Chapter 7 #3
"All yours," he says, and holds out his arm.
The word lands like he's been lying on that cot all morning rehearsing the most efficient way to dismantle the professional distance I've been reconstructing ever since my hands were on him. I take his arm. My fingers find the suture line, and the contact sends his scent directly into my airway.
The suppressant mutes the response, but the muting is slower than it used to be. Underneath it, my wolf throws herself against the barrier with a hunger that makes my jaw tighten.
"Healing well," I say. "The shoulder has regained sufficient mobility. Another few days and the sutures come out."
"And then you lose your excuse."
I don't look up from the suture line. "I don't need an excuse. You're a patient."
"I was a patient." His voice drops half a register, and the sound of it vibrates against my fingertips where they're pressed to his skin. "Now I'm a packless alpha sitting in your infirmary because you haven't told me to leave."
"You're sitting in my infirmary because your lacerations aren't fully healed and your range of motion is still compromised."
"Nearly there. I heard you tell Gunnar."
"I wasn't aware my conversations with the beta were part of your recovery protocol."
"I wasn't listening." The grin arrives, the one that rearranges his face from handsome into dangerous, the one I cataloged in the cottage as a threat to my composure and have since reclassified as a threat to my suppressant. "Alpha hearing. Your voice carries."
"My voice was directed at Gunnar."
"And yet here I am, knowing my own prognosis." He watches my hands on his skin, and the watching has a weight to it that the medical context can't contain. "You changed something in your compound. I can smell it."
The observation is precise enough to sting. He's been breathing my air the way I've been breathing his, cataloging changes, tracking the decline neither of us has named out loud. Revna noticed the adjustment from across a worktable. Eirik has been lying in the middle of it since I put him there.
"I adjusted the concentration. Standard protocol."
"Standard protocol doesn't smell like you're losing a fight with your own skin." His voice drops. "Something's coming through, Signe."
The suture assessment is complete. His wounds have healed enough that the daily dressing changes are no longer medically necessary. The shoulder has regained sufficient mobility that the restricted-activity protocol can be downgraded from mandatory to advisory.
I could step back. The clinical justification for daily proximity has expired, and any continued contact would require a rationale I'm not prepared to construct.
I release his arm. I note the findings. I close the log.
"I'll take a look at it again tomorrow," I tell him.
"Why?"
The question is quiet and unhurried. It strips every professional framework I've built around these visits down to the bare architecture underneath.
He's not challenging me. He's asking me to say it, and the asking is more dangerous than a challenge would be because a challenge I can meet with authority and a question I can only meet with honesty or silence.
"Because the wounds need monitoring."
"The wounds are fine. You just said so." He leans forward, and the movement closes the distance between us to something my suppressant can't manage at this hour of the evening.
His scent thickens in the air between us, and my wolf hits the suppressant like a fist against glass, hard enough that I feel it in my spine. "Try again."
My mouth opens. The third excuse is right there, assembled and professional and ready to deploy. It dies on my tongue. His eyes are on mine, the gold flecks catching the lamplight, and the look on his face says he'll sit here all night dismantling every rationale I construct.
His left hand closes into the loose fist I've been tracking from the first night he collapsed against my threshold, the fist that holds whatever he isn't saying.
"Tomorrow, then," he says. And the way he says it makes the word sound like a promise I didn't agree to and can't refuse.
My hands are steady.
My pulse isn't.
I turn back to the worktable. The mortar and pestle sit where they've always sat. The herbs hang where they've always hung.
The infirmary is exactly the room it was yesterday, and the woman standing in it is not.
The distance between those two facts is the width of a hand pressed against unmarked skin, a mouth that almost smiled at Leif's dry observation, a heartbeat accelerating for reasons no compound in my pharmacopeia can address.
The pestle finds the mortar again. The sound fills the stone.
And behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him without turning around, Eirik hasn't moved. His breathing has changed, slower and deeper, carrying the cadence of someone who isn't going anywhere and has no intention of making this easier for either of us.
I grind. He breathes. And outside the fortress, on the northwestern ridge, wolves in Drakfell colors are watching the tree line.