Page 43 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

Eirik puts the young female out with a hand on her shoulder and a word I don't catch. The door closes.

Through the wood, I hear him position himself in the corridor, his back against the frame, his body between the infirmary and every wolf in the fortress. He doesn't bar the door. He doesn't need to. He is the bar.

My patient is unconscious from the pain compound I administered before the first incision. The bleeding has slowed. The sutures need to be finished.

I finish them.

My hands are shaking. The tremor is fine enough that the needle work holds, because the steadiness that defines me isn't in my muscles. It's in the training that overrides what my muscles are doing.

I set the next suture and the last one. I pack the wound with a poultice that will prevent infection and reduce the swelling, wrap the jaw in the compression binding that will stabilize the fracture while the bone knits. Every step in the correct order. Every movement precise enough to pass inspection.

The patient is stable. The jaw will heal. The sutures will hold.

I set down the needle. I set down the thread. I cross the infirmary and drop the bar into its bracket. The sound of iron settling against wood is the loudest thing I've heard since the screaming stopped, since the pain compound finally took hold and the wolf on my table went from howling through a broken jaw to the silence of unconsciousness.

I brace both hands against the edge of the table and breathe.

The tremor gets worse once the work stops holding it in check. My fingers won't still against the wood. The instability shares a source with the omega scent: the biological core that the compound has been suppressing since I was old enough to understand what unsuppressed would cost me.

The core is awake. The core is loud. The core is filling this sealed room with a scent that tells every wolf within range exactly what the pack healer has been hiding for her entire professional life.

The infirmary smells like me. Not the version of me I've maintained for years, the neutral, herb-covered, unremarkable baseline that reads as beta to every nose in this fortress. This version is underneath, and it smells like heat and readiness and the omega frequency that compatible alphas can track from across a territory.

The door is barred. Eirik is on the other side.

I hear him. Not words, not yet. His breathing comes controlled and deliberate, the way I've heard him breathe when he's overriding his wolf's instincts with the human's discipline. Ceramic scrapes against stone as something is set down outside the door. His back settles against the wood. His weight redistributes as he sits down on the stone floor of the corridor outside my infirmary.

The ceramic is a mug. I can smell the valerian and chamomile through the gap beneath the door, a blend I keep in the kitchen stores for post-surgical patients.

Someone brought tea, and Eirik set it outside my door. The gesture is so precisely calibrated to a healer's recovery protocol that I almost file it under professional competence before the rest of it catches up: he knew what I needed. He arranged it. He set it down where I'd find it when I was ready, and he didn't knock or ask or make the offering conditional on anything.

Then the words start.

"My father couldn't carry a tune," he says through the wood. His voice is conversational, easy, as if we're sitting across the worktable instead of separated by a locked door and the wreckage of everything I've spent my life building. "He tried. Every morning on patrol, he'd sing. The same songs, all of them wrong. The wolves in the formation would fall out of step because they couldn't run and hold back laughter at the same time."

I don't answer. I'm standing at my table with my bloody hands braced on the edge and my omega filling the room and my professional identity disintegrating with every breath. I don't have an answer for a dead man's singing, and the bastard knows it.

He's not comforting me. He's doing something worse. He's filling the silence with himself, with the specific, disarming warmth that makes wolves lean toward him before they've decided to, and he's aiming it through a locked door at the one wolf in this fortress who built her entire life on not leaning toward anyone.

"He burned a patrol tent once," Eirik continues. "Wasn't even his tent. He was trying to start the fire for the evening meal, used too much kindling, caught the canvas. Wolves dragged him out. He was still laughing when the tent collapsed." A pause. "The patrol captain made him carry the replacement on his back for two weeks. He sang while he carried it. Badly."

My pulse is louder than his voice. I can hear it in the silence between his sentences, and the pulse carries the omega frequency through my veins the way a river carries sediment. There's no filtering it. The suppressant isn't thinning anymore. The suppressant is gone.

"The Drakfell mountains turn green in spring," he says.

The conversational ease hasn't wavered, and I want to hate him for it because I can hear the strategy underneath. Not the cold strategy of a wolf like Stellan, who calculates and maneuvers. This is worse. Eirik's strategy is just being himself at someone until their defenses stop knowing the difference between threat and warmth, and my defenses have never been built for this.

"Not the green you see in the lowlands, not the dark green of the pines below the tree line. A specific green. Bright. New. The kind that only lasts a week before the sun bleaches it, and if you're running patrol that week you can see it covering the high meadows like something spilled. My grandmother used to say the color was the mountain remembering what it felt like to be young."

My left hand lifts from the table. The movement is reflexive, older than any training I've imposed on this body, and my fingers press flat against the claiming site.

The skin is warm, unmarked, and the absence of a mark feels like a lie because unmarked isn't safety anymore. Unmarked is a countdown I've been ignoring for weeks, and the counter just reached zero in front of three wolves and a patient with a broken jaw.

Eirik isn't asking for anything. He isn't demanding. He isn't outside my door calculating the political advantage of what just happened or strategizing how to use the omega who's been hiding in the pack healer's body for years. He's sitting on cold stone and talking about his dead father's terrible singing.

The fact that he chose this over every other option available to a packless alpha who just found an exposed omega behind a locked door tells me something I'm not equipped to process right now.

If he'd demanded, I could have refused. If he'd strategized, I could have countered. I've spent my life building defenses against wolves who want something from me, and every defense I have assumes the threat arrives as force or leverage. What I don't have is a defense against a wolf who sits on a cold floor and gives me his grief as if it's something I might want to hold.