Page 41 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

Signe is in the infirmary when I arrive. Her scent reaches me before I cross the threshold, and it's different now than it was this morning. The suppressant is thinning again, the bitter herb smell fading at the edges. Underneath it the omega pushes toward the surface with a persistence that my body tracks the way a wolf tracks prey: automatically, completely, without any interest in permission.

I've been tasting the omega beneath the compound since the cottage. After what happened between us, the taste is richer, closer, and the compound is losing the fight to bury it.

She's suturing a gash on a wolf's forearm, the kind of shallow laceration that comes from training gone slightly wrong. Her hands are moving with the steady precision I've been watching since she first stitched my shoulder. Thread through tissue, pull, knot, cut. The rhythm is the same rhythm it's always been.

Until it isn't.

Her left hand pauses at the apex of a stitch. The thread goes taut. Her fingers hold the needle at an angle that should be automatic, and for a breath the angle doesn't resolve. Then her scent shifts.

It's subtle. The bitter herb smell that covers the omega thins for a count of two, and the thing underneath pushes through with enough force that I taste it from across the room. The patient doesn't notice. I notice. The needle finds its path and the suture closes clean. She ties off, cuts, and reaches for the dressing with the same efficiency she brings to everything.

After the patient leaves, her left hand lifts toward the bonding site before she catches it and forces it back down. She goes straight to the cabinet where she keeps the formula, pulls the mortar to the worktable, and starts grinding without looking at me.

I don't say anything. She doesn't know I saw it. The not-saying costs me more than the forge did. The forge is where I go when I can't act. This is the place where acting means crossing the room, pinning her wrists to the counter, making her look at me while I tell her that whatever is failing inside the compound she swallows every morning is failing faster than she's prepared for.

I can taste it in her scent every time the suppressant thins. The omega gets stronger by the day, and my wolf wants to answer it with every part of me that remembers what her skin tastes like under the compound.

I sit on her worktable instead. She tells me to get off her worktable. I don't.

"Balric was here," I tell her. "In the hall. In person."

Her hands still on the dressing she's folding. The stillness lasts a fraction too long before the folding resumes.

"I'm aware," she says. "I provided the medical assessment."

"And?"

"His cortisol management is exceptional. His resting output reads as genuine ease rather than controlled suppression, which makes him significantly harder to assess than the emissary." She folds another dressing. "He's more dangerous than his wolves."

"I know. He put a blade through my father at his own council table, and nobody saw it coming."

"Then you should understand why Stellan kept you out of the hall." She doesn't look up from the dressing. "You warped the stock in the forge. I can smell the scale on you from here. What would you have warped in the same room as your uncle?"

"Something that wouldn't grow back."

"Exactly." She sets the dressing down. "Stellan made the right call."

"Stellan is considering handing me back to him."

Her hands stop. The composure cracks for a fraction of a second before it reassembles, and the crack tells me more than anything she's said.

She didn't know. Gunnar didn't tell her.

"That won't happen," she says. The professional register is back, but the certainty underneath it is personal. Her scent spikes with something the compound can't bury fast enough.

She looks at me. Underneath the mask, the woman I've held is looking back.

The omega is thickening in the air between us, and she knows I'm catching it the same way she knows I caught it last time, and the time before that. The knowledge sits between us alongside the memory of what my mouth did the last time her scent got this strong.

"I'm not going anywhere," I tell her. "Balric can make his arguments. Stellan can consider them. The border can close. I'm not leaving this fortress, not without you."

"That isn't your decision," she says. Steady, measured, and the scent underneath it tells a different story.

"No. But it's what's happening."

She holds my gaze a beat longer than the distance between us permits, and the distance is small enough that I can count the pulse at her throat. The pulse contradicts everything her voice just said.

"Get off my worktable, Eirik."