Page 47 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
Halvor appears behind us in the corridor. He doesn't speak. He falls into step on my other side, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushes mine, a young wolf declaring loyalty to a leader whose secret he just learned and whose side he's choosing before anyone asks. Erla follows a step behind, silent, her face carrying the flat pragmatism of a woman who has known the truth longer than anyone and has been waiting for this moment with the patience of someone who plans in decades.
Torben doesn't acknowledge them. His focus is forward, his arm around me, his body a wall between mine and whatever is behind us. The corridor stretches ahead toward the residential wing, toward my quarters and his and the wall between them that held our secrets long enough for the secrets to become something else entirely.
Behind us, the hall hums with the sound of wolves rearranging everything they thought they knew.
Halfway down the corridor, my left hand lifts to the hollow of my throat. The skin is unmarked. It has been unmarked my entire life. The omega in me presses toward the spot with a hunger that no suppressant is dampening anymore, andTorben's hand on my shoulder tightens as though he can feel the gesture through the fabric and knows what it means.
I wonder if there was ever a version of this where the wordomegadidn't become a cage. I wonder if my mother ever imagined a morning like this one, her daughter barefoot in a borrowed tunic with a wolf's blood on her mouth and the scent of everything she hid pouring from her skin like a confession she can't retract.
My mother ground the herbs because she loved me. The herbs are gone. The love is still here. And the man whose arm is around my shoulders is the one who smelled the truth and chose to keep my secret. The keeping didn't save me but it bought me enough time to become someone who could survive the unmasking.
What comes next will require the strategist, not the girl whose mother ground herbs. My hands are still trembling. They won't be for long.
The hours blur after that. Signe appears at some point, clinical and calm, asking questions I answer on autopilot while Torben stands in the doorway and doesn't leave. Halvor posts himself outside like a sentry and refuses to be reassigned. Erla sends word through the barracks grapevine that nothing has changed, which is a lie so large it deserves its own designation.
The fire burns low. The fortress goes quiet. Torben locks the door from the inside, which is the first time the lock has served us instead of separating us, and he sits on the edge of the pallet with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed and the posture of a man whose entire command structure just detonated in a room full of witnesses.
I sit beside him. Our shoulders touch. The contact is small and it's enough.
The silence holds for a long time before he speaks, and when he does, his voice is low and rough and carries the absolutecertainty of a man who has stopped calculating consequences and started making declarations.
"I'm going to keep you."
The words land in the dark room with the weight of something that has been decided at a level deeper than strategy, deeper than rank, deeper than the hierarchy he's served his entire life. Not I want to keep you. Not I'll try to keep you. The flat, unqualified certainty of a man who has looked at every variable in the equation and arrived at the only answer his wolf will accept.
I don't answer. My hand finds his in the dark, and our fingers lace together, and the trembling in my hands has stopped.
16
TORBEN
'I'm going to keep you'sounded like certainty at midnight. In Stellan's study at dawn, it sounds like a death sentence.
Revna is asleep when I leave. She fell against my chest sometime after Dag's hammer started up below us, the first strikes of the morning rhythm vibrating through the stone. Her body surrendered to exhaustion before her mind gave permission, and the trust in that collapse cut deeper than any blade Stellan could put to my throat. She sleeps like a woman who has stopped guarding the door because she's decided to trust the wolf outside it.
I don't wake her. I pull the fur up over her shoulder, and my hand lingers on the bare skin at the base of her throat where the bone angles toward the clavicle. The spot is warm and unmarked and mine in every way that matters except the one that's permanent.
The corridor is cold after the warmth of my quarters. Dawn light cuts the arrow slits into pale blades on the stone, and the walk to Stellan's study is one I've made more times than I can count. Today, each step sounds different. Heavier. The boots of a man carrying mutiny instead of a report.
Stellan is at his desk when I arrive. A candle burns on the maps despite the growing daylight, his posture holding the stillness of an alpha who slept less than his beta and has been waiting for exactly this visit. His nostrils flare when the door opens, and the information that crosses his face in the beat before he controls it tells me he already knows part of what I'm here to say.
My scent carries her. It has for weeks, but after last night the merger is unmistakable. Her omega signature is woven through my pheromone output like thread through cloth, and the wolf who taught me to read scent profiles the way a scholar reads texts is currently reading the full history of my betrayal in a single breath.
"Sit down," he says.
I remain standing.
The refusal lands between us with the precision of a gauntlet dropped on a table. Stellan's eyes narrow, pale grey catching the candlelight, and the dominance that rolls off him fills the room with a pressure that pushes against my ribs. I've felt this pressure more times than I can count. I've never pushed back against it.
"The holdout leader is omega," I say, because if I'm going to burn this down, I'm going to do it with clean ignition. "Designation suppressed since adolescence by an herbal compound that operates on human biochemistry. The suppressant fails in wolf form. It also fails when compatible pheromone exposure accelerates metabolic breakdown." I hold his gaze. "The compatible pheromone source is me."
Stellan says nothing. The silence is a weapon he's wielded since I met him, and I've watched it break wolves who held out against physical interrogation.
"Her scent broke through fully in the great hall. The involuntary transformation was triggered by mortal danger, andthe suppressant has no binding sites in wolf form. The exposure was total. Every nose in the room caught it."
"I'm aware." Stellan's voice drops to the flat register that precedes the worst conversations I've had in his service. "Every nose in the hall caught it. I caught it from the head table." He stands, and the motion holds the coiled force of a man whose control costs him more than his subordinates will ever see. "What I didn't catch, until moments ago, is the part where my beta has been the catalytic agent in an omega exposure he failed to report."
"Signe has documentation. The biological compatibility was confirmed weeks ago."
