Page 54 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"You know it won't work." I keep my voice level. Not a command. An observation, the same kind she'd make over a patient whose prognosis she's already determined.

"I know." Her voice is flat. Controlled. The mask rebuilt from whatever raw materials she found between the corridor and this cottage. The pestle doesn't stop.

"Then why are you grinding?"

"Because my hands need to be doing something, and the something I've done my entire life is this." The flatness cracks for a fraction of a second. She seals it. "What do you want, Eirik?"

Everything. The word sits behind my teeth with a weight I can feel in my jaw. Everything, and the everything is the problem, because what I want and what I need align so perfectly that any wolf with strategic intelligence would question whether the wanting is real or manufactured.

"I want to tell you the truth." I watch her hands on the pestle. "All of it. And then I want you to decide what to do with it."

The pestle slows. She doesn't look at me.

"Day four." My voice comes out rough, stripped of the charm and the humor and the deflection I use to fill spaces that get too quiet. "I knew for certain on day four. The suppressant was failing, and the scent underneath it came through while you were changing the dressing on my shoulder. My wolf knew before my brain caught up."

Her jaw tightens. The pestle stops.

"I didn't tell you. Not because I was protecting you, and not because I was strategizing. I wasn't ready for the conversation that comes after knowing, because the conversation ends with you either choosing me or not, and I wanted more days before I found out which." I hold steady. "That's selfish. I know it's selfish. I'm not going to dress it up as something else."

"Your cortisol is elevated." Her voice is quiet. Clinical. She's reading my biology from across the worktable, and the reading is a power move disguised as observation. "Your pupils are dilated. Your breathing is faster than your posture suggests it should be."

"I'm about to say the part that might cost me everything. The body knows before the brain does."

"Then say it."

"I need an omega bond to reclaim Drakfell. An alpha with a bonded omega commands biological authority a packless alpha can't replicate." I don't flinch from it. "I can't separate what I want from what I need. The wanting and the needing are the same thing, and I stopped trying to separate them the night you put your mouth on me and said it was on your terms."

She folds her arms. "So every instinct you have, every political need, every biological imperative is pointing you at the omega sitting across the worktable from you. And you expect me to trust that there's something underneath all of that which exists independent of what you'd gain."

"No." I meet her gaze. "I expect you to look at the evidence and make your own diagnosis. You're better at reading wolves than any wolf alive. Read me."

Something shifts behind her expression. The clinical assessment that has been running since I sat down reaches a conclusion I can't see.

"I'll take Drakfell back without the bond," I tell her. "I'll do it the hard way, alone, with no biological authority and no omega at my side. The territory is mine by blood, and blood is enough if I'm willing to bleed for it." I hold her gaze. "But that's not why I'm sitting on your worktable. I want to know what your laugh sounds like when you stop catching it. I want to be the scent you can't scrub out of this table. I want to be the variable your formula doesn't account for, the wolf who knows what you sound like when you stop performing and won't let you forget he heard it."

Her expression doesn't change. But her arms have dropped to her sides.

"I'm telling you I'll leave." The offer sits in my open palms. "If you want me gone, I'll walk out of this cottage and down the mountain. I'll take my territory back alone. The offer is real. I'd rather take the harder road than take anything from you that you don't give me with your hands steady and your eyes open."

She doesn't answer.

The silence fills the cottage. She's assessing me with the thoroughness she brings to a compound fracture, and the assessment takes time, because the damage is extensive and the woman doing the reading doesn't trust easy diagnoses.

I stand. I walk to the door. I open it, and the mountain air hits my face with the cold clarity of a man who's just offered the only good thing in his life and is about to find out whether the offering was enough.

I close the door behind me. I sit on the ground with my back against the cottage wall, and I wait.

The waiting is the worst thing I've ever done. Worse than the truth, because the truth was action and action is what I know. The waiting is nothing. The waiting is the space between the offer and the answer, and the space is filled with every version of the future I can't control.

She'll grind the compound and I'll walk down the mountain alone. She'll grind the compound and I'll lose her. She'll grind the compound and the wolf she freed in that corridor will vanish behind a formula that won't hold. I won't be enough.

The cold settles into my bones. The mountain holds above the tree line, indifferent to the man sitting against a cottage wall with his hands open and his throat still feeling the ghost of her gaze.

I don't go inside. I don't knock. I don't bring firewood or make noise or fill the silence, because my wolf is tearing itself apart against my ribs and the only thing holding it back is the knowledge that breaking the door down would prove her right about every alpha she's ever feared.

Time passes. I don't count it. My wolf paces inside me with the focused fury of an animal that has never in its life sat still when movement was possible, and the sitting is costing me more than the truth did.

The door opens.