Page 47 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

I force myself to stay three steps behind instead of closing the distance. Three steps. The number catches in my ribs the way it always does, the distance I couldn't close in the Drakfell council hall.

Every muscle between my shoulders locks against the forward motion my body craves, and the opinion on the matter involves teeth.

The fortress is quieter than it should be at this hour. We pass the forge, and the hammer is falling in the same steady cadence it's maintained since the first morning I woke up in this pack's infirmary. The rhythm doesn't falter. Leif doesn't look up.

The deliberate disregard says more than attention would: a wolf who notices everything has decided that what's happening outside his forge isn't something he'll acknowledge. The hammer falls. The metal answers.

Gunnar appears at the corridor junction outside Stellan's study. The beta's face carries the controlled blankness I've learned to read as active assessment, and his positioning isn't casual. He's cleared the corridor. The wolves who would normally be stationed at the northern tower approach have been reassigned. The passage between the infirmary and Stellan's study is empty of every wolf except the three walking through it and the beta who made certain we'd walk it alone.

Gunnar meets my gaze for a fraction of a second as Signe passes him. The look holds nothing I can name and everything I need to know: he saw this coming. He warned me. The warning wasn't enough, and neither of us is surprised.

Stellan's study smells like decisions that end careers and start wars. The air carries fire banked high, the mineral bite of ink on parchment, the concentrated authority of an alpha who has held this territory through force and strategy and the absolute certainty that his judgment is the floor every other member of this pack stands on.

Stellan moves behind the desk. He doesn't sit in the chair the way other alphas sit. He occupies it the way a mountain occupies a valley: without apology, without adjustment, and without any indication that the landscape has ever contained anything else.

Iris isn't here. Whatever Stellan is about to do, he's decided it doesn't require a witness.

Signe takes the position along the wall she occupies in every formal meeting: peripheral, clinical, the healer observing from outside the hierarchy she serves. The positioning is automatic.

Her body is still performing a role her scent just disqualified her from and watching her do it puts a fist through something in my chest.

I take the position beside her. My wolf wants me in front of her, between her body and Stellan's authority, and the want is so strong my feet nearly carry me there before the man overrides the instinct. I manage to stop a half-step ahead, not fully between her and Stellan but not side-by-side either, and the compromise is the best my body will negotiate.

Stellan lets the silence sit. He's good at this. The silence in his study has weight and texture, and the weight is intentional, because Stellan uses silence the way Signe uses clinical language and I use warmth: as a tool, calibrated to produce a specific response.

Signe's omega scent is filling the room. The compound is gone, and what's replacing it carries a specificity that my wolf tracks with the single-minded focus of an animal who has already decided the question and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Stellan can smell it. I can see the alpha registering the scent in the controlled flare of his nostrils, the fraction of attention he directs toward it and then deliberately sets aside.

My wolf doesn't set it aside. My wolf is vibrating at the frequency that says mine with every breath I take in this room.

"How long?" Stellan says.

Signe answers. Her voice is the healer's voice, level and precise, carrying the authority earned through years of service that Stellan is currently reassessing.

"Since before I came to the Northern Pack. Since I was old enough to present."

The answer lands with the force of its implication. She was hiding before she walked through the gates of this fortress. She was hiding before she picked up a needle. The scope of the deception covers every day of service she's ever provided, and the formula that made it possible is older than she is.

"The formula," Stellan says.

"My family's. Refined across generations." Signe's hands are at her sides. They're still. The stillness is costing her everything she has. "My mother suppressed me when I presented. I maintained the compound myself after her instruction. The degradation that produced tonight's failure has been accelerating since sustained proximity to a compatible alpha."

She doesn't look at me when she says this. She doesn't need to. All three of us know which alpha she's referring to.

"The compound is no longer functional," she continues. "I can't restore it. The degradation is past the point of pharmaceutical intervention. What you're smelling now is permanent."

Stellan absorbs the information without visible effect, which means the effect is happening underneath where I can't see it. His gaze stays on Signe, carrying years of trust that have been retroactively complicated by a single piece of information that changes the foundation they were built on.

"Revna," he says.

"I identified her designation before anyone else in the pack, the same way I kept Iris's confidence when she needed it. I chose not to report either."

"Why?"

"Because I knew what would happen to them if I did."

The answer is the simplest thing Signe has said all night, and the simplicity strips it of every clinical defense she's been deploying since she opened the infirmary door. She didn't report Revna because she knew. She knew because she'd spent her entire life being the wolf who would have been reported, and the knowledge made the choice.

Stellan turns to me.