Page 53 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

The realization comes cleanly.

I don't want to grind another batch or rebuild the wall or return to the woman who survived by making herself unreadable.

But wanting the wall gone isn't the same as knowing how to stand in the open space it leaves behind.

I need air. I need distance.

I need somewhere no one is looking at me and knowing.

So I run.

16

EIRIK

She runs. I watch her from the corridor where Gunnar's wolves haul the last of the Drakfell prisoners toward the cells, and I watch the way a wolf watches something it can't chase, with every muscle locked against the forward motion its body craves. Every instinct I own demands that I go after her

I don't.

Someone gets a cloak around her shoulders before she reaches the great hall. She catches the edges together without breaking stride and keeps going, through the hall, out the gate, and onto the mountain trail above the tree line.

No one tries to stop her. Neither do I.

They wouldn't dare. The woman who just cleared a corridor in wolf form with surgical precision has earned the kind of passage that doesn't require asking.

She's spent years making sure no wolf could know what she was. Now every wolf in this fortress knows the moment she passes him.

If she needs a mountain between herself and all those noses, I can give her that.

For now.

Gunnar catches my arm before I follow. "Balric's attack force is in our cells, but that doesn't mean the ridge is clear." His voice carries the flat urgency of a beta who has just repelled an incursion from that direction. "She's heading toward Drakfell territory, alone, producing a scent that every wolf within range can track."

"I know."

"Then stop her."

"You've met her." I pull free. "If she's going, I'm going. And anything between here and that cottage that catches her scent is going to have to come through me first."

Every instinct I carry wants to close the distance between her body and mine before she reaches the cottage. The man overrides the wolf, the way the man has been overriding the wolf since the day I collapsed against her door. The override costs more tonight than it ever has. The cost shows in my stride: too long, too fast, eating the mountain trail with the urgency of a body that knows patience is the right choice and hates it.

The urgency isn't only about the woman. It's about the exposed ridge above the tree line where Balric's scouts were running days ago, and the omega scent she's trailing behind her like a signal fire.

The cottage sits in the fold of the ridge the way it sat the night I bled against its door, the stone walls dark against the snow. Smoke is already threading from the chimney, which means she lit the fire before anything else, which means her hands were steady enough for flint and steel, which means whatever's breaking inside her hasn't reached her fingers yet.

I stop at the door. I don't knock. I open it.

The cottage smells the way it smelled the first night. Dried herbs from the ceiling beams, the mineral bite of stone, the banked warmth of a fire built for function rather than comfort. She's at the worktable. The mortar sits in front of her, and the pestle is moving. The grinding fills the cottage with the same measured rhythm she's maintained since the first morning I woke up in this room with her hands inside my shoulder.

Her fingers are shaking. The tremor runs through the pestle into the mortar, and the sound of the grinding is wrong because of it, jagged instead of smooth. I can smell the alpine bloodroot, the glacier moss. She's preparing a suppressant.

She knows it won't hold. She's the smartest wolf I've ever met, and the smartest wolf I've ever met knows that the fortress watched her fight in wolf form, watched her stand naked in a corridor producing omega scent, No compound erases what the pack already witnessed. She knows that.

She's grinding anyway. The pestle moves because her hands don't know what else to do, because the rhythm is the only thing she's had since her mother taught her the stroke, because the grinding is how Signe holds herself together when the thing she's holding together has already come apart. The sound isn't strategy. It's grief.

I cross the cottage and sit on the worktable beside the mortar. The same place I've sat every time I've watched her work, the place she's told me to get off and I haven't, the place where the territory between us has been negotiated in inches since the night I woke up with her hands in my shoulder.

She doesn't tell me to move. She doesn't stop grinding. The pestle keeps its broken rhythm.