Page 18 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"The deltoid is closing because I sutured it. Twice. You're welcome." She looks at the bread in my hand. "You went to the kitchens."

"I was hungry."

"You could have asked."

"I didn't want to interrupt your grinding. You seemed occupied."

Her jaw sets. "If those sutures tear because you decided the fortress needed your personality more than your patience, I won't resew them. I'll let you heal crooked, and you can spend the rest of your life with a shoulder that clicks when it rains."

"You wouldn't let me heal crooked. It would offend your professional standards."

"Don't test that theory."

She turns and walks back toward the infirmary, her spine straight and her stride carrying the authority of someone who has just been proven right about something she didn't want to be right about. Her patient is going to be a problem.

She's not wrong. I'm going to be the worst kind of problem. The kind that makes her laugh.

Gunnar, the pack’s beta, finds me in the corridor outside the armory once the deltoid lets me walk without wincing. Stellan's beta is built from different materials than I am, denser, quieter, every motion calculated to communicate that the force behind it is being rationed rather than spent. He looks at me the way a man looks at a weapon he didn't order and isn't sure he wants.

"You've been talking to my patrol wolves."

"They've been talking to me. There's a difference."

"The difference is irrelevant. The result is the same." He folds his arms. The posture isn't a threat. It's a perimeter. "Your perimeter route observations. You shared them with Keld at the eastern gate."

"The eastern approach has a blind spot at the ravine. The rotation interval is too wide to catch anything moving through it at speed. Keld agreed."

"Keld is a sentry, not a strategist. If you have observations about border defense, you bring them to me."

"I'm bringing them to you now."

The silence that follows has the quality of a man reassessing a variable he'd already categorized. Gunnar studies me with the flat attention of a wolf who has survived by being right about people, and the assessment lasts long enough that a less confident man would look away.

I don't look away. I grin instead, because grinning at a wolf who's deciding whether to tolerate me is exactly the kind of reckless thing my father would have told me not to do, and my father isn't here to tell me anymore.

"The ravine approach," Gunnar says. "Show me."

We spend the afternoon walking the eastern perimeter. By the time we reach the northern ridge, I've told him more about mountain patrol tactics than he's asked for, and he's told me more about the fortress's defensive structure than he intended.

The argument about rotation intervals starts civil, turns heated, and ends with both of us standing in the snow pointing at terrain features and talking over each other. He's wrong about the northern approach. I'm wrong about the watchtower coverage. Neither of us says so.

By the time we walk back to the fortress, the tension has changed shape. Not friendship. Not trust. The grudging recognition that we're better at our jobs when we argue with each other than when we don't.

I meet Iris in the great hall. Stellan's mate is younger than I expected, with a directness that suggests she was underestimated once and has no intention of allowing it again. She watches me with the cool evaluation of someone calculating whether I'm an asset or a liability, and the patience to wait before deciding.

She asks me about the Drakfell mountains. Not the politics, not the pack, not the coup. The mountains. The terrain, the wildlife, the snowline.

The questions are specific enough that I recognize another wolf who reads landscapes, and the recognition earns her my first honest answer in the fortress.

"The mountains are the only thing worth going back for," I tell her.

She studies me for a long moment. "You sound like Stellan when he talks about this fortress." She doesn't say whether that's a recommendation. She doesn't need to.

I find the forge by following the sound. The forge sits at the base of the western tower, and the rhythmic clang of the hammer carries through the stone the way a pulse carries through a body.

Leif, the young blacksmith, doesn't look up when I appear in his doorway. He's drawing out a piece of flat stock on the anvil, his weight balanced on both feet with practiced ease. His arms are knotted rope. His face has finished with pretense.

I watch him work for the time it takes to shape the edge. Then I pick up a hammer from the wall, find a position at the second anvil that doesn't interfere with his swing, and start working a piece of scrap stock that's been sitting in the coal bed.