Page 27 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

The irritation holds for another breath, and then her jaw unclenches: not the mask dropping, not the professional distance collapsing, but the woman behind it deciding that the information is worth the cost of the wolf sitting on her furniture.

Her attention goes back to the ledger. I look at what she's been building.

The ledger is open to a page I haven't seen before. The tight, precise script I remember from the cottage, with a notation that makes me go still.

Root structure consistent with alpine specimens documented in prior entry. V. confirms seasonal availability. Second harvest attempted, unsuccessful. Altitude insufficient. V. advises higher approach via the northeastern pass above the glacier field.

"V.," I say.

She doesn't look up. "The initial appears throughout the older entries. My grandmother had a contact in the Drakfell mountains who provided specimens and location data. She never recorded the full name."

My throat tightens. The room contracts. "Valdi," I say, and my voice sounds wrong in my own ears, stripped down to something that the forge couldn't reach. "V. is my father."

Signe looks up, and the diagnostic focus she brings to everything is there, but it's layered over a response I haven't seen from her before. Not sympathy but recognition. The look of someone who has just discovered that the gap in her records and the gap in my life share the same shape.

"Your father provided my grandmother with alpine specimens," she says. The words are careful, measured. But her hands have gone still on the pages, and the stillness is its own kind of tell. "The entries span what looks like several seasons. The language suggests an established arrangement, not a single transaction."

"My father knew every plant on that mountain," I say, and the past tense costs me. "He carried specimens down for any healer who asked. He didn't know what half of it did. He just knew where it grew and who needed it."

"Your grandmother was the healer?"

"My grandmother made tea that tasted like dirt and brewed poultices that smelled worse, and she died when I was a boy. The pack healer after her didn't have the same interest in the mountain plants."

I lean forward, close enough now that the pages are between us and the candle throws both our shadows against the stone wall.

"But my father kept walking the old routes. He said the mountains remembered the arrangement even if the wolves forgot. He'd leave from the hunting lodge above the snowline, follow the path to the pass, and come back with bundles he couldn't name wrapped in oilcloth."

My left hand closes at my side. The grief tightens around my father's name the way it tightens every time I say it, and the fist holds the shape of what I can't put into words.

Signe doesn't notice. Her fingertip traces the entry the way her hand moves to her throat when she forgets to intercept it. She's too absorbed in the connection between her family's records and the Drakfell mountains to read the tell I'm giving her for free.

Her fingers move to the next page. More of the old handwriting, more notations, more references to V and the specimens he provided. The entries are precise, botanical, the observations of a healer cataloging what a mountain wolf carried down from territory she couldn't visit herself.

But between the data points, I catch familiarity. The way V's observations are referenced carries the respect of a professional addressing a peer, not a supplier.

"They knew each other well," I say.

"The entries suggest a sustained correspondence," Signe says, and the measured framing can't quite hide the fact that she's recognizing the dynamic between her family's healer and my father for what it looks like from this angle: exactly like us.

She leans closer to the page, and the movement puts her inside the radius where the suppressant stops mattering and the omega starts.

Every instinct I own surges, and I grip the edge of the worktable hard enough that the wood creaks under my palm. The sound doesn't register. She's too far inside the old handwriting to hear wood protesting.

"The northeastern pass," she says, her voice different now, the precision giving way to the focused hunger I saw at the cottage when I described the shrine. "Above the glacier field. Is it passable?"

"In summer. The snow clears by midsummer, and there's a traverse along the ridge that leads to a shelf above the tree line. My father took me there when I was old enough to keep up. The soil changes color at that altitude, darker, almost charcoal. Things grow up there that don't grow anywhere else."

"What things?"

"Plants I don't have names for. My grandmother might have. Yours clearly did." I tap the page. "She was getting her specimens from that shelf. He was carrying them down."

"What about the water sources? The notation mentions glacier runoff, but the drainage pattern would affect the soil composition. A northwest-facing slope above a glacier would have different mineral content than the surrounding terrain."

She asks me questions about dirt. Questions about dirt with the focused intensity of a wolf tracking prey. The realization that settles into my chest is unfamiliar, unsettling, and more dangerous than the wanting.

No one has ever needed this from me. My bloodline, yes. My authority, my body, my claim to Drakfell territory. Wolves have needed the alpha heir, the political asset, the packless liability that Stellan weighs against Balric's pressure every time the patrol reports come in.

But no one has ever needed the inside of my memory. The color of the soil on a mountain shelf. The direction the water runs in midsummer. The particular quality of light when the glacier fields catch the afternoon sun and throw it back against the stone.