Page 34 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"I've been not telling you something. That's different."

"It isn't different."

"It's different because I'm telling you now."

I hold her gaze. Her eyes are steady, her posture locked, her chin at the angle that means she's running assessments faster than language can carry them.

"I'm telling you," I continue, "because I can't carry it anymore, and because Balric sent wolves to this fortress yesterday and they walked through rooms where you breathe, and because every time I walk into this infirmary the dose you took that morning is thinner than the day before, and I'm done watching you swallow that compound every morning and pretend it isn't killing you."

The silence that follows is the heaviest I've ever stood in. Heavier than the silence after my father fell. Heavier than the silence in the mountains when I stopped running and realized no one was coming to help.

"You don't get to save me," she says. "I don't need saving. I've managed this since I was a girl without anyone knowing, and the fact that you know doesn't change the survival. It changes the risk."

"I'm not saving you. I'm telling you because the secret is rotting me from the inside and I can't carry it another day without it eating through."

"And what happens after you stop lying? What happens when the honest packless alpha with the omega secret sits in this infirmary every night and his biology runs the bonding assessment you can't override? What happens when Stellan asks you directly, because he will, and your face does what your face always does, which is tell the truth whether you want it to or not?"

I'm close enough to smell the dose failing on her skin. Close enough to see the pulse hammering at the base of her throat, right next to the spot her left hand covers when she thinks no one is watching.

My wolf wants to put his mouth there. My hands want to follow. The wanting is a physical pressure that has nothing to do with the argument and everything to do with the woman delivering it from a range where her compound can't hold.

"I won't tell Stellan," I say. "I won't tell anyone. The secret is yours. I'm just done pretending I don't know it."

"You can't unknow it."

"No."

"And you can't unfeel what knowing does to your biology."

"No."

"Then nothing has changed. You've just moved the lie from your mouth to mine."

She hits me.

Open-handed, across the jaw, with the precise force of a woman who has spent her entire life controlling what her body does and has just lost the ability to stop it. The crack of her palm against my face is louder than anything either of us has said, and the quiet afterward is absolute.

I don't move. I don't catch her wrist. I don't step back. The place where her palm connected is burning, and the burn has nothing to do with the impact. Her skin hit mine, omega to alpha, and my wolf doesn't understand the difference between a slap and a caress. He just knows she touched me, and the touch is lighting up every nerve path between my jaw and the base of my spine.

She stares at the hand that hit me as if it belongs to someone else. Her fingers are trembling. Her breathing has gone ragged, and the omega underneath the suppressant is pouring off her skin with a clarity that tells me the dose isn't just failing. It's gone. Whatever control she had left, she just shattered it herself.

"I deserved that," I say.

"You deserved worse." Her voice is shaking. Not with tears. With fury so compressed it's vibrating in her chest the way my wolf vibrates in mine. "You sat on my worktable and talked about flowers and forges and your father's mountain routes, and you knew. Every time I ground my formula, every time I adjusted the dose, every time I told myself the compound was holding, you were sitting there knowing it wasn't, and you said nothing."

The angrier she gets, the more her omega scent increases. Her heartbeat is driving the suppressant out of her system faster than any missed dose could, and the scent rolling off her is undercutting every word she's saying. She's telling me she doesn't need me. Her scent is screaming the opposite, and the contradiction is so raw that I have to lock my jaw against the sound my wolf is making.

"I know."

"You let me believe I was hidden."

"I know."

"That's worse than telling."

"I know."

Each answer costs me more than the last. My wolf is clawing at my throat, and the omega flooding the space between us is so thick I can feel it settling into my lungs like smoke.