Page 11 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

Signe avoids the flower in the old registry. She's looked at it more than once this morning and redirected her attention each time, and the redirection is so fast and so practiced that a less observant man would miss it entirely.

I'm not a less observant man. I'm the man who knows what that flower is, and the knowledge sits alongside the omega secret and the three steps I couldn't close and the sound of Balric's blade finding my father's throat. My fingers are tight around all of it.

She makes broth again at midday. I eat it. My body needs the protein, and refusing food from a healer is a fight I'm not foolish enough to pick. The broth is good, competent, and unremarkable in its excellence. I tell her so.

"You don't need to compliment the broth," she says without looking up from her mortar. "It's venison and root vegetables. The recipe doesn't require praise."

"Everything requires praise. That's how you know someone's paying attention."

"I don't need to know you're paying attention. I can feel you cataloging me from across the room."

The accuracy of the observation makes me grin. She's focused on the pestle, not me, but she heard the grin anyway, because her shoulders do the thing I noticed yesterday: they go up a fraction, then correct. I'm getting close. She knows it. I know she knows it.

"You do that with everyone?" I ask. "The cataloging observation. Is that standard healer practice, or do you save the surveillance commentary for wolves who are too injured to leave?"

"Standard practice. I read bodies for a living."

"Must make social gatherings exhausting."

"I don't attend social gatherings."

"That explains the hosting skills."

She doesn't look up. But a tension appears at the corner of her mouth that isn't the usual controlled line, and it takes me a beat to realize she's fighting a sound. Not anger. Not irritation.

Her jaw is set against laughter that's trying to get out, and I can see the muscles working. The effort she's putting into keeping her face still is entirely disproportionate to the joke I just made, which was, at best, middling.

"Signe."

"Be quiet."

"Are you laughing?"

"I'm absolutely not laughing."

"Your jaw says otherwise."

The sound escapes before she can stop it. Short, sharp, startled out of her the way a bird startles from a branch. She clamps down on it instantly, her mouth pressing closed, her hands tightening on the pestle.

The look on her face when the silence returns isn't composure. It's alarm. The expression of a woman who has just heard a sound she'd forgotten she could make and isn't sure whether it came from her or from someone else entirely.

I watch the alarm flicker through her eyes and settle into guarded bewilderment, and I make a decision. Quiet. Absolute. The kind that starts in the wolf and reaches the man a breath later.

Making this woman laugh is more important than making her trust me. Trust I can earn with time and consistency. But the laugh is the thing she's lost without knowing it, and the sound of it cracking through her clinical armor is the most honest thing I've heard since the last conversation I had with my father. I don't tell her any of this. I move on.

"Tell me about the flower," I say.

"Which flower?"

"The one from Drakfell territory. The one in your ledger."

"Drink your broth," she says, and the deflection is so smooth I almost admire it. Almost. But I've watched her avoid looking at that pressed flower all morning, and the avoidance has a quality that her other deflections don't carry. She's not protecting information. She's protecting hunger.

I let it go. I've got enough to carry for one morning, and I'm starting to learn that Signe gives more when she isn't being asked.

The hours pass. She grinds. I rest, or pretend to, while the wolf behind my ribs runs the omega frequency on a loop that grows louder with every hour of shared air.

The fire settles. The blizzard moans against the stone. The light through the shuttered window goes from grey to darker grey, and the cottage contracts around us as the sun drops and the fire becomes the only source of warmth.