Page 61 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

There's nothing wrong with his hands. The blood isn't his. The examination isn't medical.

I know whose blood this is. I watched it happen from the ridge. The man who killed his brother at a council table is dead, and the nephew who couldn't close three steps that night crossed the distance today with his hands.

The red drying between Eirik's knuckles is the end of a debt that's been accruing since before I found him half-dead on my threshold. I'm cleaning the evidence of its payment off his skin with sure fingers and open eyes.

My hands work the cloth from my kit across his palms, methodical and precise. The red comes away in layers. Underneath it, his skin is unbroken.

I'm not treating a wound. I'm choosing what I'm willing to hold, and what I'm willing to hold includes a wolf who just killed a man and would do it again for the same reasons and isn't sorry.

The clinical term for this is complicity. The clinical term is wrong. The clinical terms have been wrong about him since the beginning.

His left fist uncurls under my fingers, not gently. The release has the quality of something that's been held past endurance finally letting go, and what comes out isn't softness. It's hunger. His palm opens flat against mine, and the contact is a current that runs from his calluses through my wrist and into the low pull behind my navel that hasn't quieted since last night and won't quiet again.

He exhales. The sound is low, involuntary, the breath of a man who has been holding air in his lungs since a night in a council hall when three steps were too many. My fingers are still wrapped around his, and I feel the release travel through him: pulse slowing, tension draining from the tendons beneath my grip, the body finally letting go of what the alpha wouldn't surrender in front of the wolves he's claiming.

His fingers close around mine with a grip that skips past permission entirely. It's the grip of a wolf who has spent the last hour letting me out of his sight and is finished with the exercise.

I don't pull free.

The Drakfell mountains stretch behind us, white and vast and holding whatever we'll build in them. The skin just left of the hollow of my throat is unmarked. His teeth haven't been there. My hand doesn't lift to cover the site, because my hand is occupied. The occupation is a choice I'm making with the same deliberate precision I bring to everything: full knowledge of the cost, and no flinching from what it includes.

I cleaned the blood off a wolf who killed for me, not because he asked me to, but because my hands wanted to. For the first time in longer than I can measure, I let them do what they wanted instead of what they should.

His grip tightens around my fingers, and the pull behind my navel answers with a low, deep ache that has nothing to do with the battle and everything to do with the biology I'm no longer suppressing. The heat isn't here yet. But it's coming, and the woman who spent years understanding omega cycles in clinical terms is about to discover that clinical understanding and lived experience are separated by an ocean she can't chart from shore.

The skin just left of the hollow of my throat is unmarked. His teeth haven't been there.

My hands are steady. They won't be for long.

18

EIRIK

The heat arrives three days after the battle. The woman who has spent years understanding omega biology in clinical terms discovers that textbook knowledge and lived experience aren't the same thing. I know because I'm watching the discovery happen. Not touching her while I watch takes more out of me than running from my father’s killers through the Drakfell mountains.

It takes three days. Three days of organizing Drakfell wolves, establishing patrol routes, keeping Signe behind a barred door. Every wolf in the territory can smell what's building in her, and the alpha in me won't tolerate a single one of them breathing the same air she does. For three days the heat built behind Signe's composure the way pressure builds behind a dam. I could smell it climbing. Each morning her scent ran warmer, richer, the omega pushing through the body's last chemical resistance with the patient inevitability of water finding cracks.

She kept working. I let her, because telling Signe to stop healing is a fight no alpha wins, but I stood between her and every wolf she treated. She cataloged Drakfell's medical stores with the grim efficiency of a healer who has found a facility run by a wolf who didn't prioritize his pack's health, and I cataloged every wolf who came within arm's reach of her.

On the third morning, I handed the territory to Gunnar. He didn't ask why. He could smell it on her, same as every wolf in the hall could, and the beta who'd learned to run a fortress under Torben could manage a subdued pack for a few days without breaking stride.

I moved Signe into my father's quarters. The alpha's rooms at the heart of the hall, stone walls thick enough to muffle scent, a door heavy enough to bar. Every approach controlled, every corridor narrow enough that Gunnar's wolves could hold it without strain. She didn't argue. The fact that she didn't argue told me more than any diagnosis could.

She sleeps through the afternoon and into the night, her body banking every hour of rest it can before the heat takes the rest away.

I bar the door. I check the shutters. I’ve stationed two of Gunnar's wolves at the corridor entrance with orders to let no one pass, and then I build the fire and sit against the wall with my jaw locked and my hands fisted on my knees. I watch the heat rewrite her scent one hour at a time, and the watching is an exercise in the kind of restraint that strips the enamel off my teeth.

She wakes before dawn in my father's rooms. The stone walls are older than any wolf alive, the furs on the bed carry a scent that isn't mine yet, and the hearth holds the remains of a fire my uncle's wolves built before I reclaimed these walls. My father lived here. My uncle took it. I'm taking it back for the woman who chose to stand beside me, and these walls will hold her compounds and her herbs and the infirmary she deserves.

The air holds her scent the way the mountain carries snow: inevitably, with a weight that accumulates faster than it can be measured. Omega in full bloom, years of suppressed cycles crashing through her biochemistry at once, and the signature is so concentrated my wolf goes rigid beside her before my conscious mind registers the change.

Her pulse runs fast under my palm where it rests against her hip. Her skin is fever-warm.

When her breathing hitches and she opens her eyes, the look she gives me contains a healer's assessment and a demand. The demand arrives in a language she speaks fluently below the neck and has never learned above it.

"It's here," she says. Her voice is steady. The steadiness won't last. We both know it. The knowing sits between us with the weight of every conversation she's ever delivered in her healer's register about bonding biology and heat mechanics and what's about to burn through her like a wildfire she lit by choosing to stop fighting it.

"I know." I close my hand around the back of her neck. The silver-blonde strands are damp with sweat that started while she slept, and the fever heat coming off her skin reaches my palm like her scent reaches my wolf: total, consuming, impossible to parse into components. "I've been smelling it for an hour. I've been awake for three."