Page 35 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

The silence is different this time. Not the weight of unspoken truth. The place where the anger has burned through and what's left isn't composure or clinical distance or any of the defenses she's spent her life building. What's left is the woman. Just the woman, looking at me with eyes that hold nothing at all, and the absence of everything is more frightening than anything I've seen since my father's blood on a council table.

My jaw aches where she hit me. My wolf is vibrating at a frequency that has every instinct I own screaming that the omega in front of me is unguarded for the first time since I've known her. The not-touching is costing me something I can feel in my bones. My hands are shaking with the effort of keeping them at my sides.

I don't move. This is hers. My wolf is howling behind my ribs, every alpha instinct I have is demanding that I close the distance and put my hands on the omega three steps away, and the man won't let him. Not yet.

She crosses the distance in two strides and puts her mouth on mine.

The kiss is furious. It tastes like the argument and the anger and the silence. Underneath all of it, the omega, raw and bright and hitting my bloodstream with the force of something I didn't know I was starving for until the first taste landed. My cock hardens so fast the rush makes my vision blur, and the alpha in me narrows to a single, roaring imperative that has no interest in patience or restraint or the careful man I've been performing since the day she pulled me through the cottage door.

She bites my lower lip hard enough to draw blood, and the bite isn't affection. It's punishment. It's want. It's the last defense coming down because she's the one who put her hands on it and pushed.

I let her lead for exactly as long as it takes me to be certain she chose this. Then I take over.

I grip her jaw and angle her head back and kiss her deeper. My hands find her hips. I lift her, and her legs wrap around me with the reflexive precision of a wolf whose body has committed to a course of action her mind stopped fighting the moment she closed the distance. She slams against the infirmary wall, and the impact pushes the air out of her lungs in a half gasp, half snarl.

"This doesn't change anything," she says against my mouth.

"This changes everything."

"This is biology."

"This is you closing the distance and putting your mouth on mine. That isn't biology. That's a choice."

Her fingers dig into my hair. She pulls, hard enough to sting, and the pain registers in my wolf as a challenge he has no intention of losing.

I pin her wrists against the stone above her head with one hand and hold them there. The noise she makes when she can't move is the most honest thing she's said all night.

"Let go," she says.

"No."

Her pulse is hammering against my fingers where they circle her wrists. I can feel the omega spiking through her skin, the frequency so loud now it vibrates through every contact point where my body touches hers: wrists, hips, the inside of her thigh where my free hand is pushing her skirt up over skin that's fever-warm and trembling.

I don't rush. I'm not going to rush this. Every layer I strip is a wall she built, and I want her to feel each one come down.

Her underthings are simple. I pull them aside rather than off, because the impatience of it makes her breath catch, and the catch is control slipping. My fingers find her first, sliding through wet heat that has nothing to do with clinical objectivity.

She's soaked. The evidence of her wanting me is slick on my fingers. When I press two inside her, her back arches off the wall. Her wrists strain against my grip. Her mouth opens on a moan that the healer's voice has never made.

The omega frequency spikes through the contact, through the wet heat gripping my fingers. The alpha response is immediate: my blood runs hotter, my cock aches against the confines of my belt, and my wolf's focus narrows until there's nothing in the room except the omega clenching around my hand and the sounds she's making.

"Tell me this is biology," I say against her throat. My thumb finds her clit and presses, and her hips jerk. "Tell me this is a bonding assessment."

She doesn't answer. She can't. Her head is back against the stone and her thighs are shaking around my hips and her body is clenching around my fingers with a rhythmic urgency that tells me everything her clinical voice won't say.

I work her until she's gasping, until her wrists have stopped pulling against my hand and started pressing into it, until the omega rolling off her skin is so thick it coats the back of my throat with every breath.

She comes hard, clamping down on my fingers, and I watch her face while it happens. The composure dissolves. The woman underneath is completely visible, furious and desperate and beautiful in a way that the healer has never been because the healer doesn't allow this and the woman can't stop it.

I free my belt with my other hand while she's still shaking. She could move her wrists. She doesn't.

I push inside her in one long stroke that seats me to the hilt. We both stop breathing. She's tight and wet and burning around me, and every instinct my wolf has is screaming that this is the omega he chose before my conscious mind caught up. The rightness of her body around mine rewrites every priority I've carried since the day I ran from the Drakfell mountains with blood on my hands that wasn't mine. I can feel the knot biology stirring at the base of my cock, a thickness building that has no business being here this early, and I clench my jaw and force it down because knotting her against the infirmary wall the first time I'm inside her isn't how this goes. My wolf disagrees. My wolf has been disagreeing since the first bandage change.

Her legs lock around my waist. I pull back and drive into her again, and again, setting a rhythm that she fights and fails to redirect.

The fighting is the point. She pushes against me, tries to angle her hips to take the control I won't give her. Every time she adjusts I pin her harder against the wall and take her deeper. The deeper I go the louder the omega gets, until the frequency fills the room with a clarity her compound has been muting since the day I met her.

We don't make it to any surface softer than the stone wall and the cold floor when the angle changes and I take her down beneath me. I'm over her, between her thighs, and the cold stone against her back makes her arch up into me.