Page 32 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"I didn't let him do anything."

"I saw you. You dropped your guard on the left because you were thinking about the meeting instead of the fight. The bruise pattern is consistent with an undefended strike. You took this hit because your head was in the meeting and your body was in the training yard."

He looks at me over his shoulder. The angle puts his face near mine, near enough that I can see the muscle working in his jaw and the challenge sitting in his expression like a dare. "You can tell all that from a bruise."

"I can tell all that from you. You're not subtle."

"And you're touching me."

My hands go still on his skin. He's right. The examination stopped being purely clinical somewhere between reaching for him and realizing I hadn't wanted to let go. I know exactly when a healer's touch becomes something else.

Apparently knowing doesn't prevent it.

My bare fingers are pressed against the curve of his shoulder. The contact is skin to skin, and the omega underneath the suppressant is drinking the warmth like water.

I don't pull away. Pulling away would be an admission, and I don't make admissions. I press harder into the bruise instead, and the sound he makes is low and short and carries a vibration I can feel through my fingertips.

"Ice tonight," I say. "Compression tomorrow. No overhead training for three days."

"Three days."

"Two if you stop letting patrol wolves hit you because you're too busy being angry to pay attention to your own body."

"I pay plenty of attention to my body." His voice has dropped, and the drop isn't pain. It's the register he used in this room when I had my mouth on him, the one that runs along my spine and settles low. "Yours too. I pay attention to yours."

I apply the compress with steady hands. The steadiness is costing me more than it should. His skin burns under the cold cloth, and the temperature differential sends a jolt through my fingers that I catalog as thermal contrast. I know, with the honesty I reserve for diagnoses I can't lie about, that it's nothing of the kind.

"You kept me out there today," he says, and the words aren't grateful. They're proprietary. "Stellan had every reason to pull me off patrol when things started moving inside these walls. He didn't. Because you gave him a medical reason to leave me where I was."

"The opinion was accurate."

"I didn't say it wasn't." He turns on the table, fully facing me now, and the movement brings his knees against the outside of my thigh. He leaves them there. I don't step back. "I'm saying you knew exactly what Stellan would do with it."

"He asked for my medical opinion. I gave it to him."

"You gave him the one argument that would keep me out of that hall." His eyes hold mine. "You don't aim weapons for wolves who don't matter to you."

"You're my patient. All my patients matter to me."

"I'm not your patient anymore and we both know it." He holds my gaze, and the frustration from earlier has burned down to something more focused, more dangerous: the quiet intent of a predator that has stopped circling. "So what am I?"

The question sits in the air between us like a formula I don't have ingredients for. My wolf is pressing against the barrier with a steady, rhythmic insistence that matches his breathing, and the synchronization isn't accidental. My biology is locking onto his the same way it locked on in the cottage, every time he's near enough that the dose can't maintain the separation between what I am and what he can smell.

"You're a wolf with a contusion who should be icing his shoulder," I say.

He stands. The movement brings him into the space I've been maintaining between us, and the space ceases to exist. The air between us is all him. My formula doesn't register at this range.

He doesn't touch me. The restraint is worse than contact would be, because contact I could classify. The deliberate way he holds himself just outside the boundary of my skin, as if the boundary is something he's choosing to honor rather than something that keeps him out, reads as patience that has teeth.

"You're running out of reasons to keep me at arm's length," he says. "And you're running out of formula to make it stick." His gaze drops to my throat, to the spot just left of the hollow where my hand goes when the dose thins and the omega presses through. He studies it with the focused attention he gave my grandmother's ledger, the look of a wolf committing something to memory. "I can smell the difference tonight. From across the room. The suppressant might have held during time in the great hall this morning. You were lucky then, but it’s not working so well now. The variable is me."

"The variable is a narrowing hallway and hours of degradation. Don't flatter yourself."

"I'm not flattering myself. I'm reading you the way you taught me to read everyone." He steps back. The distance returns, and the return of it leaves a vacuum that fills slowly, like water pouring into the impression left by something heavy. "Pupils, pulse, scent. You gave me the vocabulary. Don't be angry that I'm using it."

He leaves. The infirmary door stays open behind him, and the hall beyond it carries the sounds of the fortress settling into its evening rhythms: boots on stone, the distant murmur of wolves in the great hall, the faint, persistent ring of Leif's hammer from the forge below.

I close the door. I stand in a room saturated with him, and the reckoning I've been deferring all day arrives with the precision of a diagnosis I can no longer avoid. The suppressant is failing faster than I can compensate. The deviations are no longer fluctuations. They are a pattern, and the trajectory ends in exposure.