Page 8 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"As long as the work requires."

"The work." He turns the word over with deliberate care, testing its edges. "The work requires you to be alone on a mountain in the worst storm of the season with pages that look older than the fortress spread across your table and enough herbs to stock an infirmary for a year." The amusement drops from his face. What replaces it is serious, attentive, and aimed at me with the full focus of a packless alpha reading the most interesting thing in the cottage: the healer. "That's not dedication, Signe. That's a second set of walls."

The observation lands precisely. My spine straightens before I can modulate the response. He sees it. I watch him see it, watch him read the tension in my shoulders and store the information.

"You're observant for someone who was bleeding out on my floor last night."

"I was observant before the bleeding. The bleeding just slowed me down." The amusement doesn't return. The face behind it is worse: steady, intent, stripped to focus. "You do this thing when a question gets too close. Your shoulders go up, and then you correct them, and the correction is faster than the reaction. You've been doing it for a long time. I'd guess years."

"You should be resting, not cataloging my posture."

"Tell me I'm wrong."

I don't tell him he's wrong. The silence between us proves his point more effectively than a confession would.

"You don't have to answer," he says. His expression doesn't waver, and beneath the steadiness is a recklessness I can feel in the room like a change in air pressure. "But I'm going to keep asking. You should know that about me."

I hold the look long enough to communicate that I've heard him and that hearing isn't the same as yielding. Then I turn to the broth I've been preparing from dried venison and root vegetables. The familiar motion of stirring puts distance between his observation and my composure.

For approximately the span of a breath. Because his warmth has been doing its work on me all morning, quiet and persistent and not innocent at all. For one unguarded second I feel the pull of it in my chest, an impulse to laugh at the sheer recklessness of his promise to keep knocking. The sound is already climbing toward my throat before I catch it and swallow it down.

The speed of the suppression tells me everything I need to know. I can't remember the last time I almost laughed, and the almost frightens me more than the storm outside.

Behind me, he laughs at his own observation, whatever it was, the sound full-bodied and entirely too vigorous for a man with sutured muscle. I hear the precise moment the deltoid sutures voice their objection: a wet, fibrous pop followed by a sharp intake of breath.

"If you've torn another stitch being amusing, I'll sedate you with something that tastes worse than dying, and you'll sleep through the rest of this storm."

"Define 'torn.'" A pause. "It might be more of a loosening."

I set down the knife and cross back to him. The bandage is darkening at the shoulder where the deepest suture has pulled free of the wound margin, and a thin line of fresh blood is seeping through the linen.

One hand presses a clean cloth against the margin while the other reaches for my suture kit. The pressure brings my palm flat against his chest, and the heat of his skin registers like a warning in a language I haven't spoken in years.

His scent is stronger this close. The blood-and-herb overlay has thinned; what's replacing it is denser, insistent in a way that presses against the back of my throat. A biological response to sustained touch, amplified by the confined space and the metabolic demands of healing.

My training categorizes the escalation, labels it. The rest of me is still standing too close.

I resew the pulled stitch with three efficient passes, tie it off, and step back to the far corner where I keep my personal supplies in a leather pouch beneath a loose floorboard.

The suppressant pill is small and bitter, and I take it with a mouthful of cold water while his attention is on the fire. The standard dose has been holding since I arrived at the cottage, but the compound's margin of coverage has narrowed since last night, eroded by hours of sustained skin contact with an alpha running hotter than any I've treated.

So I double the dose. The second pill catches in my throat, and I force it through with water so cold it aches behind my sternum.

The ache in my sternum is irrelevant. The doubled dose is a precaution.

When I return to the fire, the room has settled into the contained silence of two wolves in a space built for one. The blizzard roars against the stone, and inside the roar, the man is watching me with an unhurried directness that has stopped pretending to be casual.

"You're staring," I tell him.

"You're worth staring at."

The words arrive without apology or flirtation. He delivers them as fact, with the carelessness of someone who has never learned that honesty is supposed to be rationed.

The transparency should make him easier to manage. It doesn't. Calculation, I can outmaneuver. Directness leaves me nothing to work with.

"You're a healer alone on a mountain in a blizzard with shelves of compounds that include at least three I've never seen in any healer's kit, and pages on your worktable that look older than both of us." He tilts his chin toward the worktable. "I'm looking at a woman who has buried herself so deep in her own silence that she's forgotten she did it on purpose."

I'm saved from responding by a sound that cuts through the blizzard's roar. A howl, distant, muffled by wind and snow, but carrying the sustained pitch of a wolf projecting across territory rather than calling to a companion. It isn't a hunting call or a greeting. It's a declaration.