Chapter 4
EIRIK
My wolf has been trying to tell me something for two days, and I've been too busy bleeding to listen.
The message isn't complicated. He doesn't do complicated.
He does scent and sound and threat and hunger, and he's been running them all at full volume since Signe pulled the first stitch through my deltoid.
That's when I caught a thread of something underneath the herbs and the blood and the mineral bite of this cottage's stone walls.
I filed it under irrelevant because I was busy not dying, and he filed it under important and has been circling back to it every time she gets close enough to touch. This morning, my mind catches up.
She's changing the bandage on my shoulder when it happens. Her fingers are cold and precise against the wound margin, professional to the bone. He's tracking every point of contact with the focus and patience of a scent trail: the absolute certainty that this leads somewhere worth going.
The fur has slipped again. I haven't pulled it up. She hasn't commented on it, which tells me more about her discipline than any amount of clinical terminology.
Her fingers lift the old linen, and the air between us changes.
It's faint. Buried under the comfrey and calendula from the earlier poultice, under the copper residue of my own dried blood, under the herbal compound she carries like a second skin.
But my wolf doesn't care about the layers.
He's been sorting them for two days, and what's left after the subtraction is a frequency as familiar as my own name.
Omega.
The word arrives without drama. My wolf has known for longer than I have, and the knowing has been sitting in the back of my skull like a low hum I mistook for the blizzard.
She's omega. The healer who doubled her medication last night when she thought I was watching the fire, who can make the word "drink" sound like a clinical directive.
She's omega, and she's been hiding it long enough that the hiding has become the bones of her life.
I don't say anything.
The knowing is too new and too large. I'm not ready for what it means, and I've never been a wolf who says a thing before he's ready to stand behind it.
So, I hold still while she wraps the fresh bandage. The howl in my chest goes unanswered. I let her fingers finish their work without giving her any reason to look up from the wound and see what's on my face.
My left hand closes at my side. Loose. Just the fingers curling in, holding something I can't put down.
She doesn't notice. She's counting stitches.
The morning passes in the enforced intimacy of a single room with a single fire and a woman who treats shared space like occupied territory.
Every surface has a function. Every jar has a position.
Every movement she makes follows a pattern so precise that I can predict where she'll be in the room at any given moment based on the time of day and the stage of her routine.
She grinds compounds at dawn. She checks the fire at first light, adds a log if it's burned past the halfway mark. She eats standing, a mouthful of dried fruit and hard bread, chewing while she works.
She takes the suppressant when she thinks I'm not watching.
I'm always watching. I've seen the ritual more than once: the quick reach into the leather pouch, the small pill, the mouthful of cold water, the slight tightening of her throat as it goes down.
She hides the gesture inside the ordinary rhythm of tasks, but the hiding has a specific urgency that the rest of her routine doesn't carry.
I watch these things because watching is how I survive. Not her version of watching, with clinical labels and diagnostic frameworks. I read people like terrain: how they move through a space, where they pause, what they avoid, what draws them back.
Signe avoids the flower in the old registry. She's looked at it more than once this morning and redirected her attention each time, and the redirection is so fast and so practiced that a less observant man would miss it entirely.
I'm not a less observant man. I'm the man who knows what that flower is, and the knowledge sits alongside the omega secret and the three steps I couldn't close and the sound of Balric's blade finding my father's throat. My fingers are tight around all of it.
She makes broth again at midday. I eat it. My body needs the protein, and refusing food from a healer is a fight I'm not foolish enough to pick. The broth is good, competent, and unremarkable in its excellence. I tell her so.
"You don't need to compliment the broth," she says without looking up from her mortar. "It's venison and root vegetables. The recipe doesn't require praise."
"Everything requires praise. That's how you know someone's paying attention."
"I don't need to know you're paying attention. I can feel you cataloging me from across the room."
The accuracy of the observation makes me grin. She's focused on the pestle, not me, but she heard the grin anyway, because her shoulders do the thing I noticed yesterday: they go up a fraction, then correct. I'm getting close. She knows it. I know she knows it.
