counting stitches.

The morning passes in the enforced intimacy of a single room with a single fire and a woman who treats shared space like occupied territory. Every surface has a function. Every jar has a position. Every movement she makes follows a pattern so precise that I can predict where she'll be in the room at any given moment based on the time of day and the stage of her routine.

She grinds compounds at dawn. She checks the fire at first light, adds a log if it's burned past the halfway mark. She eats standing, a mouthful of dried fruit and hard bread, chewing while she works.

She takes the suppressant when she thinks I'm not watching. I'm always watching. I've seen the ritual more than once: the quick reach into the leather pouch, the small pill, the mouthful of cold water, the slight tightening of her throat as it goes down. She hides the gesture inside the ordinary rhythm of tasks, but the hiding has a specific urgency that the rest of her routine doesn't carry.

I watch these things because watching is how I survive. Not her version of watching, with clinical labels and diagnostic frameworks. I read people like terrain: how they move through a space, where they pause, what they avoid, what draws them back.