Page 14 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

It also means other wolves. Other noses. Trained wolves who will breathe the same air she breathes and whose instincts will run the same assessment mine are running right now, subtracting the layers until they reach the frequency underneath.

My wolf makes a sound behind my ribs that isn't a growl and isn't a whine but lives somewhere between the two. The low, possessive hum of a packless alpha who has found something he didn't know he was looking for. He's already decided, without consulting the man, that the found thing isn't leaving his proximity.

My left hand closes into a loose fist at my side. The grip isn't tight, just closed, the fingers curling around something I can't name and am not ready to release.

Signe is watching her mortar. The pestle strikes the bowl in a measured rhythm. Her hands are steady.

She doesn't see it.

5

SIGNE

The blizzard breaks before dawn. By the time light reaches the cottage, I'm already packing. The oilskin pouch back in the bottom of the satchel. The records, wrapped and secured, go beneath the grinding compounds and the surgical kit the way they've always gone: present, persistent, invisible. The mortar gets emptied and wiped clean. The jars get sealed and stacked in the carrying frame.

Every motion is a completed thought, and every completed thought is a step closer to the fortress, the infirmary, the version of myself that functions in front of other wolves without cracking. The version that doesn't catch herself humming or almost laughing. The one who has never sat by a fire listening to a man describe volcanic soil and stone cairns with the reckless generosity of someone who has never learned that knowledge is supposed to be hoarded.

I secure the leather straps and test the load against my shoulders. The pressure is balanced and familiar. The frame is a thing I understand, a burden I've measured and adjusted for. Whatever has been building inside me since a wounded alpha collapsed against my door is not.

Eirik is dressed and upright, which I didn't authorize but can't prevent. I'd laid out clothing from the emergency stores I keep in the cottage: trousers, a heavy wool tunic, and boots that belonged to a patrol wolf who used the cottage years ago and left supplies behind.

The fit is wrong in ways I wasn't prepared for. The trousers sit too low on his hips, and the tunic pulls across the shoulders where his frame is broader than the original owner's, the wool straining across his chest until every breath maps the musculature underneath with more specificity than a clinical assessment. The bandages press visible ridges against the fabric.

His wounded arm moves carefully, each gesture calibrated to disguise pain rather than demonstrate its absence, and the good arm compensates with a casual strength that makes the borrowed wool look like something he's doing a favor by wearing.

"The tunic fits," he says, catching me looking. He tugs at the shoulder seam, testing, and the motion pulls the fabric taut across his torso. "If I don't breathe."

"Then don't breathe. You'll tear the sutures less."

His dangerous smile surfaces through the pain, fast and sharp.

He moves to the door, testing the crossbeam, checking the shutter braces, running through the same perimeter inventory I watched him perform last night after the silvery mist dissolved and the bleeding started again. The clay cup is still balanced on the door latch where he set it. It didn't fall. Nothing tested the door in the night.

"The cup stayed," he says, lifting it off the latch. He turns it in his fingers, giving the cup the same full, undivided attention he gives everything: herbs, wounds, questions I haven't answered, the structural integrity of my door. "Either the scouts didn't circle back or they're better at patience than I gave them credit for."

"The storm might have delayed them." I pull my hair back and begin working it into the tight braid I wear at the fortress. The motion is automatic, my fingers finding the familiar pattern without consulting my thoughts.

Loose hair belongs to the cottage. Loose hair belongs to the woman who grinds herbs at a worktable and catches herself humming and sits too close to a fire that holds two people's warmth. That woman stays here. The one who walks through the fortress gate is tighter, cleaner, contained.

"Grounded isn't gone." Eirik sets the cup on the table with a deliberateness that reads its silence as intelligence, not reassurance. "They'll have a direction. The cottage's position is fixed. When they report back, Balric will have a location and a timeline."

"Then stop cataloging information and start walking."

The mountain greets us with the particular brutality of a storm's aftermath: clear sky, vicious cold, and a silence so absolute that every footfall sounds like a declaration. The snow is knee-deep in the drifts and ankle-deep on the exposed rock, and the wind has scoured the ridgeline into a rippled surface that catches the early light and throws it back in planes of white and blue.

Above the tree line, the world opens in every direction. The peaks to the northwest hold their snow like armor, and the valley below the fortress is a pale basin still buried under the storm's deposit.

The trail down isn't a trail in any formal sense. It's the path I've worn over years of ascending and descending between the cottage and the fortress, memorized by my feet in every season, navigable in darkness and fog and weather that would turn a less familiar traveler back.

Today the path is treacherous. Ice has formed beneath the new snow where meltwater seeped through and refroze overnight, and the footing requires an attention that leaves no room for anything else.

Eirik manages the first stretch on his own, stride longer than mine, weight distribution different. He reads the snow the way I read wound margins: instinctively, from a body trained to interpret terrain.

But the claw marks in his shoulder have been reopened and re-sutured before we started, and the healing factor that should have closed the wounds by now is being spent on fighting infection and replacing blood volume.

By the time we reach the first steep descent, where the path drops between two rock faces, ice has glazed the trail until it reflects the sky. His boot slips. I catch his arm before the stumble becomes a fall.

I file the contact under necessary and medical, nothing more. His bulk transfers through my grip and into my shoulder and supporting a man larger than myself on an icy slope requires sustained, deliberate touch with no gap between intention and skin.