Page 24 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"There’s another factor." Signe picks up the pestle, but her hands stay still around it. "Your scent profile has been changing since the Blackridge wolves arrived. I’ve been tracking it through the baselines I run on all pack wolves. The changes are consistent with a condition described in the old healer texts: latent alpha markers activated by proximity to a compatible omega."
The words reach me at a delay. My hands have not relaxed from my thighs, and the muscles in my forearms are starting to cramp from the sustained grip. My wolf is snarling now, low and constant, the sound filling the inside of my skull where Signe's clinical language is trying to land.
"You’re telling me I’m not a beta."
"I’m telling you that you carry dormant alpha factors in your biology that are waking up. Your pheromone output has been escalating beyond beta range for weeks. The trajectory is consistent with a full biological realignment." She holds my gaze with the unflinching steadiness of a woman delivering a diagnosis she has been sitting on for longer than this conversation. "Your body is catching up to whatever your genetics intended."
My pulse thuds against the inside of my wrists. The scent memory surges again, and I have to breathe through my mouth to keep my legs from carrying me out the door and back down the corridor to the room where she is sitting behind a closed door with her hand on her throat.
"How long have you known about her?"
"Known is the wrong word." Signe sets the pestle down. "I’ve been building scent baselines on the Blackridge wolves since the intake. One has been inconsistent from the beginning. The compound she uses is herbal, elderroot and possibly valerian derivatives. I could smell the botanical signature underneath her baseline when she was close enough, but the compound wasdoing its job. I could tell she was masking something. I couldn’t confirm what." She looks at me with the clinical precision of a healer who has just had a suspicion confirmed by the man standing in her infirmary shaking. "You just confirmed it for me."
The infirmary is quiet. The mortar sits where she left it, the pestle beside it, and the grinding dust on the stone surface looks like ash.
"This stays between us."
"Torben."
"This stays between us, Signe."
She holds my gaze for a long moment, reading whatever my face is offering. Whatever she finds there produces a silence that carries the weight of a healer deciding whether her loyalty to her patient or her loyalty to her alpha takes precedence.
"I am a healer," she says. "I don’t report what I can’t confirm, and until today I couldn’t confirm anything. What you do with confirmed intelligence is your business, not mine." She picks up the pestle and returns to her grinding. "But if Stellan asks me a direct question, I won’t lie to him. You should factor that into whatever calculation you are running."
I leave the infirmary with Signe's clinical language sitting in my chest like a stone. There’s no neutral terminus. The feedback loop continues. Your body is catching up.
The training yard is empty at this hour. I strip off my tunic, wrap my hands, and hit the post.
The first blow sends a shock up my arm that reaches my shoulder and dies there. The second finds the rhythm. The rest blur together as my knuckles go raw and my wolf feeds the strikes with everything the infirmary conversation held back, every image Signe's clinical language painted on the inside of my skull and every image my own body supplied without permission. The post absorbs it. The wood is scarred from yearsof wolves doing exactly this, channeling what they cannot say and cannot do into something that bleeds and heals and leaves no damage that matters.
I hit until the skin splits and the blood runs into the grain. I hit until my shoulders burn and my lungs ache and the taste of her scent in the back of my throat is buried under the copper taste of exertion. My wolf retreats from the surface enough that I can think in sentences instead of instincts.
My legs don’t carry me to Stellan's study. My split knuckles don’t reach for his door. The decision lands in my muscles before my mind frames the justification, and the justification, when it arrives, tastes like ash.
The omission is not a decision. It is the absence of a decision, which is worse, because a decision can be justified and an absence can only be explained.
I should walk to Stellan's study and deliver a report that contains the following intelligence: the Blackridge holdout leader is an omega whose suppressant is failing under sustained proximity to a beta whose biology is realigning toward alpha. The intelligence is operationally critical. It affects the Grimnir negotiation, the holdout integration, and the power structure of the pack. It’s the kind of information that Stellan needs and that I have never in my career withheld from him.
I don’t deliver the report. I wrap my bleeding knuckles with a strip of linen, pull my tunic back on, and walk to my quarters, and every step away from Stellan's study is a step deeper into a betrayal I can’t frame as anything else.
The hours crawl. I sit in the chair by the hearth with my wrapped hands on the armrests and her scent threading through the chimney, stronger than it was this morning. My wolf paces behind my ribs, restless and focused, tracking her through the stone the way he tracked her across the table. I stand, sit back down, stand again. The last time I stay on my feet long enoughto press my forehead against the wall and breathe through my mouth before her scent pulls me back to breathing through my nose and the warmth underneath fills my lungs and settles low and heavy in my gut.
Stellan will find out. He always finds out. The only variable is whether I tell him or he discovers it, and the difference between the two is the difference between a fracture and a collapse.
I sit against the wall between our rooms. The stone is warm. Her scent reaches me through the rock, and now that I know what lives underneath, the knowing changes what I smell. Whatever she takes is still doing its work, but my brain keeps reaching past it, searching for the warmth that broke through this morning, the way a tongue keeps returning to the gap where a tooth was pulled.
Omega. The hand on the bonding site. The mother who was a metalworker, who built a forge in the back of her workshop where the chimney drew badly and everything tasted of smoke. She takes something every morning. Her mother worked metal. And I have been tearing down whatever her mother built by sleeping on the other side of her wall.
She knows I know. The scent slip was mutual. She felt whatever she takes fracture, felt her biology surge, saw my pupils blow and my body lock and heard the sound I made.
Revna walked back to her room knowing that the man on the other side of her wall now holds information that could destroy everything her mother built to protect her.
She’s waiting to see what I do with it.
Through the wall, silence. I can hear her breathing, shallow and held, the sound of a woman listening so hard that the listening itself fills the space between us.
Her voice reaches me, quieter than I have ever heard it.
