Page 56 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
I walk down from the ridge. The distance between us shrinks with each step, and each step is a decision, a deliberate act of a woman who has spent her life being moved by forces larger than herself and is choosing, for the first time, to move toward something instead of away.
Torben watches me come. He doesn't move. He stands in the wreckage of the battle he fought for me, blood drying on his skin and nothing between his body and the mountain air, and he waits, because the wolf who said'I'm going to keep you'understands that keeping means nothing if she doesn't choose to be kept.
I stop in front of him, close enough to touch, close enough to see the grey of his eyes, steady and wrecked and waiting. I can smell the blood and the combat and the alpha underneath both, the scent that has been rewriting my chemistry since the first breath I took of him through stone. I can see the evidence of his body's readiness, the alpha arousal that mirrors mine, and the pull between us is so strong that standing still takes more effort than any tactical calculation I've ever run.
"Not because of the heat," I say, and my voice is steady in a way the rest of me is not. "Before it takes the choice away. I want you to know it's me." My left hand lifts to the hollow of my throat, fingers settling on the bonding site, the involuntary tell made fully conscious for the first time. "Not the omega. Me."
His hand lifts to cover mine. His palm presses against my fingers, against the bonding site, and the touch holds the same certainty he brings to everything that matters. There is blood on his knuckles and warmth beneath.
"I know," he says, and the two words hold the full weight of a man who wanted this badly enough to commit treason and fight an alpha and stand naked in a valley full of blood and not ask, because asking would have been another cage, and he has spent all this time learning that cages are not the way to keep her.
The heat pulses at the base of my spine, closer now, and I let it come. The choice is made.
18
TORBEN
She chooses me before the heat steals the choosing, and the weight of being chosen deliberately, with clear eyes and a strategist's full awareness of the cost, is heavier than any order Stellan ever gave me.
We don't make it back to the fortress with dignity. One of the senior wolves who held the reserve position in human form tosses me a cloak on the battlefield, and I wrap it around my waist while Revna walks beside me through the wreckage of the engagement, her scent pouring off her in waves that make every wolf we pass lower their head and step aside. The omega pheromones are thick enough that Signe intercepts us at the fortress gate with a healer's bag and a single instruction: "Get inside. Lock the door. Don't come out until I tell you."
"Romantic," Revna says.
"Clinical," Signe corrects, already pressing a waterskin and wrapped food into my free hand. "You'll need both. The heat will run in waves, with lucid intervals between. The intervals get shorter as the cycle progresses. Stay hydrated. Eat when you can." She looks at me with the flat assessment of a healer who has watched this biology play out before and knows what comes next. "The knot will form when the cycle peaks. Neither of youhas experienced it. It will be intense and it will last. Don't fight the lock."
"You realize you're giving knotting instructions to a war counselor and a man who just won a dominance fight," Revna says. "We can figure out the mechanics."
Signe's mouth twitches. "Eat the food, Revna."
The walk through the fortress is the longest of my life. Revna is beside me, close enough that her arm brushes mine with each step, and every point of contact sends a jolt through my nervous system that makes my cock strain against the cloak I'm barely wearing. Her scent is intensifying in real time, the heat building toward the first wave, and the omega pheromones pouring off her skin draw the attention of every wolf we pass.
I put my hand on her lower back and the touch is possessive and public and entirely insufficient. I want to pin her against the corridor wall and bury my face in her throat and breathe her in until the distinction between her scent and my lungs disappears. I want to pick her up and carry her because the pace she's walking is too slow for a man whose biology is screaming that his omega is minutes from the first wave and needs to be behind a locked door and under him before it hits.
I do neither. I walk. My jaw aches from clenching. She glances up at me once, reads the strain in my face, and her mouth curves with the satisfaction of a woman who knows exactly what she's doing to the wolf beside her and is enjoying every second of it.
The corridor to our quarters is empty. Signe cleared it, or word spread faster than we walked. The door closes behind us and I throw the bolt, and the sound of the lock engaging is the same sound that has measured our days since the beginning, except this time the lock keeps the world out instead of keeping her in.
Revna stands in the middle of the room, arms wrapped around herself, and the flush across her chest has spread to her throat and the skin below her ears. Her eyes have gone dark at the edges, the pupils blown wide, and her scent fills the space between us with a concentration that makes my vision narrow to her and nothing else. The omega biology is running full open, every pheromone receptor in my body firing at once, and the alpha imperative that has been building since the first shared breath through stone hits its terminal velocity.
"How long?" she asks, and I can hear the heat in her voice already, a roughness underneath the control, the omega rising like a tide.
"Hours."
She nods. Holds my gaze. The strategist is still in there, behind the dark eyes and the flushed skin and the scent that is making coherent thought increasingly optional. The woman who said'not the omega, me'is making sure I see her before the biology takes the wheel.
I see her.
"Then come here," she says.
The first wave takes her before I cross the room.
She bends at the waist, hands bracing on the edge of the bed, and the sound she makes is low and involuntary, the desperation of an omega whose heat has arrived after years of suppression. The intensity is magnified by the duration of the denial. Signe warned us about this: the chemistry burning hotter because the body has been denied its cycle for over a decade and the accumulated biological pressure has nowhere to go but through.
I'm behind her in two strides. My hands find her hips and the contact sends a shudder through both of us, the scent-loop slamming open at full capacity. Her omega scent spikes so hard the room narrows to the two of us and the bed and the space between, and my cock is harder than it's been in my life,straining against the rough fabric of the borrowed cloak that I strip off without looking where it falls.
"Don't be careful," she says, and the words come out ragged, her fingers white-knuckled on the bed frame. "Don't be tender. Don't be whatever you were this morning. That was beautiful and I'll want it again, but right now I need you to stop thinking and start fucking me before I lose the ability to tell you what I want."
The permission detonates something that the last several weeks of restraint have been holding in check. The alpha that my biology has been building, the territorial, possessive, primal wolf that has been straining against the leash of the man I was trained to be, snaps the leash and surges forward.
