Page 48 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"Signe." The name drops like a blade on stone. "My pack healer. Running unauthorized diagnostics on a captive whose designation she concealed from her alpha."
"At my request."
"We've already addressed your personal entanglements." The words land clipped, surgical. "Now I'm learning my healer is compromised too." He rounds the desk and closes the distance between us, each step deliberate, and stops close enough that the alpha pheromones pressing against my chest make my wolf want to bare its throat. The fact that it doesn't is its own declaration. "What else is running behind my authority?"
His fury during our last encounter was hot. This is cold. The difference shows in his economy. He's past the betrayal of a beta who got tangled up with a captive. He's into the betrayal of an institution: his beta and his healer running a parallel biological intelligence operation inside his pack without his knowledge or consent. The personal wound bled in his study two days ago. The structural one is bleeding now, and Stellan has always cared more about the architecture than the feelings.
"I concealed the designation because reporting it activated the Grimnir scenario," I say. "The forced bond. A high-valueBlackridge omega traded to the Ashvald alpha as a border concession. Reporting her designation would have made the trade irresistible."
"You don't get to decide what's irresistible to your alpha." Stellan stops close enough that the heat of his anger is its own presence in the room. "You get to report. I get to decide. That architecture has held for years, and you dismantled it unilaterally."
"Yes."
The admission sits between us without padding. No tactical framing, no strategic justification. Stellan reads my face for a long moment, and what he finds there produces a shift in his expression I don't have a name for.
Stellan crosses to the door, opens it, and speaks to whoever is standing post outside. "Find Signe. Bring her here." The door closes. He doesn't return to the desk. He stands with his back to me, looking out the window, and the silence he leaves me in is precise and calculated and designed to let the weight of what I've said settle into the stone.
Signe arrives within the hour, carrying the documentation with the composure of a healer who has been expecting this summons since the first diagnostic results came back. She stands before Stellan's desk and lays out the biological evidence with clinical precision: the pheromone compatibility analysis, the metabolic markers showing my beta designation evolving under sustained omega exposure, the latent alpha DNA sequences she identified in my bloodwork weeks ago.
"His biology is adapting to hers," Signe tells Stellan, her voice steady with the calm authority of a wolf who has spent decades delivering truths that alphas don't want to hear. "The beta designation is a presentation, not a permanent state. Latent alpha markers have been activating in response to prolongedcompatible omega proximity. The trajectory suggests full alpha reproductive capability, including knotting capacity."
Stellan asks questions that are precise and territorial: timeline, implications for pack hierarchy if his beta transitions to alpha biology. Signe answers each one without flinching.
"And if they're separated?" Stellan's voice flattens to the neutrality that means he's testing the edges of a decision.
"I flagged the dependency risk in my initial report to Torben." Signe's gaze is level. "Prolonged compatible exposure creates neurological entrainment. Disruption at this stage would produce withdrawal in both wolves. In an omega whose suppressant system has already collapsed, the destabilization could trigger a crisis heat without a compatible anchor."
The clinical framing of what lives between Revna and me, reduced to compatibility markers and withdrawal projections, sits strangely in a room where the actual substance of the thing is a woman who calls me Wolf Prince to draw blood and sleeps against my chest like the silence between our bodies is its own kind of language.
Stellan dismisses Signe with a nod, and the healer leaves without looking at me, which is its own mercy.
I should wait for Stellan to speak. Instead, I say what I came to say.
"I want to claim her. The request is personal before it's strategic, but the strategic merit stands regardless of the motivation."
Stellan's jaw works. The muscle beneath the skin ticks twice, which is more visible reaction than he's given any wolf in my memory.
"You want," he repeats, and the two words land with the full weight of a wolf who has watched his beta go years without wanting. Without asking. Without taking anything for himself that wasn't handed to him as a function of his usefulness.
He turns to the window. Stands with his hands clasped behind his back, the posture he holds when making decisions that will reshape the territory, and the silence that follows is not a weapon. It’s a calculation—one that needs time. The candle gutters on the desk. Dawn brightens behind the glass.
What breaks the silence comes from outside. A junior wolf, breathless, holding a message that arrived by runner from the eastern border. The scroll bears Grimnir's seal, and the wording has abandoned all pretense of diplomacy. The Ashvald alpha isn't negotiating anymore. His previous demands framed Revna as a political asset, a war strategist offered as a border concession, but the language of this message strips that framing bare. He's demanding an unclaimed omega, and the specificity of the demand tells me something the spy reports didn't: Grimnir knew what she was before the exposure. He'd been counting on Stellan handing over an omega without understanding what he was giving up. A breedable omega acquired through a political mating that looked like a border treaty. The great hall just destroyed his quiet acquisition plan, and the threat underneath the diplomatic language makes it clear that if Stellan doesn't deliver her, Grimnir intends to come collect.
Stellan reads the message once. Sets it on the desk with the careful placement of a man handling an explosive.
The speed of the message confirms the calculation. Grimnir didn't need time to learn what Revna is. He needed time to realize his cover was blown and to pivot from covert acquisition to open demand. His assets inside the fortress reported the exposure, and within hours he'd abandoned the diplomatic approach for something that reads like an ultimatum. The mountain faction's spy network didn't just carry information out. It carried Grimnir's operational planning in.
"Congratulations," Stellan says, and the word is dry enough to strip paint. "Your omega just became a territorial crisis."
"She's been a territorial crisis since you assigned her to me. She's just a louder one now."
Stellan reaches for the territory map and spreads it flat over the correspondence, the gesture I've seen before every military operation I've served in: the alpha converting a personal problem into a tactical one.
"Claim her, Torben. Claim her for the pack before Grimnir does, and then use every asset we have, including her wolves, to hold what's ours."
The order is identical to the one he gave in the first briefing. The meaning has inverted entirely. The irony needs no acknowledgment from either of us.
The relief hits hard enough to wind me.
