Page 33 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

The emissary's head turning as he passed me. The instinctive pull toward something that didn't match. My formula held in the great hall, under direct scrutiny, at a distance of several strides. It didn't hold at arm's length in a narrow passage, and it won't hold tomorrow either. Not with Eirik's pine and snow embedded in the stone, the fabric, the skin of my own hands where I touched him and can still feel the warmth.

I pick up the pestle. The mortar is cold under my palm. The grinding begins again, steady and circular and familiar, and the sound fills the infirmary the way it has filled every room I've worked in. My hands are steady. My formula isn't. The distance between those two facts is closing.

10

EIRIK

I've kept the secret for sixteen days. The weight of it has settled into the space behind my sternum like a stone I swallowed and can't pass. I'm not built for secrets.

Stellan carries them like currency, spending each one at the precise moment it buys the most. Gunnar carries them like weapons, cleaned and stored and ready. I carry this one the way I carry everything: badly, loudly, with the growing certainty that the holding is doing more damage than the telling would.

She's in the infirmary when I find her. Not grinding, not organizing, not performing any of the rituals she uses to pretend she isn't waiting for me. She's standing at the window with her back to the door and her braid over one shoulder, and the omega frequency coming off her is stronger than I've ever scented.

The dose she took this morning is losing ground. I can taste the failure in the air between the doorway and her spine, and the hum my wolf has been running since the cottage is getting harder to keep behind my teeth.

I close the door behind me. The latch catches with a sound that's small and final, and it makes her turn.

"I can't keep pretending I don't know," I say.

She knows what I mean. I can see the understanding hit her body before it reaches her face.

Her spine straightens. Her chin lifts. Her left hand twitches toward her throat, toward the bonding site, and she catches the motion and kills it before her fingers reach the skin.

The mask goes on. Not the fortress version, the one she wears for the pack. The deeper one. The one I've only seen twice, both times when someone got too close to the truth she's built her entire life around hiding.

"How long?" she says, and her voice is the professional register, the healer's voice, the one that turns questions into scalpels.

"Since the cottage. Since the first bandage change, when you leaned in and your formula slipped and I caught what was underneath it."

"And what do you intend to do with that information?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing." She repeats the word back to me and strips it clean. "A packless alpha with no territory, no allies, and no political standing discovers an unbound omega, and his answer is nothing."

"My answer is nothing."

"Your biology's answer isn't nothing. I can read your cortisol from across this room. Your pupils are blown. Your respiration has increased since you walked through the door. Your body is running a bonding assessment whether your mind agrees to it or not, and the assessment will reach the same conclusion every time because alpha-omega biochemistry doesn't negotiate."

Every word lands. My jaw aches because I can feel my body doing exactly what she's describing. My wolf is locked on the omega standing across the room with her chin lifted and her mouth delivering diagnoses I can't argue with. Even angry, her mouth is the thing I can't stop looking at. Especially angry.

"You're right about the biology," I say. "You're wrong about the man."

"The man and the biology aren't separate systems. You know that. I taught you that, in this room, when I was foolish enough to think the lesson was academic."

"The lesson wasn't academic and we both know it." I take a step closer. One step. She doesn't retreat. "You put your mouth on me in this room and called it clinical. You kept me in this fortress and called it medicine. You touched me last night and didn't notice until I pointed it out. The reason you didn't notice is standing in front of you telling you he already knows."

Her nostrils flare. The tell is small, involuntary, the wolf underneath catching my scent at close range and responding before the woman can lock it down.

"I didn't tell you because I wasn't ready," I say. "Not because I was building leverage. Not because I was waiting for the right moment to use it. Because I wanted one more day of you looking at me like a patient instead of a threat, and the wanting was selfish, and I know it was selfish, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend it was anything else."

The honesty costs me. The sudden absence of the weight leaves a hollow that aches worse than the carrying did. My left hand closes at my side, the fingers curling into the loose fist that Signe reads the way she reads every other tell I can't control.

Her eyes drop to my fist before I even feel it close.

"You've been lying to me for sixteen days," she says.

I take another step. The infirmary isn't large. Two more and I'll be within arm's reach, and my body already knows which two steps it wants to take.