Page 46 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

My infirmary smells like both of us and the aftermath of surgery, blood and herbs and omega and the musk of an alpha whose body just spent itself inside mine. The combination should be grotesque. It isn't. It smells like the truth of what this room has always been: the place where I keep my hands steady while everything else falls apart.

My hands aren't steady now. For the first time in my professional life, I can't make them obey.

The wolves who witnessed the failure know. Gunnar's senior, the patrol partner, the young female. By morning, the information will have reached Stellan, who will calculate. Gunnar, who already knows. The pack, which will decide what the healer's secret means for the hierarchy she's served since before most of them were born.

The compound is gone. I've been saying variations of this to myself for weeks, adjusting the formula, narrowing the margin, buying time with concentration increases that flirt with toxicity. The buying is over. What happened in this room wasn't a fluctuation. It was the wall coming down, and walls can’t always rebuild from wreckage.

Eirik turns his head against my thigh. His mouth presses against the skin above my knee, and the gesture carries no explanation I can use to file it somewhere safe.

My left hand lifts to the claiming site. The skin is warm. Unmarked.

His teeth grazed it and stopped, and the stopping is the thing I can't categorize, because every framework I have for understanding alpha behavior predicts that an alpha with an exposed omega pinned against a wall would take the bond. He didn't. He sat on cold stone and filled the silence with his dead father's singing because he knew the silence was the thing that would break me, and that giving instead of taking was the one weapon my defenses weren't built for.

Alpha protective response under bonding-adjacent stimulus, I tell myself. Territorial instinct channeled through emotional regulation. Biologically mandated caretaking behavior consistent with pre-bond attachment.

The explanations aren't holding. The part of me that spent years building frameworks for this exact situation is very, very quiet.

The forge sound reaches me through the stone. The rhythm of Leif's hammer, steady and unhurried, provides a soothing rhythm that I have come to value. It hasn’t changed—it never does.

My infirmary smells like the end of everything I've maintained since my mother first placed a suppressant on my tongue and told me to swallow, and Leif's hammer is still falling.

Eirik's breathing is evening out against my thigh. His left fist is closed on the stone beside my knee. My left hand is pressed against the claiming site.

I don't move his head from my thigh. I don't remove my fingers from his hair.

Three sharp raps on the infirmary door. The knock belongs to a wolf who doesn't ask permission to enter rooms in his own fortress and is extending the courtesy only because the bar is down and the alternative is breaking it.

Stellan.

Eirik lifts his head from my thigh. His eyes find mine, and the question in them isn't whether to answer. It's whether I'm ready for what comes after.

I stand. I straighten my clothing. I pull my hair back from my face with fingers that won't cooperate and tuck the loose strands behind my ears in a parody of the braid I've worn every day of my professional life. The mask goes on. The mask is in pieces, but I've been wearing pieces for weeks, and pieces are enough if the wolf on the other side of the door isn't looking too closely.

The problem is Stellan is always looking too closely.

14

EIRIK

Signe lifts the bar and opens the door, and the woman who steps back to let Stellan see the infirmary is wearing a mask I watched shatter less than an hour ago. The braid is gone, her silver-blonde hair tucked behind her ears in a rough approximation that wouldn't fool anyone who knows what her composure looks like when it's real. Her sleeves are rolled to hide the blood. Her chin is level.

Her scent fills the room with everything the suppressant spent years burying, and she stands in the middle of it as if the scent belongs to someone else.

Stellan doesn't cross the threshold. He stands in the corridor with the particular stillness of an alpha who is deciding how much damage has been done before he decides how much to inflict. His gaze moves from Signe to me, and the assessment lasts long enough to catalog everything worth cataloging: Signe's hair loose instead of braided, the combined scent of both of us layered over the omega saturating the air.

He reads the scene the way Signe reads a wound, with clinical precision and no wasted motion, and what he reads changes nothing in his expression because Stellan's expression doesn't change until he's ready for it to.

"My study," he says. "Both of you."

He turns and walks. He doesn't wait to see if we follow. Wolves like Stellan don't check whether the order landed. The order is gravity. You fall or you don't, and the falling isn't optional.

I look at Signe. She's already moving, her stride the measured pace I've watched carry her through this fortress since the first day I was well enough to notice how she moves through a space. The stride is the same. The woman inside it isn't.

Her omega scent rolls off her skin and trails through the corridor behind her, and the corridor notices.

Two patrol wolves at the junction ahead of us register the scent at the same moment. One goes rigid. The other drops his gaze to the floor and takes a step back against the stone wall, giving Signe passage that she doesn't acknowledge and doesn't need. The deference is reflexive, the response of wolves whose biology has identified something their conscious minds haven't caught up with.

My wolf presses against the inside of my chest with a focused urgency that has nothing to do with threat and everything to do with the omega walking three steps ahead of me. The possessive drive is immediate and absolute: she's mine, they can all smell it, and the alpha in me wants to put my body between her scent and every nose in this fortress.