Page 21 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

My hand opens. Her hair slides free.

The infirmary is quiet. My breathing sounds like I've been running for days.

Signe sits back on her heels. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. The gesture is practical, efficient, and it undoes me more completely than anything that preceded it.

She's putting the tools away after a completed procedure, and the fact that she can reduce what just happened to something completed is either the most impressive display of will I've ever witnessed or a wall I'm already planning to take apart.

"That was on my terms," she says. Her voice is steady. Her left hand drifts toward the hollow of her throat before she catches it and folds it into her lap. From where I'm lying, I can still catch the faintest trace of the omega harmonic the compound should have buried by now. Whatever the suppressant lost tonight, it hasn't recovered it. "The terms don't include reciprocation."

My hand was in her hair for every second of it. My grip set the pace and the depth and she followed where I led. There's nothing about what just happened that was on her terms. We both know it. The lie is the most controlled thing she's done all night.

I let it stand. She needs the fiction the way she needs the pestle and the grinding and the steady rhythm that puts everything back in its place.

"Your terms," I say instead.

She stands. Straightens her clothing. Turns back to the worktable, where the mortar and pestle sit exactly where she put them when she moved into the fortress infirmary. Signe may have changed rooms, but apparently her instruments aren't allowed the same freedom.

The grinding begins again, measured, constant, the sound she uses to reassemble what I just dismantled.

My left hand closes into a loose fist at my side. The fist is becoming a habit, and the habit is becoming a tell. It's holding something I'm not ready to name.

She grinds. I breathe. The infirmary holds both sounds, and the silence between them is full of every word neither of us is willing to say.

What stays with me is the taste of the compound on her breath, the scent of slick I shouldn't have caught, and the memory of her hands accommodating the swelling instead of pulling away. She calls them her terms.

My wolf doesn't believe a word of it.

7

SIGNE

The scent deviation registers on a Tuesday morning. I'm grinding elder root into the fine-grain consistency that the compound requires when I catch a trace of something underneath my standard wolf musk, faint and sweet and wrong. I stop. I set down the pestle. I breathe in through my nose with the controlled precision of a clinician isolating a variable, and the trace is still there, threading beneath the botanical signature of the compound like a current running under ice.

My own scent. The omega, bleeding through.

I've been documenting my own baselines since my mother first taught me what to watch for. Temperature, scent output, hormonal markers I track through skin pH and pupil response. The suppressant's performance curve has remained within acceptable parameters for most of my adult life, with predictable fluctuations during seasonal changes and illness.

The degradation I've observed from the cottage onward has been accelerating, and the adjustments I've made to the formula's concentration have been compensating adequately. That changes now.

I pick up the pestle. I start grinding again. The rhythm is steady, the stroke even. The scent fades as the compound reasserts itself, which means the breach was temporary and responsive to activity level. A fluctuation, not a failure.

This should reassure me. It doesn't. A breach I can close with activity is a symptom at the surface. The cause is deeper. It's lying on a cot across the room with his eyes closed, one arm behind his head, wearing the particular stillness of a man who isn't sleeping and wants me to think he is.

Eirik's wounds are healing at a rate consistent with alpha physiology under adequate nutrition and minimal stress. The claw marks across his shoulder are closing cleanly. The deeper lacerations are granulating well. His temperature has normalized. His appetite is aggressive, which I file under expected recovery metrics and refuse to examine further.

He's also been pretending to sleep through every morning suppressant preparation since the night I put my mouth on him and proved exactly nothing about my capacity for professional detachment.

The grinding fills the infirmary. I adjust the compound's alpine bloodroot concentration by a quarter-measure, adding glacier moss at a ratio my mother's notes suggest is the upper boundary of safe supplementation.

The increased dosage will buy time. How much time depends on variables I can't control, the primary one being the packless alpha whose scent has been saturating my workspace since I brought him down from the mountain and whose proximity is doing to my biochemistry what a sustained fever does to tissue integrity.

The mortar sits in its usual position. The pestle moves in its usual arc. The sound is the same sound it's been since my mother first put a pestle in my hand and taught me to grind lavender for a poultice while explaining, in the measured cadence of a woman delivering a life sentence, what I was and why no one could ever know.

The sound is the same. The motion is the same. But my scent bled through this morning, and the breach means the wall is thinning in a place I can't reach with herbs.

I take the first dose dry, then measure the remainder into a clay vial and seal it with wax.

The bitterness coats my tongue and settles into the familiar chemical dampening that has textured every morning of my life from girlhood forward. The suppressant works the way it's always worked, pulling the omega into quiet submission beneath a surface of standard wolf musk, smoothing the hormonal spikes, flattening the scent profile into something unremarkable.