Page 44 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

My eyes sting. The sensation is unfamiliar enough that I mistake it for a reaction to the surgical compound before I recognize it for what it is.

I don't cry. I can't remember the last time I cried. The suppressant doesn't manage this, not the way it manages the scent glands and the heat response. There's no compound for tears. But years of clinical discipline have built their own kind of wall, and tonight that wall is thinner than it's been since I was old enough to understand what crying costs a woman who can't afford to be seen as anything other than steady.

I wipe my hands on the surgical cloth. I wash them in the basin, the water turning pink with the patient's blood. I dry them on clean linen and stare at my fingers, and the steadiness that has defined me for my entire professional life is gone. These are a stranger's hands. They don't obey.

He's still talking. Something about a cave system in the Drakfell high passes, a specific formation where the rock changes color from grey to green where the mineral veins run through, and how his father used to take him there when he was young enough to believe the color was magic.

There’s a knock on the door—two of the guards here to take my patient back to his own quarters. They will keep an eye on him and let me know when he rouses or if there are complications. I cross the infirmary. I lift the bar and open the door.

The warriors push past Eirik, who is sitting on the floor with his back against the stone wall, his legs stretched across the corridor, his head tipped back against the rock. He looks up at me, and whatever he sees on my face makes the talking stop.

Having transferred the patient to a stretcher, they move past me, giving both Eirik and I a second look—not a sniff, but a look. They head back down the hall to the patient’s own bunk where he will be more comfortable.

I'm standing in the doorway of my own infirmary with my scent pouring off my skin, surgical blood on my sleeves, the wreckage of every clinical defense I've spent my life constructing scattered around my feet.

The wolf on the floor is looking at me with an expression I've never seen on him. Not hungry, not calculating. Something older than both, patient and absolute, the way a wolf goes still when the prey has stopped running and the chase is over and everything that comes next is inevitable.

The fury arrives without warning. It isn't directed at him. It's directed at my body for betraying me, at the suppressant for failing when I needed it to hold, at the wolves who now carry the information that will destroy me, at the years I spent building a life that crumbled in the time it took to set a suture.

The fury is hot and clean and completely free of the clinical detachment that should be managing it, because the detachment is another thing the compound was maintaining, and the compound is gone.

I pull him up by his collar and put my mouth on his.

The kiss isn't tenderness. It isn't want, although want is there underneath like a current I've been swimming against until my arms gave out. The kiss is the sound a wall makes when it comes down, and the sound is violent.

He lets me lead for the space of a breath. Then his hands are on my hips and his body is driving mine backward through the infirmary door, and the door swings shut behind us with the force of his weight pushing me into the room. My back hits the wall beside the supply cabinet, and the impact rattles jars on the shelf above us.

"Signe." My name in his mouth is a warning and a question, and the question isn't asking permission. It's asking whether I understand what happens next.

"This is a cortisol-mediated response," I tell him. My voice is clinical, precise, deployed like a scalpel against the thing happening between us. "Acute stress plus biological proximity plus suppressant failure. This doesn't mean anything except that my endocrine system is compromised and you happen to be the nearest compatible alpha."

His hand catches my jaw. The grip tilts my head back, and the position exposes my throat with a specificity that makes my omega spike hard enough to feel in my teeth. His thumb traces the line of my pulse from the hinge of my jaw to the claiming site, and the touch is slow and deliberate and unbearable.

"Keep talking," he says against my mouth, and the smile I can feel against my lips makes my stomach tighten because a smiling wolf is a wolf who already knows how this ends. "I like it when you use the long words. Means you're still fighting."

"I'm not fighting. I'm providing a clinical assessment of a biologically predictable response to..."

He kisses me hard enough to swallow the rest of the sentence. When he pulls back, the terminology has evaporated and the only word left in my mouth is his name.

His hands strip the surgical apron over my head. The ties catch in my braid and he pulls them free with a roughness that sends pins scattering across the stone floor.

My hair falls loose, and his fist closes in it the way it has before. The grip sets the angle and the pace and the depth, and the familiarity of it makes the ache between my legs sharpen into something that has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the specific wolf whose hand is in my hair.

I want him so badly my vision is blurring, and the wanting is the one thing the suppressant never touched because the suppressant operates on glandular function, not on the part of a woman that wants to be taken apart by a specific pair of hands.

He pins my wrists above my head with one hand and holds them against the cold stone while the other works my clothing open with an efficiency that tells me he's thought about this. Not fumbling. Knowing. The lacing of my bodice comes free under fingers that have learned the path, and the air hits bare skin with a cold that makes me gasp against his mouth.

His knee pushes between my thighs. The pressure is deliberate, grinding against me through the fabric, and my body responds before my mind can intercept: the slick arrives with a suddenness that levels the defenses I've spent my life constructing.

The slick spills warm and immediate, the omega's answer to the alpha's proximity, soaking through my underthings and onto his thigh with a volume that the suppressant has been holding back for years. The rush of it is involuntary, raw, the omega I've buried announcing herself without permission. My hips rock into his knee with a need that my conscious mind hasn't agreed to authorize.

The sound I make against his throat belongs to someone I've never met. It comes raw and unfiltered, stripped of the register I've spent my professional life maintaining.

"Tell me this is biology," he says. His mouth moves down the column of my throat, and the heat of his breath against the claiming site sends a contraction deep inside me that doubles me against his chest. "Tell me the compound is malfunctioning and the arousal response is glandular and the healer would have the same reaction to any compatible alpha in close proximity."

I can't answer. The clinical framework that would produce those words is offline, shorted out by the scent flooding every pathway the suppressant used to control.

"That's what I thought."