"You do that with everyone?" I ask. "The cataloging observation. Is that standard healer practice, or do you save the surveillance commentary for wolves who are too injured to leave?"
"Standard practice. I read bodies for a living."
"Must make social gatherings exhausting."
"I don't attend social gatherings."
"That explains the hosting skills."
She doesn't look up. But a tension appears at the corner of her mouth that isn't the usual controlled line, and it takes me a beat to realize she's fighting a sound. Not anger. Not irritation.
Her jaw is set against laughter that's trying to get out, and I can see the muscles working. The effort she's putting into keeping her face still is entirely disproportionate to the joke I just made, which was, at best, middling.
"Signe."
"Be quiet."
"Are you laughing?"
"I'm absolutely not laughing."
"Your jaw says otherwise."
The sound escapes before she can stop it. Short, sharp, startled out of her the way a bird startles from a branch. She clamps down on it instantly, her mouth pressing closed, her hands tightening on the pestle.
The look on her face when the silence returns isn't composure. It's alarm. The expression of a woman who has just heard a sound she'd forgotten she could make and isn't sure whether it came from her or from someone else entirely.
I watch the alarm flicker through her eyes and settle into guarded bewilderment, and I make a decision. Quiet. Absolute. The kind that starts in the wolf and reaches the man a breath later.
Making this woman laugh is more important than making her trust me.
Trust I can earn with time and consistency.
But the laugh is the thing she's lost without knowing it, and the sound of it cracking through her clinical armor is the most honest thing I've heard since the last conversation I had with my father.
I don't tell her any of this. I move on.
"Tell me about the flower," I say.
"Which flower?"
"The one from Drakfell territory. The one in your ledger."
"Drink your broth," she says, and the deflection is so smooth I almost admire it. Almost. But I've watched her avoid looking at that pressed flower all morning, and the avoidance has a quality that her other deflections don't carry. She's not protecting information. She's protecting hunger.
I let it go. I've got enough to carry for one morning, and I'm starting to learn that Signe gives more when she isn't being asked.
The hours pass. She grinds. I rest, or pretend to, while the wolf behind my ribs runs the omega frequency on a loop that grows louder with every hour of shared air.
The fire settles. The blizzard moans against the stone. The light through the shuttered window goes from grey to darker grey, and the cottage contracts around us as the sun drops and the fire becomes the only source of warmth.
I'm working out how to bring up the flower again when the shutter blows open.
The sound is a crack of wood against stone, sharp enough to break glass if there were glass to break.
My body is off the table before my mind finishes processing the noise, and the pain that detonates through my shoulder and chest is a secondary concern behind the primary one, which is that the wind didn't do this.
The latch is intact. It was opened from outside and released.
I'm between her and the window in the time it takes the cold air to reach the fire.
The position is instinct, my body choosing the placement before my mind catches up, and the instinct has a name I don't examine too closely: three steps.
I was three steps from my father and I was too slow.
I'm less than one step from her and I won't be too slow again.
Not tonight. Not for this woman who doesn't know what she is to my wolf and wouldn't accept the information if I told her.
The blizzard howls through the gap, snow driving sideways into the cottage, and the scent profile of the incoming air hits me with the efficiency of a system built for exactly this purpose.
Drakfell. At least two. Already moving away from the cottage, heading away through the storm.
They didn't attack because the weather is too bad or because there aren't enough of them or because they're scouts, not soldiers, and their job is to report back, not to engage. They tested the cottage. Checked who was inside. Found what they were looking for.
"Stay here," I tell her, and I'm already moving toward the window, fingers working the fur loose from my hips.
"What are you doing?"
"Going after them."
"You can barely stand."
"My wolf can do things my body can't."
I strip the fur and drop it on the table. No hesitation. The cold hits my skin with the force of a fist. The cold is a problem for the man, and the man is about to become faster, stronger, and better equipped to read the snow than any wounded human.