Page 49 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

My left fist locks hard enough to feel the bones grind. My jaw locks. My wolf goes still with the focused silence that usually precedes violence, and the violence sits right behind my teeth waiting for the permission my body won't give it.

He's testing whether I'll lose control, whether the wolf who warped stock at the forge when Balric arrived can hold his composure when the man who holds his future puts a finger on the rawest wound available.

I hold.

"I was three steps away," I say. My voice is steady. "I won't be three steps away again."

Stellan holds my gaze. Whatever he's looking for, he finds it, because his attention releases with the finality of an assessment completed and filed.

"Reclaim your territory. Secure it. Then we discuss a claiming."

The condition lands clean. He's not saying no. He's saying earn it. Build something worth taking her to before you put your teeth on her throat.

"She comes with me," I say. "When I take Drakfell back, Signe comes with me."

Stellan's expression doesn't change. "Retake the territory first. Then we'll see who goes where."

He turns back to his desk. "Gunnar will brief you on the border intelligence. The Drakfell reclamation becomes a strategic priority for this pack as of tonight." He picks up a piece of correspondence, the gesture a dismissal that carries the weight of every future conversation compressed into a single movement. "The healer's designation is pack business. It stays inside these walls until I decide otherwise."

We leave the study. The corridor is empty, and the emptiness is Gunnar's work. The stone is cold and quiet, and our footsteps echo in the space between us, Signe's measured and mine too loud because I've never learned to walk through a fortress without filling the space I'm moving through.

The forge sound reaches us from below. Leif's hammer, still falling. The constancy of it should be comforting, and it is, in the way that a heartbeat is comforting when you've just been told your chest is still intact.

We don't speak. The silence between us isn't the weighted quiet of Stellan's study or the desperate hush of the infirmary floor. It's the silence after a storm, when the wreckage is visible but the damage hasn't been measured yet.

Signe's left hand lifts.

The movement is automatic, reflexive, the gesture I've watched her repeat since before I understood what it meant. Her fingers press flat against the spot just left of the hollow of her throat, the diagonal toward the clavicle, covering the place where a claiming bite would go. She presses flat against unmarked skin the way she's been pressing flat against unmarked skin for years.

She's been guarding that place on her body for longer than she's known me. The guarding is so deep in her muscle memory that she does it walking down a corridor with a man whose mouth was on that exact patch of skin less than an hour ago. The doing is automatic. The automatic is the thing that guts me, because it means the reflex doesn't belong to anything I've done.

It belongs to the years before me. All the years she spent alone, pressing her own fingers against the place where someone else's teeth were supposed to go, holding the absence closed like a wound she was trying to keep from bleeding.

My left fist closes at my side. She doesn't see it. She's looking straight ahead, walking with the same disciplined pace she's maintained through this fortress since she became its healer.

My wolf wants to pull her fingers away from the claiming site and replace them with my mouth. Every instinct I own wants to pin her against the corridor wall and put my teeth where her hand is and make the unmarked skin a territory that belongs to me.

The wanting sits in my jaw like a held breath, and the held breath is going to cost me sleep tonight and every night until the place she's guarding carries my scent instead of her fear.

I walk beside her. I've never practiced a harder patience, because patience requires accepting that the thing I want is close enough to taste and too important to take.

The fortress settles around us. The forge hums below. The mountain holds above. The corridor stretches between where a healer and a packless alpha walk side by side through the aftermath of the worst night of her professional life.

Where she is, that's where my future starts. Reclaiming Drakfell is how I build a home worthy of her.

15

SIGNE

The next day, the forge hums through the stone beneath my feet, steady as it's been since Leif first lit it, and the fortress has settled into the particular quiet that follows a reckoning. I'm at my worktable. The pestle moves in the mortar with the rhythm I've maintained since my mother taught me the stroke, and the compound I'm grinding won't stabilize.

The formula is correct. The proportions are precise, but it doesn’t matter. The suppressant has failed. It didn’t do it all at once but in the specific, measurable increments that tell a clinician the structure is past saving.

Stellan's conditions are less than a day old. Eirik's scent is still in the infirmary air. The walk from the study to this worktable was the longest silence I've shared with another wolf, and the silence carried more weight than anything either of us said in Stellan's presence. I've been grinding almost continually, because grinding is what my hands do when my brain needs time to process a variable it can't control.

Balric doesn't negotiate. The healer who spent the last hour staring at a compound that won't stabilize should've predicted that.

The sounds reach me through the walls: the crack of wood splintering, a snarl cut short, boot strikes coming fast and wrong from the direction of the northwestern gate. The cadence isn't the measured rhythm of the patrol rotation. It's the cadence of a breach.