Page 42 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

I don't move. She doesn't make me.

Gunnar finds me in the corridor outside the infirmary after the fortress has gone quiet for the night. The beta's face is stripped of everything except the careful blankness he uses when he's delivering information he's already decided is accurate.

"The healer," he says. His voice is low enough that the stone won't carry it past the two of us. "Her scent has been off for days. I've been tracking it since the emissary's visit." He pauses. "I saw what happened when Revna's suppressant failed. The progression looks the same."

He doesn't ask what I intend to do about it. He doesn't need to. The information lands between us with the weight of a wolf who has seen this before and is telling me, without saying it, that the time I think I have is shorter than I think.

"How long?" I ask.

"I'm not the healer," Gunnar says. "But if it's following the same progression I watched before, you're looking at days."

He walks away. The corridor holds the silence where his words used to be, and in the infirmary behind the closed door, Signe is grinding compounds with steady hands and a scent that betrayed her once today and will betray her again tomorrow.

She'll adjust the dose. She'll refine the formula. She'll treat the degradation like a clinical problem she can solve with enough precision, because that's what she does. Her precision is the thing that's going to bury her. She'll be measuring ratios and adjusting concentrations right up until the moment the compound fails completely and every wolf in the fortress turns to look at her at once.

The woman who saved my life is running out of time.

She doesn't know it yet.

Three steps from my father, and I was too slow. The distance between Signe's infirmary door and Balric's diplomatic smile is longer than three steps, but not by much.

13

SIGNE

My hands are inside a wolf's mouth when the compound fails. The patient is a patrol runner who took a bad fall on the northwestern ridge and landed jaw-first on an outcrop. Compound fracture of the mandible, bone fragments displaced into the oral cavity, blood pooling faster than the packing can absorb it.

I've repacked the wound twice and I'm holding the jaw steady with both palms while I assess whether the fragment has nicked the lingual artery or if the bleeding is muscular. The answer matters more than anything else in this room, because one of those options ends with a dead wolf on my table.

The fragment hasn't nicked the artery. The blood is muscular, which means I have time, and time means sutures, and sutures mean the kind of sustained focus that narrows my awareness to the diameter of a needle and the resistance of tissue and nothing beyond it.

My hands are coated to the wrists. The candles on the shelf above the table throw uneven heat against my face. Three wolves are in the infirmary: the patient's patrol partner holding his shoulders, a young female assisting with the tray, and a senior wolf from Gunnar's rotation who brought the runner in and hasn't left.

I set the first suture. The needle bites through the displaced tissue, and I draw the thread with the steady pull that the compound fracture demands, firm enough to close and gentle enough not to tear what's already compromised. My breathing is controlled. My pulse sits at its clinical resting rate, the rhythm I've maintained through worse than this.

The second suture is when I lose it.

The stress is the trigger. Prolonged cortisol elevation on top of weeks of accumulated degradation, the same progression I've been documenting in my own baselines since the cottage, pushed past the threshold the morning's dose was calibrated to hold.

I don't feel it happen. The first indication is that the wolf holding the patient's shoulders goes rigid beneath my peripheral vision, his head turning with the involuntary precision of a predator registering a scent change he didn't expect. The second is the young female's sharp intake of breath.

The final indication is Gunnar's wolf, the senior from the rotation, taking a step toward my table.

My scent breaks through the compound and floods the infirmary. I know it before my conscious mind catches up, because my body has been tracking the suppressant's failure rate for weeks, and the part of me that measures and predicts and calibrates already knew this was coming.

The dose I took at dawn was thin when I swallowed it. I adjusted the ratio this morning, pushed the bloodroot concentration as far as the toxicity margin permits, and it wasn't enough. The cortisol spike from the surgery, the sustained proximity to three wolves, the accumulated degradation from every night Eirik's scent has been settling into the fortress air and into my skin, all of it converging on a single moment while my hands are occupied with saving a wolf's jaw.

The senior wolf takes another step. His pupils are dilated, his nostrils flared, his body orienting toward me with a focus that has nothing to do with the patient on my table and everything to do with the scent pouring off my skin.

I don't look up. I set the third suture. The needle enters. The thread pulls.

The infirmary door opens, and Eirik is across the room before the senior wolf's third step reaches the ground. I don't see all of it. I see fragments through peripheral vision because my hands are in a wolf's mouth and the suture won't set itself: Eirik's body inserting between me and the approaching wolf, his hand flat against the senior wolf's sternum, the controlled push that moves a wolf twice his age backward without violence.

His voice drops to the register I remember from the cottage, the night Drakfell scouts were circling the perimeter, quieter than a command and more absolute, something underneath language that speaks to instinct rather than the language center.

"Out."

The senior wolf doesn't argue. He backs toward the door with his eyes down. The patrol partner releases the patient's shoulders and follows without being told, his face carrying the confused deference of a wolf who doesn't understand what's happening but recognizes that the alpha in the room has decided the conversation is over.