Page 19 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. The hammers find a rhythm, mine rough and eager where his is measured and precise, and the rhythm is a conversation that doesn't require words.

When I finish the piece, a crude but functional hook, he looks at it, looks at me, and hangs it on the wall next to his tools without comment.

I talk while I work. I can't help it. The mountains, the forge in Drakfell where my grandmother had her tea kettles made, the particular way mountain iron holds an edge compared to lowland stock. Leif doesn't respond. I keep talking.

Somewhere around the comparison between his anvil technique and the way my father used to gut a fish, a sound escapes him, short and rough and rusty from disuse. It takes me a moment to identify it as a laugh. The second one comes the following morning when I tell him his tongs are better organized than Stellan's war council. He doesn't agree or disagree. He just makes the sound again and goes back to hammering, and the repetition feels like an accomplishment that outweighs anything I've done with a blade.

After that, there's a fresh piece of stock in the coal bed and a set of tongs laid out at the second anvil. The invitation is Leif's version of a handshake: practical, wordless, and more binding than any oath.

Through all of this, Signe watches. I catch her watching from the corners of my awareness where my wolf lives, the part of me that never stops tracking the woman whose scent changes every time I walk into a room. She stands in the infirmary doorway while I talk to patrol wolves in the corridor. She appears at the edge of the great hall when I'm arguing with Gunnar over maps. She passes the forge while I'm working with Leif, and her stride shortens by a half step before she corrects it and moves on.

She's filing me under categories that don't fit, with measured attention and absolute refusal to name what the data is telling her. I'm becoming a permanent variable in her fortress, and the permanence is eroding her ability to treat me as something she'll eventually discharge.

My wolf likes the erosion. My wolf likes it very much.

The night she asks me to stay for a late assessment, the infirmary is quiet and the fortress has settled into the low hum of a pack at rest. The forge has gone silent. The corridors outside carry nothing but the footfalls of the night patrol, and the sound fades as the rotation moves to the eastern perimeter.

Signe pulls her stool to the side of my cot and begins the examination with the focused efficiency I've learned is her version of breathing. She checks the pulse at the wrist, palpates the suture line, and takes the temperature at the wound margin.

Then she turns her attention to something different: she tells me to breathe normally and watches my respiratory rate while making notes I can't read from this angle.

She leans closer to check my pupils, tilting my jaw toward the lamplight, and the proximity puts her scent directly in my airway. She monitors my breathing pattern as the scent lands, tracking the change, and notes the pupil response without commenting on it. Her fingers are cold and steady, and every point of contact registers in my wolf's awareness with a clarity that makes it difficult to hold still.

"I need to discuss bonding biology with you," she says, and her tone is the same tone she'd use to discuss wound drainage protocols. "You know the basics. I need to make sure you understand the risks specific to a packless alpha with elevated hormonal output."

"You're giving me the bonding talk."

"I'm clarifying stakes." She doesn't look up from the suture line. "A packless alpha without a pack bond to distribute the hormonal load accelerates scent-bonding faster than you'd expect. A bite at the bonding site," her fingers hover near the left side of her own throat without touching, "is irreversible."

I watch her fingers. She catches herself and drops her hand.

"I know where the bonding site is, Signe."

"Then you understand the risk." She returns to the suture line. "Heat produces pheromone levels and" she pauses, the pause so brief a less attentive man would miss it, "slick that a compatible alpha would find impossible to resist. Do you have questions?"

"Just one." I wait until she looks up. "Are you telling me this as my healer, or as a warning?"

She doesn't answer immediately. Instead she leans closer, fingers pressing against the pulse point at my throat, ostensibly checking the rhythm against her baseline readings. Her face is near enough that I can count the fine lines at the corners of her mouth, the ones she earned through years of holding an expression still. Her scent fills the narrowing space between us, herb-and-mineral layered over something warmer that the compound can't quite bury at this proximity.

"Your pulse is elevated," she says.

"You're very close."

"I'm assessing your baseline scent threshold. Hold still."

"My baseline is fine. Your pupils are dilated."

Her fingers freeze on my throat. The pause lasts the length of a single heartbeat, and in that heartbeat my wolf stops tracking her as a healer and starts tracking her as the only thing in this room that matters.

"So are yours," she says.

The words are clinical. The voice isn't. Somewhere between 'your pupils' and 'so are yours,' the healer's mask slipped a fraction. What I can hear underneath is the woman from the cottage, the one whose laugh escaped before she could catch it, the one who leaned toward me when I described the shrines and forgot to be afraid.

I don't move. My hands stay flat on the cot. My wolf is screaming at me to close the distance, to put my mouth against the hollow of her throat where a bite would send the taste of her straight through my brainstem and into every nerve I own.

I hold still because taking is easy and I've never wanted easy from her. My wolf understands the calculation even when the rest of me is shaking with the effort: a woman who comes to you is a woman who chose you, and a woman who chose you doesn't spend the morning after rebuilding walls. The restraint isn't kindness. It's the predatory patience of a wolf who wants more than what force would give him.

She watches my hands. Sees them flat, open, not reaching.