Page 12 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

I'm working out how to bring up the flower again when the shutter blows open.

The sound is a crack of wood against stone, sharp enough to break glass if there were glass to break. My body is off the table before my mind finishes processing the noise, and the pain that detonates through my shoulder and chest is a secondary concern behind the primary one, which is that the wind didn't do this.

The latch is intact. It was opened from outside and released.

I'm between her and the window in the time it takes the cold air to reach the fire. The position is instinct, my body choosing the placement before my mind catches up, and the instinct has a name I don't examine too closely: three steps. I was three steps from my father and I was too slow. I'm less than one step from her and I won't be too slow again. Not tonight. Not for this woman who doesn't know what she is to my wolf and wouldn't accept the information if I told her.

The blizzard howls through the gap, snow driving sideways into the cottage, and the scent profile of the incoming air hits me with the efficiency of a system built for exactly this purpose.

Drakfell. At least two. Already moving away from the cottage, heading away through the storm.

They didn't attack because the weather is too bad or because there aren't enough of them or because they're scouts, not soldiers, and their job is to report back, not to engage. They tested the cottage. Checked who was inside. Found what they were looking for.

"Stay here," I tell her, and I'm already moving toward the window, fingers working the fur loose from my hips.

"What are you doing?"

"Going after them."

"You can barely stand."

"My wolf can do things my body can't."

I strip the fur and drop it on the table. No hesitation. The cold hits my skin with the force of a fist. The cold is a problem for the man, and the man is about to become faster, stronger, and better equipped to read the snow than any wounded human.

She's staring at me with an expression that contains equal parts rage and clinical assessment, and the combination is so purely Signe that I nearly laugh.

The silvery mist takes me before the laugh arrives.

The transformation is instant. One breath I'm standing naked with the blizzard pouring through the window. The next breath I'm low to the ground, four-legged, my vision flattened and my scent-processing expanded to a range that makes the human nose feel like a blunt instrument.

My wolf doesn't carry pain the same way the man does. The shoulder is wrong, stiff, the claws having done damage that even this frame can't fully compensate for, but the stiffness is manageable in a way the human version isn't. Wolves don't negotiate with injury. They work around it.

I go through the window and hit the snow at a run.

The world opens. The blizzard that's been a wall of sound from inside the cottage is, from out here, a living thing with texture and direction. My nose cuts through it the way Signe's scalpel cuts through tissue: reading the layers, sorting the information. Snow has its own scent profile, clean and mineral, and laid on top of it are the scent-trails of everything that's moved through this storm in the last hour.

Two wolves. They approached from the northwest, circled the cottage once, tested the shutter, and retreated on the same bearing. Their scent carries the particular mineral signature of Drakfell mountain territory: volcanic soil, glacier runoff, the cold stone of the passes I grew up running. Balric's wolves. My uncle's reach extending through a blizzard to find the nephew who escaped.

I follow the trail far enough to confirm the direction and the pace. They're moving fast, not lingering, heading for the northwest passes. Scouts reporting back.

The trail is already filling with snow, which means they have enough of a lead that I won't catch them without leaving the cottage undefended. Leaving the cottage undefended with Signe inside isn't a risk my wolf is willing to take.

The return is harder. The shoulder is screaming in the wolf's language, which is less articulate than the human version but more honest, and by the time I reach the cottage window I'm running on willpower rather than strength.

The silvery mist takes me in the doorway. One breath wolf, the next breath naked man, and the full weight of what my body just did lands on the reopened wounds with a clarity that drops me to one knee on the threshold. Blood runs down my chest where the deltoid suture tore. Fresh red on skin that's already mapped in old scars.

Signe is standing at the table with her suture kit in one hand and an expression I haven't seen from her before. This isn't the clinical mask or the competent healer or the woman who laughed this morning for the first time in what sounded like years. This is fury. Pure, undiluted, medical fury, and it's aimed at me with a precision that makes her scalpel look imprecise by comparison.

"If you shift again before that deltoid has sealed," she says, and her voice is so controlled it could cut glass, "I will personally ensure you can't stand long enough to try."

"Two scouts." I'm grinning through the pain because the alternative is screaming, and I've always preferred the grin. "They'll reach Balric in days if the weather holds. They know where we are."

The fury doesn't leave her face, but calculation moves behind it. She crosses to me, drops to her knees on the threshold, and presses a clean cloth against the bleeding deltoid with hands that are angry and steady and impossibly warm against my cold skin.

She doesn't say anything while she works. The silence is louder than the anger.

She re-stitches the wound. The pain is a familiar companion by now, and her hands on my chest are a better anchor than the cold and the blood and the image of Drakfell wolves circling this cottage while she worked on my wounds.