Page 28 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

She needs what I know, not what I am. And the distinction gives me leverage I didn't ask for and don't know how to hold without becoming the kind of wolf who uses it on a woman whose guard is down.

"The runoff feeds a series of pools on the shelf," I say. My voice has changed, gone quieter, closer to the register I used at the cottage when I was describing the shrine and she forgot to maintain the mask. "Shallow, clear, cold enough to numb your hands. The plants grow thickest at the edges, where the minerals concentrate. My father used to say the soil at the pools looked like it had been mixed with ash."

"Volcanic mineral deposits," she says, and the precision is back, but it's running warmer than usual. "That would explain the alkalinity references in the compound variations. The old notes mention pH levels she couldn't replicate with available ingredients." She looks at me. "She couldn't replicate them because the growing conditions are specific to that shelf."

"And the shelf is in Drakfell territory. Behind Balric's wolves."

The words settle between us. The knowledge she needs lives on a mountain she can't reach, guarded by wolves who answer to the uncle who killed my father and wants me dead or delivered. The geography of the problem is simple. The politics of the problem are not.

"I need to see it," she says. Her voice is the professional one, the voice that makes requests sound like diagnoses. "The shelf. The pass. The soil. I need to see the terrain those notes describe, because they reference compounds I can't replicate without understanding the growing conditions."

The request is professional. Her eyes aren't.

The distance between us across the worktable has closed without either of us moving.

The suppressant has stopped pretending it's in control. The omega is there, the frequency my wolf has been tracking since the cottage, the one that gets louder every time she forgets to be afraid of me.

Her body has decided that the wolf sitting on her worktable belongs in her air, and my body has a list of suggestions about what to do with that information, none of which involve old ledgers.

My left hand closes into a fist at my side. The tendons pull tight, and the pressure holds whatever I'm not saying in a space small enough to carry.

She sees it this time. Her gaze drops to my closed fist, and the assessment runs the way it runs on every other part of my body she's examined: cataloging, measuring, reading the tell for what it contains.

She doesn't ask what I'm holding. She turns back to the pages, and the candle throws light across the edge of the map she's been drawing, the contours of a territory she's never visited rendered in careful handwriting that documents things she can't see.

I sit on her worktable. She doesn't tell me to leave. The distinction between permission and tolerance is one she'd insist on if I pointed it out, so I don't point it out.

In the margin of the oldest entry, my father's initial sits beside her family's handwriting. The connection between those two letters is older than either of us.

Neither of us is ready to say out loud what it means that the arrangement they started is what we're building now, at midnight, in a room that smells like alpine bloodroot and whatever her compound can no longer contain.

9

SIGNE

Idon't sleep. The candle has burned to a stub. The ledger is still open to the entry with his father's initial in the margin, and the connection between that letter and the wolf who sat on my worktable at midnight keeps turning over in my mind.

Valdi Valdisson walked the same alpine routes my grandmother documented. He carried specimens down from the Drakfell mountains to a healer he corresponded with across territory lines. The arrangement they built is the foundation I've been working from my entire career without knowing who laid the stones.

The suppressant I take at dawn tastes the same as it always does. Bitter, vegetal, the particular copper-edged astringency of alpine bloodroot ground fine and suspended in glacier moss extract. I hold it under my tongue for the standard count, swallow, and wait for the familiar settling. The chemical wall rebuilds between the omega and the world. My scent flattens to the neutral baseline I've maintained since I was old enough to understand what the alternative would cost me.

The settling takes longer than it should. I note the delay the way I note all deviations: clinically, without alarm, with the understanding that data points are only useful when they form a pattern. The pattern is forming.

I'm braiding my hair at the basin when the fortress horn sounds. Not the alarm sequence. Visitors at the gate. The distinction changes the rhythm of the fortress: guards to the walls rather than the armory, the great hall torches lit rather than the defensive positions manned. I finish the braid with steady hands, check the fall of it against my spine, and leave the infirmary with my satchel over one shoulder because a healer who arrives without her kit is a healer who isn't taken seriously.

The passage to the great hall is already busy. Wolves moving with the purposeful energy that comes from Stellan's summons, their boot-falls carrying the cadence of a pack responding to its alpha's will. I pass two patrol wolves heading for the stairs, and they nod. The healer. Trusted. Unremarkable. The nod is my camouflage, and I wear it the way I wear the braid, the neutral baseline, the composure that tells every wolf in this fortress exactly what I want them to see.

Gunnar meets me at the great hall entrance. The beta stands with his weight evenly distributed, his hands loose at his sides, his expression locked into the blankness he uses instead of tension. I've treated him enough times to read what the blankness conceals: the tightened jaw, the elevated pulse visible at his throat, the slight flattening of his mouth that means he's already decided something isn't worth trusting.

He's already scented whoever is at the gate. He doesn't like what he smelled.

"Stellan wants you in the hall," he says. "Medical assessment of the delegation."

"Delegation from where?"

"Drakfell."

The word lands with the precision of a diagnosis I've been expecting. Balric's scouts have been on the northwestern ridge for days. The patrol reports have been consistent: small teams, disciplined, maintaining distance but never retreating fully. Patience, not aggression. The territorial equivalent of sitting at the edge of another wolf's kill and watching without approaching. Patience has apparently run its course.