Page 29 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"Then ask Stellan."
"You don't give me orders."
"I'm giving you information. What you do with it is your business." She picks up her cup and drinks, watching me over the rim. "Although your business seems to include adjusting my diet, unlocking my door, and putting me in a room where your scent pours through the stone every night. So perhaps your definition of business is more flexible than you'd like to admit."
The words land in the quiet room like a blade drawn from a sheath. She just named it. Not through the wall, not in the loaded silence of the mornings since the scent slip, but here, at the breakfast table, with daylight on her face and her eyes holding mine.
"You think the room assignment was about my scent."
"I think the room assignment was about proximity. I think the proximity was about control. And I think the control stopped being professional the moment you heard a sound through the wall and stayed there listening instead of reporting it."
My jaw locks. She isn't wrong. The wrongness would be easier to fight.
"You've been performing cooperation since you got here," I say. "Feeding me intelligence calibrated to the gram, keeping the timeline alive, trading cache locations for barracks visits. Every piece you give me is designed to keep you useful enough that I can't hand you over. You know exactly what you're doing."
"Of course I know what I'm doing. I've been running tactical operations since I was old enough to sit at a war council. The question isn't whether I'm strategic. The question is whether you're going to keep pretending that your scent in my lungs every morning is a coincidence of architecture."
"It's a shared chimney."
"It's a weapon, and you know it."
I'm on my feet before I decide to stand. The chair scrapes back against the stone, and the sound is loud in the chargedquiet, and Revna doesn't flinch. She looks up at me from the table with the flat calm of a woman who has been waiting for this fight and is ready for it.
"You want to talk about weapons?" My voice has dropped into a register I don't use in debriefings. "Your wall conversations. The forge story. The metal holding heat. You've been reaching through that stone, feeding me pieces of yourself that have nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with keeping me on the other side of the wall with my hands flat and my breathing wrong. You know what your voice does to me and you use it."
She stands. The table is between us, and the table isn’t enough.
"My voice. My cooperation. My compliance. Everything I do is a weapon, is that it?" She steps around the table toward me, and the movement closes the distance to something my discipline can't manage. Her scent hits me, the compound thin enough now that the warmth underneath bleeds through at close range, and my wolf slams forward so hard that my vision narrows. "Has it occurred to you that some of it might be real?"
"Has it occurred to you that I don't care whether it's real? You're a captive. I'm your keeper. Whatever this is, it doesn't change what we are."
"You're right. It doesn't change what we are." She's close enough now that I can see the pulse hammering at the base of her throat, can smell the compound cracking under the pressure of proximity, can feel the heat coming off her skin like a forge bank. "It just makes what we are harder to hide behind."
"I'm not hiding."
"You're hiding right now. Behind duty. Behind Stellan. Behind the professional distance you've been performing since the day you put your hand on my arm and pretended you didn't notice that your fingers fit."
The sentence is barely out of her mouth when the compound fractures again.
The omega scent floods the room. It hits me with the full force of a biological imperative that doesn't care about rank or duty or the careful fictions we've built across the time of shared meals. My wolf doesn't surge this time. He arrives, fully present, and the arrival is not a request. My pupils blow. My hands grip the edge of the table behind me hard enough that the wood groans. A low, continuous sound rolls up my throat, carrying an authority I haven't heard from my own body before.
Revna's eyes go wide. Her hand flies to the hollow of her throat, but this time she catches it halfway and forces it down. The effort shows in the cords of her neck and the white of her knuckles.
"Torben."
"Don't." The word comes out wrecked. "Don't say my name while you smell like that."
"Like what? Like what I actually am?" She doesn't step back. She should step back. Every rational cell in her body should be telling her to put distance between herself and the wolf whose pheromones are tearing her suppressant apart. She steps closer. "You've known for days. You've been breathing me through stone and choosing my meals and wrapping your knuckles instead of reporting me. So stop pretending this is about duty."
I grab her arm. The grip isn't the professional hold I've used in corridors, measured and contained. This is my hand closing around her bicep with a possessiveness that comes from somewhere below my ribs, and the contact sends a jolt through both of us that I can feel in her sharp inhale. The omega harmonic rides the breath, and my body reads it before my mind can intervene.
"If I touch you," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like mine, "the compound fails faster. Every point of contact accelerates it. You understand that."
"I understand it."
"There's no bond without a bite. I won't bite."
"I know you won't."
