Page 13 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"The cottage isn't safe anymore," I tell her while she ties off the suture. "It's a known position. They'll report back, and Balric will send wolves who aren't just scouting."

"I know."

"We need to leave at first light. Regardless of the storm."

"I know that too." She secures the bandage with the same efficient competence she brings to everything, then reaches for the fur I dropped and drapes it across my shoulders.

The gesture is professional. The way her fingers brush the back of my neck is not, and the contact sends the animal behind my ribs into a register I have to actively suppress. The timing is catastrophically wrong.

She straightens and steps back, and the distance she puts between us is a clinical decision I can read as clearly as she reads wound drainage.

Too close, too long, too warm. She's aware of the same variable I'm tracking, and her version of managing it is the opposite of mine: where I want to close the gap, she widens it.

I let her have the distance. For now.

The shutter needs bracing. I wedge a piece of firewood against the frame from the inside, testing it with my good shoulder until it holds. The door gets a simple alarm: a clay cup balanced on the bar latch, positioned so that any pressure from outside will send it crashing to the stone floor. Primitive. Effective. The kind of field craft I learned running patrols in the Drakfell mountains since I was old enough to keep up with my father's stride.

My father's stride. The thought catches, and the rage that lives underneath my ribs flares hot enough to taste. I push it down because the rage isn't useful right now. The rage is for later, for the day I stand in front of Balric and make him answer for the three steps I couldn't close. Tonight, the rage is a coal I keep banked behind the grief.

When I turn back to her, Signe is at her worktable. Not grinding. Looking at the pressed flower with a face I haven't earned yet: open, unguarded, a woman studying a question she's been carrying for years and might finally be close enough to answer.

"The soil is volcanic," I say.

She goes still. "Black as char, loose on the surface, packed hard underneath."

I settle against the wall with the fur pulled around my shoulders and talk as if scouts aren't on their way to report our position to a man who wants me dead. Because that's what I do. I fill silence. I give things. And the things I have to give this woman are the mountains I grew up in, and no one has ever wanted them before.

"The flowers grow in clusters, never singly. They need the glacier runoff to germinate, and they only bloom above the snowline on northwest-facing slopes where the afternoon sun hits the ice melt. My grandmother picked them every summer. She dried them in bundles and brewed them into a tea that tasted like dirt and sadness, and she swore it could settle a pregnant wolf's stomach better than anything the pack healer had in her kit."

Signe's hands haven't moved. Her breathing has changed. Slower. Deeper.

"There's a shrine above the snowline where the oldest Drakfell wolves used to leave offerings before the pack system formalized," I continue. "Stone cairn, nothing elaborate. Someone carved a symbol into the base that my father said was older than the pack itself. A healer's mark. The folklore says a woman lived in those mountains before any alpha claimed the territory. She gathered the flowers. She knew which compounds cured and which killed. She didn't answer to any pack because packs hadn't been invented yet."

Signe turns to face me.

The mask is gone. Not dropped, not cracked, not deliberately lowered. Gone, because the woman behind it forgot to maintain it. She's leaning toward me with a mouth parted on a question she hasn't formed yet, her body language abandoning clinical distance for the pull of a mind that has just found the one thing it can't resist.

"What was the shrine made of?" she asks, and her voice is different. Quieter. Less measured. The voice of the woman underneath the healer.

"Stacked basalt. River stone at the base, mountain stone above."

"And the symbol. The healer's mark. What did it look like?"

I describe it: the curved lines, the crossed stems, the way the carving caught snow in winter and shadow in summer. She asks about the altitude. The direction of the slope. Whether the soil changed color closer to the glacier.

I give her everything I have, and the knowledge that's been sitting in my memory like furniture in a house I can't go back to finally has a home.

She wants it. Not my body or my bloodline or the territory Balric stole from me. She wants the mountains. Every ridge I've crossed, every valley I know, every place someone recorded in notes Signe has spent years trying to understand. I can see the questions building behind her eyes, faster than she can ask them, and she looks hungry for any new information.

I can smell the suppressant thinning while she talks. The omega frequency is stronger now, pushing through the compound the way heat pushes through glass: not breaking it, but making it irrelevant. The vibration along my spine is getting harder to ignore.

She's too busy being the real Signe to notice. The one who forgets to perform when she's learning. The one who is, right now, the most dangerous thing in my life, including the wolves in the mountains and the uncle who wants me dead.

Embers glow in the firepit. The wind is quieter than it was this morning, the blizzard's roar dropping to something closer to a moan, and the change in pitch means the storm is breaking.

"The passes will clear by morning," she says without looking up. "We'll go to the fortress. Stellan will need to know about the scouts."

I nod. The fortress represents safety in numbers, reinforcements, and potential allies. Stellan's authority stands between Balric’s wolves, this cottage, and a grim fate if I’m taken to Drakfell.