Page 43 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"Then let me claim her."
The words are out before I've authorized them. They hang in the air with the gravity of something that cannot be retracted, and Stellan's expression doesn't change but his stillness does, the quality of it going from controlled to predatory between one heartbeat and the next.
"Let you claim her," he repeats. "The captive you were assigned to break. The woman whose integration you've compromised at every stage. You want me to authorize a permanent biological bond between my beta and a Blackridge war strategist whose loyalty is, at best, conditional."
"Her loyalty isn't conditional. It's earned. Every piece of intelligence she's given me has been voluntary and accurate, and she gave me the spy network knowing it would cost her standing with her own wolves. That isn't conditional loyalty. That's a woman who has chosen to trust the wolf on the other side of her wall, and the wall has been open because I'm the one who opened it."
Stellan studies me for a long time. The candlelight catches the angles of his face and turns them into something that looks carved from the same granite as the fortress.
"The transfer happens within the week," he says, and the words drop into the room with the finality of a blade hitting stone. "Prepare her. Brief her on the terms. Manage the handoff." He holds my gaze. "This is the last assignment I give you regarding this woman. When she's gone, we don't discuss her again."
"And if I refuse?"
The question fills the room with a silence so complete that I can hear the candle flame working through the wax.
"Then I relieve you of command," Stellan says, "and I manage the transfer myself, and the method of management will not include the courtesy of a briefing or the dignity of a goodbye. She goes in chains and you go in a cell, and the pack structure that we've spent years building burns because you decided one woman was worth more than every other wolf under this roof."
The silence holds. My hands are fists at my sides. The wolf is howling behind my ribs with a sound that is rage and grief andthe desperate, futile fury of an animal watching the cage door close.
I leave the study without another word. The corridor outside is empty and cold and stretches the length of the fortress between Stellan's door and hers, and every step toward Revna's quarters is a step toward the conversation that will break something that cannot be repaired.
The walk is long enough for the full scope of the order to settle into my body. Revna transferred to Grimnir. Given to an alpha she's never met. Bonded to a wolf who will touch her and sleep beside her and put his mark on the skin where my mouth has pressed and pressed and never bitten because the biting isn't mine to do.
The possessive fury building in me isn't beta. It's the alpha biology that her proximity has been awakening for weeks, now roaring to full volume against the threat of another male, and my hands are fists at my sides by the time I reach her corridor and my jaw aches from the clenching and the discipline that has held me in formation for all the years of my service is crumbling under a single word the wolf will not stop repeating.
I stop outside her door, waiting for a moment before knocking. She opens the door and from the doorway I can see her boots are by the pallet. Her braid is loosening from the day. Dag’s blade is sitting on the edge of the bed, and I see she’s been running a whetstone along the edge with the unhurried attention of a woman who sharpens things when she's thinking.
She looks at my face and the reading starts before I've barely crossed the threshold. Her eyes move across my face the way they move across terrain, cataloging the stress points, the fault lines, the places where the structure is under load.
"Torben."
"Later."
"That bad," she says.
"Later." I cross the room and take the blade from her bed and set it on the table.
"Disarming a woman before delivering news is a negotiation tactic," she says, "Not a reassuring one."
"I'm not negotiating."
"No. You're stalling. The difference is that negotiation produces information and stalling produces anxiety, and I already have enough of the second one to supply the entire barracks." She uncrosses her legs and faces me fully, and the sharpness in her eyes is the sharpness of a woman who has survived by reading wolves and knows when one is lying to her. "Your jaw hasn't unlocked since you walked in. You smell like Stellan's study. And you took my blade before you said a word, which means whatever you're about to say, you think I'm going to want to stab something."
"You're not wrong."
"Then say it."
"I can't." The admission comes out rough. "Not yet."
She studies me for a long beat, and what passes across her face is the rapid, visible calculation of a strategist weighing the cost of pressing against the cost of waiting. I watch her choose waiting, and the choice isn't submission. It's the tactical patience of a woman who knows that the information will come and that forcing it before it's ready produces worse intelligence than letting the source deliver on his own terms.
"Fine," she says. "But you owe me the blade back when this conversation eventually happens. I want to be armed for it."
The ghost of humor in the words is thin enough to cut, offered to a man she can see is breaking and delivered with the deliberate steadiness of someone handing a rope to a person on a ledge. She knows something is wrong. She's choosing to give me the space to be wrong in, and the generosity of that is worse than the anger would be.
I kneel in front of her, put my hands on her knees, and look up into her face. Her hand comes up to my jaw. Her thumb traces the muscle that's been clenched since Stellan's study, and the touch is so careful that it opens something in me I don't have the resources to close again.
I turn my head and press my mouth to the inside of her wrist, where her pulse beats fast and close to the surface, and the taste of her skin with the omega scent bleeding through is enough to rearrange every priority I possess into one.
