Page 52 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
The war council is exactly the kind of torture the day has been building toward.
Stellan, the senior wolves, and Signe's documentation spread across the table in the fortress war room. The territory map is anchored with stones. Grimnir's message is weighted at the corner.
The discussion is clinical, strategic, and entirely about my omega.
"The heat window gives us a few days before the biology forces the question," Signe says, her voice holding the flat calm of a healer delivering a prognosis. "Once the cycle peaks, the claiming scent will draw every unmated wolf in range. If Grimnir has assets inside the territory, they'll track her to the room."
"Then the claim happens before the heat peaks." One of the senior wolves taps the map. "A claiming bite during pre-heat locks the scent-fusion. Grimnir can't demand a claimed omega without declaring war, and his supply lines through the mountain passes won't sustain a prolonged campaign."
"The bite alone isn't sufficient," Signe says. "Full scent-fusion requires knotting. The neurochemical seal that makes a claim permanent is triggered by the hormonal cascade during a locked mating. Without it, the bite mark heals and the designation reverts to available."
The senior wolf’s gaze cuts to me. "Torben is a beta. Betas don't knot."
The mood at the table changes. Every senior wolf recalculates, and I can feel the weight of their reassessment landing on me like a physical thing.
Signe doesn't flinch. "Torben carries latent alpha DNA that has been activating under prolonged compatible omega exposure. His biology is transitioning. The knotting capacity is part of that trajectory." She lets the clinical language sit for a beat. "His body is catching up to what his behavior has been demonstrating for some time now."
The silence that follows is thick enough to cut. The senior wolves are processing the information that the pack's beta is becoming something else, and the something else changes every hierarchy calculation in the room.
Knotting. The word sits in the war room like a grenade with the pin pulled. Signe just told a table full of senior wolves that my body needs to lock inside Revna's while my teeth are buried in her throat, and the way she delivered it held the same emotional weight as a supply chain logistics report.
A short while ago, Revna's voice broke on the second syllable of my name. She bit my shoulder when she came and pressed her lips to the mark afterward, and the symmetry of that gestureheld more tenderness than any word either of us has managed. The woman they're discussing as a biological mechanism just trusted me with the last unguarded part of herself, and the wolves at this table are reducing that trust to scent-fusion timelines and hormonal cascades.
My knuckles have gone white on the table edge. My jaw is locked so tight the bone aches. Every clinical term translates in my body to what it actually means: my teeth breaking the skin just left of the hollow of her throat, the pressure I felt at the base of my cock building toward something my biology has been constructing for weeks.
The professional discussion and the visceral wanting and the protective fury all occupy the same space, and the composure I'm maintaining shows cracks in my hands and the sweat between my shoulder blades.
Stellan watches me from the head of the table. His gaze tracks the white knuckles, the locked jaw, and whatever he reads in my face tells him his beta is a limited number of clinical observations away from clearing the table with his teeth.
He moves the conversation forward.
"Grimnir." One word. The room pivots. "The holdout wolves in the eastern barracks are a liability if they sit out a territorial defense, and an asset if they fight. Their leader is the omega we just discussed claiming for pack security." He lets the irony settle. "She also designed the mountain faction's operational infrastructure. Every approach route, every staging position, every communication channel."
"She'll fight," I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I intend, scraped raw by the effort of sitting at this table while wolves who've never heard the sound she makes when she trusts someone discuss the mechanics of claiming her. "She built those systems. She knows where the seams are. If Grimnir attacks,she's the only wolf in this fortress with operational knowledge of his local assets."
The silence that follows holds the weight of senior wolves reassessing the captive they've been discussing as breeding stock and realizing she's also the tactical advantage they need to survive the week.
Stellan makes the decision. The holdout wolves will be deployed as a combat unit under their own command structure. Revna will be brought to the war table for tactical planning. The claim will proceed before Grimnir's deadline.
The council adjourns. The senior wolves file out.
I remain at the table with the map and the message and the decisions that sit in the room like ordnance waiting for someone to carry them to the woman who needs to hear them.
I have to tell Revna. Not about the claiming order; she already knows that. About the war council's decisions, the deployment, the battle plan they need her to build, and the timeline that puts a claiming bite and a war on the same horizon.
I have to walk into my quarters and tell a woman whose worst fear came true yesterday that the next part of her life involves a battle fought over her body and a claim that will rewrite her biology permanently.
I have to tell her this and then ask her to choose it.
Because'I'm going to keep you'without her choosing to be kept makes me Grimnir. Makes me Korren. Makes me every wolf who's ever looked at an omega and seen a commodity instead of a woman.
She needs to understand something the war council didn't address, something the biology can't explain and Stellan's order doesn't cover.
I would never have let her go to Grimnir. Not if Stellan had marched me to the border himself. Not if the alpha command had brought me to my knees. The transfer was nevera real possibility, because somewhere between the wall and the debriefing table and the night she told me about the forge, I stopped being a wolf who follows orders and became a wolf who'd burn the hierarchy to ash before he let another male touch her. The biology didn't make that choice. The alpha in my blood didn't make that choice. I did.
Not the war council's strategic calculus. Not Signe's clinical projections. Me, choosing her, because she is the thing I want, and I have never wanted anything for myself before her.
The forge below counts the moments in hammer strikes.
