Page 50 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

My hands stop grinding. The pestle rests in the mortar.

I've heard the fortress under attack before, during Korren's war, and the sound has a texture that doesn't soften with repetition. It settles in the stone. It settles in the way the air changes when wolves start running.

I move before the assessment finishes forming. I pull triage supplies from the upper shelf, then the suture kit, the instruments my hands know without my brain's participation.

The irony of preparing to treat casualties while my own scent is the fortress's most significant vulnerability isn't lost on me. I just don't have time to appreciate the craft of it.

Gunnar's voice cuts through from somewhere below, issuing commands with the controlled efficiency of a beta who has trained for exactly this scenario. I catch fragments: northwestern gate and infirmary corridor and find the Drakfell wolf.

Find Eirik. They're here for Eirik.

My brain catalogs the tactical logic while the rest of me moves toward the infirmary door. Balric's emissary scented me during the diplomatic visit. The information he carried back would've included my position in the fortress, and a wolf with that intelligence could direct an assault straight to the infirmary wing.

A targeted extraction: breach the perimeter, reach this corridor, take Eirik before the fortress can mount a coordinated defense.

The emissary also scented something else underneath the suppressant. Whether that intelligence shaped the attack plan or merely sweetened it is a question I'll have the luxury of examining later.

I reach the infirmary door and open it.

The passage beyond is wrong. Torchlight catches movement at the far end, figures where figures shouldn't be. The scent that reaches me isn't Northern Pack. It's Drakfell. The scent carries pine resin, granite dust, and the musk of wolves who've been running hard through cold mountain air. Underneath it all, I catch the sharp tang of adrenaline that turns any enclosed space into a killing floor.

Wolves in human form materialize from the shadows. They're big, built like patrol runners, moving with the coordinated precision of a unit that's trained together. Their eyes sweep the passage and lock on the infirmary door, on the woman standing in it. Whatever the emissary reported about the healer's position was accurate enough to bring them straight to me.

The first one speaks. His voice is flat, controlled, weighted with the authority of a wolf operating under direct orders. "The Valdisson heir. Where?"

"He's not here." I deploy the measured calm that has stopped patrol wolves in their tracks and kept dying wolves still on my table. "This is a medical facility. Whatever your orders are, they don't extend to my infirmary."

The one closest to me is favoring his left knee. The one behind him is bleeding through a sleeve he thinks nobody's noticed.

My brain files these observations alongside the tactical assessment, because diagnosing doesn't stop when the diagnosis is irrelevant to my survival. The filing is so automatic it's already moved on to the third wolf's breathing rate before the conversation catches up.

The second wolf takes a step forward. His nostrils flare. The scent check is standard, the same reflexive inventory every wolf runs in a confined space. But the check lands on something the suppressant can no longer mask, and his weight redistributes from purposeful to predatory in the span of a single breath.

He scents what I am.

His lips pull back from his teeth. Recognition, not aggression, the kind that turns a healer into a commodity, that strips the title and the training and reduces everything to biology and what biology is worth on a border negotiation.

I've spent my entire adult life preparing for this exact moment, and the preparation was supposed to prevent it from happening, not equip me to survive it.

"Omega." The word is quiet, delivered with the focused attention of a wolf who's just found something more valuable than the extraction target. His gaze drops to the unmarked skin just left of the hollow of my throat. "Unbonded."

The word lands in my chest like a diagnosis I already knew was coming. Unbonded. Unclaimed. Unprotected by anything except a pharmaceutical formula that stopped working and a professional reputation that just became irrelevant.

Every compound my mother refined, every morning she sat across the worktable and said ‘swallow’, it all ends here, with a wolf looking at my neck the way buyers look at livestock.

"Balric will want to know about this," the first wolf says. The courtesy is gone. What's replaced it is worse than aggression because it has the calm focus of men doing inventory. "Bring her."

The third wolf lunges.

He doesn't reach for my arm or try to restrain me. He goes for my throat, claws extended, closing the distance between the wall and the infirmary door with the speed of a wolf who isn't planning to negotiate.

His hand comes at the exposed skin below my jaw with fingers curled to grip, to pin, to hold me against stone by the place where I breathe. The distance between those claws and my skin disappears faster than thought can build an exit.

My wolf doesn't ask. Doesn't wait for the healer to assess risk or the woman who's spent her life hiding to decide whether the mask is worth dying for. My wolf has been caged for years, patient and silent and pressed against the inside of my ribs with the contained fury of something whose patience has calcified into a kind of rage that doesn't need permission.

Claws at my throat. The mortal danger override, the one scenario my mother warned me about, sitting across the worktable with her green-stained fingers and her steady voice: 'If something threatens your life, the wolf takes over. No compound holds against it. No training, no discipline, no will. The body chooses survival, and the wolf is how the body survives.'

Silvery mist swirls around me, instant and total. The transformation takes me between one heartbeat and the next. My human form dissolves into the mist with the seamless speed of a process that's been waiting for the precise moment the cage stopped holding. My clothes absorb into the mist. The claws that were reaching for a woman's throat close on empty air, because the throat isn't there anymore, and what replaces it has teeth.