Page 62 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"Three hours." Something flickers behind the mask, the last time the mask will hold today. "You didn't wake me."

"You needed the rest. What's coming isn't going to leave you any."

Her jaw tightens. "Your bedside manner is appalling."

"You're my mate, not my patient."

Her mouth presses into a line. The expression is Signe at her most precise. The healer reading her own symptoms with the same focus she brings to wound margins, running her own prognosis while the subject of the assessment is her own failing composure. "The accumulated suppression means the intensity will exceed a standard cycle by a significant margin. The hormonal pressure hasn't released naturally in years. When it breaks, the cascade will be severe."

"You're narrating your own heat to me."

"I'm preparing you."

"Signe." I tilt her chin up. Her pulse hammers against the inside of my wrist, and the heat pouring off her skin has climbed since the conversation started. "You don't need to prepare me. You need to stop talking and let it come."

The first wave hits before she can answer. Her spine arches off the furs and the clinical voice shatters into a sound that belongs to the omega underneath, raw and involuntary, the cry of a body that has been caged for years and is finally running free.

Her fingers grip my forearms hard enough to bruise, and the wave that floods the room is so thick and sweet and desperate that something in me stops asking permission. The wolf takes over.

This is different. This is the omega demanding, and no amount of clinical preparation could've told Signe what it would feel like from the inside.

The heat rolls through her in waves that shorten and intensify. Between the waves she surfaces long enough to grip the edges of her own consciousness with the same precision she grips a suture needle. During the waves, she's mine in a way that no amount of pharmaceutical intervention could replicate or suppress, and the mine isn't a thought. It's an imperative that runs through my blood.

I strip her. I strip myself. The stone holds warmth from the fire I banked before dawn. I knew this was coming.

Orange light catches the sheen on her skin as the slick arrives with a suddenness that soaks the furs beneath her hips. The volume of it is staggering, her biology answering years of denial with a flood that coats her inner thighs and fills the air with a density so thick I can taste it on my tongue.

The smell of her arousal at full heat is a thing I don't have language for. Pure omega, unsuppressed and uncut, the frequency cranked to a volume that bypasses my conscious mind entirely and speaks to the wolf in a language older than words.

My body responds before my brain can intervene: I'm hard enough that the ache is sharp and immediate, my canines pressing against my lower lip with a pressure that wasn't there a minute ago, the alpha biology completing its preparations.

Between waves, she breathes, and the breathing brings back the healer. "The canine elongation is a precursor to the bonding mechanism," she says, and the fact that she can still produce clinical terminology while flushed and slick and spread beneath me is the most Signe thing I've ever witnessed. "The teeth extend to facilitate a clean puncture at the claiming site. The neurochemical seal requires the alpha's saliva mixing with omega blood at the scent gland, which triggers the permanent fusion cascade."

"You're giving me a lecture."

"I'm making sure you know when." Her left hand lifts to the spot just left of the hollow of her throat, the diagonal toward the clavicle. The gesture is the oldest reflex she owns, and this time it isn't guarding. It's showing. "When the knot locks. The seal won't hold without it."

My wolf already knows the spot. Has known it since the first time her hand drifted there and I understood what she was hiding underneath her fingers. The next wave takes her and the lecture dissolves into the sound of my name in her mouth, bitten off on the second syllable because her body doesn't care about syllables.

I don't wait for permission. I grip her hips and pull her beneath me, angling her where I need her. When I push inside her with one stroke, the heat that grips me is so intense and so wet and so devastatingly tight that what comes out of my throat belongs to the wolf, not the man, the alpha answering the omega in the only language the heat accepts.

The first knotting was quiet and chosen, two wolves meeting in a stillness that asked permission before it took. This is the answer that permission built, and the answer is loud and raw and doesn't negotiate.

She's slick enough that every thrust is a glide and a grip at the same time, her inner walls pulling me deeper while the omega contracts around my cock in rhythmic pulses that feel like a claim staked from the inside. I grip her hip with one hand and pin her wrist above her head with the other, and the pace is mine.

The heat demands urgency, but I set the depth and the angle, driving into her with long, deliberate strokes that force her to meet me where I am instead of dragging me where she wants.

"Faster," she says through her teeth, and the healer's voice is gone but the demand isn't. The healer who gives orders in her infirmary is giving orders in this room, and the giving is a fight she's waging against the loss of everything she used to control.

I don't go faster. I go deeper. The difference pulls a cry from her throat that belongs to a woman she's never met. Her jaw clenches because the woman who made that sound is the omega she's been burying for years, and the burial just failed.

"That's not what I said."

"I know what you said." I drive into her with a stroke that lifts her hips off the furs. "I don't take orders."

She bites my shoulder hard enough to draw blood. The bite feels like fury and want and the healer's refusal to lie still while someone else runs the procedure.

Wet sounds fill the chamber alongside the fire's crackle. Each stroke drives slick down between us, soaking the furs, and the obscenity of it feeds something primal in my wolf that I stopped trying to civilize the moment she burned the compound.