Chapter 9 #3
My wolf lunges at the barrier again. The formula absorbs the impact, but the absorption isn't clean.
The dose is thinner tonight than it was this morning.
I can feel the frequency underneath it pressing toward the surface, and the pressing has a quality I don't like: persistent, rhythmic, tidal.
Pressure that doesn't need to break through. It just needs to outlast me.
Eirik drops onto the examination table with the graceless authority of a wolf who has claimed every surface in this room through sheer repetition.
His legs hang over the edge. His hands grip the sides.
He takes up exactly as much space as he wants to, which is more than the table offers, and the overflow is deliberate.
"They sent an errand boy," he says.
"They sent a trained diplomat with a formal extradition document."
"An errand boy with a nice vocabulary and a document that isn't worth the paper it's written on.
" His jaw is tight. The frustration isn't banked or contained.
It radiates off him the way his pine-and-snow does: filling the room, filling the air I'm breathing, making the formula work harder with every inhale.
"I should've been in that room. My uncle sends wolves to demand my head and I'm running the perimeter like a good little patrol wolf while Stellan handles my problem for me. "
"Stellan handled a diplomatic threat to his territory. Your problem was a footnote."
"My problem is the reason they came."
"Your problem is the reason you're alive and sitting on my examination table instead of in a Drakfell cell." I pick up the compress roll from the supply shelf, not because I know he needs it yet but because my hands want occupation. "You're welcome, by the way."
His gaze snaps to mine. The frustration is still there, but something else comes in behind it: the focused, predatory attention he turns on me when I say something that gets past the anger and lands where he actually lives.
The attention has weight. Intent. A wolf deciding the interesting thing in the room isn't the political crisis but the woman holding the compress roll.
"I heard," he says. "You told Stellan my care was ongoing.
That my injuries require continued monitoring.
" He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and the lean halves the space between us.
"My injuries healed weeks ago, Signe. You know it.
I know it. Stellan knows it. What exactly are you monitoring? "
"Your inability to follow medical direction. It's chronic."
"Your inability to discharge me. Also chronic.
" His mouth pulls at one corner, not a smile but the shape of one, the expression he wears when he's about to say something I won't be able to deflect with a diagnosis.
"What are you going to tell him when the next delegation comes?
The wounds are gone. The excuse is gone.
What's the diagnosis that keeps a healthy alpha in a healer's infirmary past any medical justification? "
The answer is a space I'm not willing to open.
He's sitting near enough that I can count the pulse beats in his throat, near enough that I can smell the sweat cooling under the pine resin on his skin.
My wolf is tracking his heartbeat, involuntarily, constantly.
It's the fixated attention of an omega whose formula is failing and whose biology has already chosen its target.
"Roll your shoulder," I say instead. "The left one."
"Why?"
"Because you winced when you sat down, and you're favoring it, and you don't favor injuries unless they're bad enough to override your preference for pretending nothing hurts."
He rolls the shoulder. The motion catches halfway, and the muscle spasm is visible through the skin: the deltoid contracting against a trauma it can't accommodate.
"Training yard earlier," he says. "One of the patrol wolves caught me on the turn."
"Take off your tunic."
He pulls it over his head, and the pine and snow trapped against his skin floods the room. Underneath, the alpha baseline runs constant: the specific biochemical signature my wolf has been cataloging since the cottage, the one that makes the formula work harder every time he's within arm's reach.
I keep my focus on the shoulder because focusing on the shoulder is the only option that keeps my hands professional. The alternative is the healed scars from his arrival mapped across his chest, the way firelight catches the lines of muscle beneath skin that runs fever-warm.
The alternative is the memory of what he felt like under my mouth in this same room.
The sounds he made when my hands stopped being professional and started being something else entirely.
The memory is vivid, specific, precisely the kind of sensory data that the suppressant is supposed to flatten into irrelevance. The suppressant isn't doing its job.
I press my fingers into the bruise without warning him. The contusion runs deep across the posterior deltoid, the tissue swollen and tender, an impact injury from a wolf who wasn't defending and should have been.
"You let him hit you," I say.
"I didn't let him do anything."
"I saw you. You dropped your guard on the left because you were thinking about the meeting instead of the fight. The bruise pattern is consistent with an undefended strike. You took this hit because your head was in the meeting and your body was in the training yard."
He looks at me over his shoulder. The angle puts his face near mine, near enough that I can see the muscle working in his jaw and the challenge sitting in his expression like a dare. "You can tell all that from a bruise."
"I can tell all that from you. You're not subtle."
"And you're touching me."
My hands go still on his skin. He's right. The examination stopped being purely clinical somewhere between reaching for him and realizing I hadn't wanted to let go. I know exactly when a healer's touch becomes something else.
Apparently knowing doesn't prevent it.
My bare fingers are pressed against the curve of his shoulder. The contact is skin to skin, and the omega underneath the suppressant is drinking the warmth like water.
I don't pull away. Pulling away would be an admission, and I don't make admissions. I press harder into the bruise instead, and the sound he makes is low and short and carries a vibration I can feel through my fingertips.
"Ice tonight," I say. "Compression tomorrow. No overhead training for three days."
"Three days."
"Two if you stop letting patrol wolves hit you because you're too busy being angry to pay attention to your own body."