Page 23 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"You are something."
She leans forward to trace the southern approach on the map. The movement brings her closer, and her scent reaches me ahead of her hand. The familiar markers first: pine, mineral, the faint botanical trace of whatever she takes every morning.
Then something underneath. Warm and sweet and carrying a signature that hits the base of my skull and detonates.
Whatever she takes to suppress it fails for a single breath. The thing underneath pushes through, and my body recognizes it at a depth where language has not been invented yet. My pupils blow. Every muscle locks. My hands flatten on the table.
My wolf surges against the inside of my ribs with a force that buckles my breathing, and the sound that comes from my throat is not a word.
She freezes. Her left hand flies to the hollow of her throat, covering the bonding site with the reflex I watched when I told her about Grimnir.
But her face doesn’t carry fear. What I see is recognition. The expression of a woman who has been carrying a detonator for years and just watched someone discover the trigger.
Omega.
Every tell I cataloged reorganizes around the word. Whatever she takes every morning. The hand at the bonding site. The Grimnir fear. The metalworker mother who built a forge in the back of her workshop and raised a daughter who covers the hollow of her own throat with a reflex older than conscious thought.
She’s been hiding in plain sight, and I’ve been dismantling the hiding by existing in the room next to hers.
Whatever broke through seals over, and the air between us returns to something that merely hums instead of screams. My hands are still flat on the table. My arms are shaking, a fine tremor I can feel in the bones of my wrists.
She pulls her hand from her throat, each finger peeling away with deliberate control. Her face is white. Her breathing is too fast.
The map sits between us with the drainage route half-traced, and the map has stopped meaning anything at all.
I stand. The standing is the hardest physical act I’ve performed in years, because standing means moving away fromher, and my body wants to circle the table and press my face into the junction of her neck and shoulder and breathe until every chamber of my lungs is full of what I just smelled. My vision greys at the edges from the effort of not doing it.
"We're done." My voice sounds like it has been dragged across gravel. Two words. All I can manage.
She stands. The composure she reassembles is thinner than it was this morning, the skin beneath her jaw carrying a flush her body cannot explain away. She gathers the map with steady hands, rolls it with the precise movements of a woman performing calm, and walks toward the door.
She stops with her hand on the frame.
"Whatever just happened to your concentration is yours to manage, Torben." My name in her mouth for the first time, without the title, without distance, aimed like a blade over her shoulder. "It doesn’t change the terms."
Revna leaves. I don’t walk her back. Every debriefing before this one ended with my hand on her arm and the few steps between our doors, but my hands can’t touch her right now. My hands can’t be trusted with the distance between the table and her skin. The door closes and I grip the edge of the table until the wood creaks and my breathing returns to something functional.
I head to Signe's infirmary, because the alternative is following Revna, which is something I’m not prepared to do. Signe is grinding something in a stone mortar when I arrive, her silver-blonde hair pulled back from a face that has never carried an expression it did not intend.
"You look like you've taken a blow."
"Hypothetical question?"
"No such thing." She sets the mortar aside. "But go ahead."
"If a beta were to encounter a strong omega scent, one that has been suppressed and is breaking through, what would the physical response look like in a compatible match?"
The wordcompatibleearns me a silence that lasts several heartbeats. I press my hands against my thighs to keep them still. The scent memory hooks into every inhale, dragging my attention back toward the residential wing.
My wolf hasn’t stopped pulling since I left the room, a constant pressure behind my ribs aimed at the wall between our quarters like a compass needle locked on north. The effort of standing in this infirmary having a clinical conversation while my biology tries to walk me back through the door costs more than anything I’ve spent in years.
"The pupils dilate," Signe says, her tone flat and precise. "The heart rate elevates. The musculature locks into a posture the conscious mind doesn’t authorize." She watches my hands, pressed hard against my thighs. "Any male's pheromone output spikes in the presence of omega scent. That is standard biology. What is not standard is what happens with a compatible match. The beta's output does not plateau. It escalates, which accelerates the omega's scent production, which deepens the beta's response." She pauses. "There is no neutral terminus. The feedback loop continues until one party removes themselves from proximity or the biology reaches its conclusion."
The conclusion. My body supplies the image before my mind can block it: Revna underneath me, her scent unfiltered and rising from her skin while my mouth finds the hollow of her throat. I lock my jaw and grind the image flat.
"If the omega is using suppressants, what does sustained proximity to a compatible beta do?"
"It accelerates the failure. A compatible beta's pheromones are the key to whatever lock the suppressant is maintaining." Another pause, and this one has teeth. "The kind of exposure that comes from sharing air in enclosed quarters and sharing meals across a table every morning. The suppressant was never designed to resist that."
