Chapter 10
EIRIK
I've kept the secret for sixteen days. The weight of it has settled into the space behind my sternum like a stone I swallowed and can't pass. I'm not built for secrets.
Stellan carries them like currency, spending each one at the precise moment it buys the most. Gunnar carries them like weapons, cleaned and stored and ready.
I carry this one the way I carry everything: badly, loudly, with the growing certainty that the holding is doing more damage than the telling would.
She's in the infirmary when I find her. Not grinding, not organizing, not performing any of the rituals she uses to pretend she isn't waiting for me.
She's standing at the window with her back to the door and her braid over one shoulder, and the omega frequency coming off her is stronger than I've ever scented.
The dose she took this morning is losing ground. I can taste the failure in the air between the doorway and her spine, and the hum my wolf has been running since the cottage is getting harder to keep behind my teeth.
I close the door behind me. The latch catches with a sound that's small and final, and it makes her turn.
"I can't keep pretending I don't know," I say.
She knows what I mean. I can see the understanding hit her body before it reaches her face.
Her spine straightens. Her chin lifts. Her left hand twitches toward her throat, toward the bonding site, and she catches the motion and kills it before her fingers reach the skin.
The mask goes on. Not the fortress version, the one she wears for the pack. The deeper one. The one I've only seen twice, both times when someone got too close to the truth she's built her entire life around hiding.
"How long?" she says, and her voice is the professional register, the healer's voice, the one that turns questions into scalpels.
"Since the cottage. Since the first bandage change, when you leaned in and your formula slipped and I caught what was underneath it."
"And what do you intend to do with that information?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing." She repeats the word back to me and strips it clean. "A packless alpha with no territory, no allies, and no political standing discovers an unbound omega, and his answer is nothing."
"My answer is nothing."
"Your biology's answer isn't nothing. I can read your cortisol from across this room.
Your pupils are blown. Your respiration has increased since you walked through the door.
Your body is running a bonding assessment whether your mind agrees to it or not, and the assessment will reach the same conclusion every time because alpha-omega biochemistry doesn't negotiate. "
Every word lands. My jaw aches because I can feel my body doing exactly what she's describing.
My wolf is locked on the omega standing across the room with her chin lifted and her mouth delivering diagnoses I can't argue with.
Even angry, her mouth is the thing I can't stop looking at. Especially angry.
"You're right about the biology," I say. "You're wrong about the man."
"The man and the biology aren't separate systems. You know that. I taught you that, in this room, when I was foolish enough to think the lesson was academic."
"The lesson wasn't academic and we both know it.
" I take a step closer. One step. She doesn't retreat.
"You put your mouth on me in this room and called it clinical.
You kept me in this fortress and called it medicine.
You touched me last night and didn't notice until I pointed it out.
The reason you didn't notice is standing in front of you telling you he already knows. "
Her nostrils flare. The tell is small, involuntary, the wolf underneath catching my scent at close range and responding before the woman can lock it down.
"I didn't tell you because I wasn't ready," I say.
"Not because I was building leverage. Not because I was waiting for the right moment to use it.
Because I wanted one more day of you looking at me like a patient instead of a threat, and the wanting was selfish, and I know it was selfish, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend it was anything else. "
The honesty costs me. The sudden absence of the weight leaves a hollow that aches worse than the carrying did. My left hand closes at my side, the fingers curling into the loose fist that Signe reads the way she reads every other tell I can't control.
Her eyes drop to my fist before I even feel it close.
"You've been lying to me for sixteen days," she says.
I take another step. The infirmary isn't large. Two more and I'll be within arm's reach, and my body already knows which two steps it wants to take.
"I've been not telling you something. That's different."
"It isn't different."
"It's different because I'm telling you now."
I hold her gaze. Her eyes are steady, her posture locked, her chin at the angle that means she's running assessments faster than language can carry them.
"I'm telling you," I continue, "because I can't carry it anymore, and because Balric sent wolves to this fortress yesterday and they walked through rooms where you breathe, and because every time I walk into this infirmary the dose you took that morning is thinner than the day before, and I'm done watching you swallow that compound every morning and pretend it isn't killing you. "
The silence that follows is the heaviest I've ever stood in. Heavier than the silence after my father fell. Heavier than the silence in the mountains when I stopped running and realized no one was coming to help.
"You don't get to save me," she says. "I don't need saving. I've managed this since I was a girl without anyone knowing, and the fact that you know doesn't change the survival. It changes the risk."
"I'm not saving you. I'm telling you because the secret is rotting me from the inside and I can't carry it another day without it eating through."
"And what happens after you stop lying? What happens when the honest packless alpha with the omega secret sits in this infirmary every night and his biology runs the bonding assessment you can't override?
What happens when Stellan asks you directly, because he will, and your face does what your face always does, which is tell the truth whether you want it to or not? "
I'm close enough to smell the dose failing on her skin. Close enough to see the pulse hammering at the base of her throat, right next to the spot her left hand covers when she thinks no one is watching.
My wolf wants to put his mouth there. My hands want to follow. The wanting is a physical pressure that has nothing to do with the argument and everything to do with the woman delivering it from a range where her compound can't hold.
"I won't tell Stellan," I say. "I won't tell anyone. The secret is yours. I'm just done pretending I don't know it."
"You can't unknow it."
"No."
"And you can't unfeel what knowing does to your biology."
"No."
"Then nothing has changed. You've just moved the lie from your mouth to mine."
She hits me.
Open-handed, across the jaw, with the precise force of a woman who has spent her entire life controlling what her body does and has just lost the ability to stop it. The crack of her palm against my face is louder than anything either of us has said, and the quiet afterward is absolute.
I don't move. I don't catch her wrist. I don't step back.
The place where her palm connected is burning, and the burn has nothing to do with the impact.
Her skin hit mine, omega to alpha, and my wolf doesn't understand the difference between a slap and a caress.
He just knows she touched me, and the touch is lighting up every nerve path between my jaw and the base of my spine.
She stares at the hand that hit me as if it belongs to someone else.
Her fingers are trembling. Her breathing has gone ragged, and the omega underneath the suppressant is pouring off her skin with a clarity that tells me the dose isn't just failing.
It's gone. Whatever control she had left, she just shattered it herself.
"I deserved that," I say.
"You deserved worse." Her voice is shaking.
Not with tears. With fury so compressed it's vibrating in her chest the way my wolf vibrates in mine.
"You sat on my worktable and talked about flowers and forges and your father's mountain routes, and you knew.
Every time I ground my formula, every time I adjusted the dose, every time I told myself the compound was holding, you were sitting there knowing it wasn't, and you said nothing. "
The angrier she gets, the more her omega scent increases.
Her heartbeat is driving the suppressant out of her system faster than any missed dose could, and the scent rolling off her is undercutting every word she's saying.
She's telling me she doesn't need me. Her scent is screaming the opposite, and the contradiction is so raw that I have to lock my jaw against the sound my wolf is making.
"I know."
"You let me believe I was hidden."
"I know."
"That's worse than telling."
"I know."
Each answer costs me more than the last. My wolf is clawing at my throat, and the omega flooding the space between us is so thick I can feel it settling into my lungs like smoke.
The silence is different this time. Not the weight of unspoken truth.
The place where the anger has burned through and what's left isn't composure or clinical distance or any of the defenses she's spent her life building.
What's left is the woman. Just the woman, looking at me with eyes that hold nothing at all, and the absence of everything is more frightening than anything I've seen since my father's blood on a council table.