Page 32 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
And the scent. I scrubbed last night. Basin water, the rough soap they issue to captives, the methodical attention of a woman removing evidence. It should have been enough.
It isn't. Torben's scent has settled into the deeper layers, worked into my skin through sustained contact and the biological mechanics of what happened between us. The omega chemistry that Erla warned me about has taken his scent and woven it into my own like thread through fabric. The result is faint but unmistakable to any nose that knows what to look for. Every wolf in this fortress has a nose that knows what to look for.
I dress. I braid my hair. I take my suppressant dose and swallow it dry, counting what remains in the pouch with the detached precision of a woman running a ledger that's approaching zero. Days. Not weeks. The margin between managed and exposed is shrinking every morning, and what happened between us didn't help. Erla's clinical warning aboutproximity accelerating the failure sits in my memory like a stone in a shoe.
'This doesn't happen again.'
I said it. He agreed. The terms haven't changed.
The terms haven't changed, but every cell in my body is calling me a liar, and the warmth of the wall under my palm is still there when I pull my hand away, as though the stone itself intends to keep the argument going.
I open the unlocked door and step into the corridor. His door is closed. The few feet of stone hallway between our rooms carries a faint trace of his scent, fainter than what's embedded in my skin, and the omega chemistry reaches for it the way a plant turns toward a window.
I keep walking. The corridor connects to the main fortress through a juncture that passes the kitchens, the armory, and the guard rotation muster point. Three locations staffed by wolves with functional noses and no particular reason for discretion. I calculate the fastest route that avoids the largest number of nostrils and discover that no such route exists in a building designed by a man who prioritized sight lines and air circulation in equal measure.
The first wolf I pass is a kitchen runner carrying a tray of bread. She sniffs, falters, and redirects her eyes to the far wall with the carefully neutral expression of someone who's decided that bread is the most interesting substance in the fortress and always has been.
The second is a guard changing shifts. His nostrils flare. His posture shifts from bored to alert to carefully, aggressively bored again in the span of a few heartbeats. He nods to me. I nod back. We've conducted an entire conversation about the political ramifications of the beta's scent on a captive's skin without exchanging a single word, and both of us will pretend it didn't happen.
By the time I reach the eastern corridor, I've been politely ignored by half a dozen wolves, each of whom will have relayed their olfactory findings to at least a few others before I reach the barracks door. The informal information network in this pack operates faster than any system I could design, and I've designed several. I scrubbed. I used soap. I might as well have sent a written announcement.
The guard outside the holdout barracks straightens when I approach. This one doesn't bother hiding the reaction. His nostrils flare wide and his mouth opens slightly, which is the wolf equivalent of reading a headline in bold print.
"I'm here to see my people," I say, with the tone of someone who's walked through doors she wasn't invited through for a living. The guard steps aside without comment, because even a Northern Pack wolf recognizes that the beta's scent confers a certain immunity from casual interference.
The barracks open into the long, low-ceilinged space I know by heart: sleeping pallets along the walls, narrow windows set high in the stone, the small artifacts of suspended lives arranged on upturned crates. The air inside carries the compressed scent of too many wolves in too small a space, overlaid with the cold stone smell that permeates everything in this fortress.
Halvor finds me before I've crossed the threshold.
He's like a weapon that hasn't learned where to point itself. The angles of his face have sharpened since the war, baby fat burned off by captivity and barely managed fury, and the split in his lower lip, still scabbed from whatever fight or bitten-down rage produced it, pulls tight as his mouth thins. The tension in his frame as he approaches carries the specific rigidity of a wolf who's been waiting for something to be angry about and has just been handed it gift-wrapped.
His nostrils flare.
"You smell like the Wolf Prince." His voice carries across the barracks with enough volume that every wolf in the room stops what they're doing, which is exactly the performance he intended.
"Thank you, Halvor. My sense of smell wasn't functioning. I appreciate the diagnostic assistance."
"This is a joke to you?"
"Several things about this situation qualify as humorous. Your volume level is one of them." I keep my voice flat. Controlled. The pitch that Halvor recognizes from every command I've given since he was old enough to follow orders, the one that saysI'm your strategist and you will stand down or we will have a problem that outranks whatever problem you think we currently have."Walk with me."
He doesn't want to. Every line of his body says he'd rather have this conversation at broadcast volume with an audience of captive wolves who are already cataloging the evidence. His fists clench at his sides, and the cords in his neck stand taut, and for a moment I see the boy who fought in Korren's war because he was told to and never figured out how to put down the sword.
He walks with me.
The far corner of the barracks offers minimal privacy, a recessed alcove between two support columns where the torchlight doesn't fully reach. It's the closest thing to a private room in a space designed to prevent them.
"Speak," I tell him.
"You slept with him." The words come out raw. Not quite an accusation, but close. The kind of hurt a young wolf feels when the person he's organized his entire post-war identity around does something he can't incorporate into the story he's telling himself about loyalty and resistance and the clear bright line betweenusandthem.
"What I do with the beta is my decision. Not yours, not the barracks', not a matter for public debate."
"He's our captor."
"He's the man who controls our food, our housing, our access to fresh air, and our likelihood of being traded to an Ashvald alpha as a border settlement. Which of those facts do you imagine has escaped my attention?"
Halvor's jaw works. The muscle jumps. Gods above, he even clenches the same way Torben does, and the observation is so inconvenient that I file it immediately and refuse to retrieve it.
