Page 49 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
I rehearsed arguments. I rehearsed defiance. I did not rehearse the gutting, sickening relief of an alpha's permission to do the thing I've been wanting, the thing I told myself was strategic, the thing I dressed in operational language because the naked truth of it was too large for the framework I built to contain it. I wanted this. I've been wanting this. The beta who never takes anything for himself is about to take the most consequential thing possible, and the alpha's order just gave him cover for a desire he's been hiding from himself.
The cover makes it worse. The cover means I can pretend it's duty, and the pretending would be the last lie.
I don't pretend.
"Thank you," I say, and the words come out rough, holding the weight of a man who has just discovered that wanting something for yourself, after years of wanting nothing, feels less like freedom and more like stepping off a cliff.
"Don't thank me," Stellan says. "War council in an hour. Bring Signe's documentation."
I leave the study walking differently than I entered it. The boots sound different on the stone, and the difference is not lighter. It is grounded. The mutiny landed and the structure absorbed it and what came back was not forgiveness but pragmatism, and in Stellan's world pragmatism is the closest thing to mercy that exists.
Revna is sitting up in my bed when I come through the door, the fur pooled at her waist and her hair loose and tangled and her amber eyes tracking my face with the thoroughness of a strategist reading a battlefield report in real time.
"You went to Stellan," she says. No question in it.
"I went to Stellan."
"Without telling me first."
"You were asleep."
"I was asleep because you detonated my entire life and then held me while I processed the shrapnel, and then you vanished before I could debrief you." The scarred eyebrow lifts. "That is a move I'm going to need you to never repeat."
"Noted."
She studies me for a long moment, reading my posture, my scent, the set of my jaw that she's mapped as precisely as she maps terrain. Whatever she finds in the assessment makes her pull her knees up and wrap her arms around them, her chin resting on the juncture, her gaze steady and unhurried.
"How badly did he take it?"
"Better than I deserved."
"That's not an answer, Wolf Prince. That's a deflection wearing humility."
The title lands with the precision she's honed it into over weeks of use, and the familiar sting of it loosens something in my chest that's been clenched since I walked into Stellan's study.
"He called me an institutional failure, reviewed my entire career in terms that made it sound like a criminal proceeding,and then authorized the claim and called a war council. In that order."
Revna blinks once. "He authorized the bond."
"For the pack. Not for my personal fulfillment, which he made extremely clear."
"Naturally." The corner of her mouth pulls. "The strategic merit of bonding an omega with inside knowledge of the mountain faction's infrastructure is considerable. The fact that the beta requesting it happens to be biologically converting into something else entirely under the omega's influence is merely an incidental complication."
"You're enjoying this."
"I'm enjoying the mental image of the Northern Pack's most controlled wolf standing in front of his alpha and admitting he wants something." She tilts her head, and the angle puts the light across the hollow of her throat, the skin unmarked and flushed in a way that I track the way I track movement on a perimeter. "You asked him. You didn't frame it as a strategic recommendation. You asked."
"I told him the request was personal before it was strategic."
The silence that follows is a different animal than the silences that have lived between us. Every silence before this one held weight: secrets, tactics, the things we couldn't say through the wall, the things we refused to say face to face. This one is lighter. Not easy, but lighter. A silence where neither of us is running reconnaissance on the other or bracing for the next blow.
"What else?" she says. "Your scent is holding something you haven't told me yet."
"Grimnir knows. A sealed message arrived this morning bearing his seal. He's demanding you by name."
She processes this with the speed of a strategist who has been war-gaming scenarios since before she could walk. The fear that should surface doesn't. What surfaces instead is the cold-eyedassessment of a woman who was forced to hide who she was and has decided that the next wolf who tries to force her is going to find a different kind of resistance.
"The message arrived this morning," she repeats. "The exposure was yesterday."
