Chapter 12 #2
"Not the way the emissary did. Nothing overt.
He looked at her the way he looked at every wolf in the hall, which is what made it worse.
He was reading the room, cataloging who matters, and he spent a fraction longer on the healer than the position warrants.
" Gunnar watches me process this. "Balric doesn't waste attention on wolves who aren't useful to him.
If he lingered on Signe, he's already working out how. "
The protective response isn't a decision.
It doesn't go through the part of me that weighs options or considers consequences or respects the fact that I'm a guest in someone else's fortress with no standing to protect anyone, including myself.
It goes through the part of me that stood three steps from my father and didn't move fast enough, and the part carries a debt I'll pay for the rest of my life.
Balric looked at her. My uncle, who kills with courtesy and calls it governance, turned his attention toward the woman whose omega bleeds through the suppressant every time I stand close enough. If the emissary caught even a trace of what I catch, Balric already has the information.
I'm not staying for asylum anymore. I'm staying for the woman in the infirmary with steady hands and a failing compound and no idea how much danger she's in. That's the reason now.
It's been the reason since I put my mouth on her body and didn't bite the bonding site because I want her shaking for it before I do.
Signe is in the infirmary when I arrive.
Her scent reaches me before I cross the threshold, and it's different now than it was this morning.
The suppressant is thinning again, the bitter herb smell fading at the edges.
Underneath it the omega pushes toward the surface with a persistence that my body tracks the way a wolf tracks prey: automatically, completely, without any interest in permission.
I've been tasting the omega beneath the compound since the cottage. After what happened between us, the taste is richer, closer, and the compound is losing the fight to bury it.
She's suturing a gash on a wolf's forearm, the kind of shallow laceration that comes from training gone slightly wrong.
Her hands are moving with the steady precision I've been watching since she first stitched my shoulder.
Thread through tissue, pull, knot, cut. The rhythm is the same rhythm it's always been.
Until it isn't.
Her left hand pauses at the apex of a stitch. The thread goes taut. Her fingers hold the needle at an angle that should be automatic, and for a breath the angle doesn't resolve. Then her scent shifts.
It's subtle. The bitter herb smell that covers the omega thins for a count of two, and the thing underneath pushes through with enough force that I taste it from across the room.
The patient doesn't notice. I notice. The needle finds its path and the suture closes clean.
She ties off, cuts, and reaches for the dressing with the same efficiency she brings to everything.
After the patient leaves, her left hand lifts toward the bonding site before she catches it and forces it back down. She goes straight to the cabinet where she keeps the formula, pulls the mortar to the worktable, and starts grinding without looking at me.
I don't say anything. She doesn't know I saw it.
The not-saying costs me more than the forge did.
The forge is where I go when I can't act.
This is the place where acting means crossing the room, pinning her wrists to the counter, making her look at me while I tell her that whatever is failing inside the compound she swallows every morning is failing faster than she's prepared for.
I can taste it in her scent every time the suppressant thins. The omega gets stronger by the day, and my wolf wants to answer it with every part of me that remembers what her skin tastes like under the compound.
I sit on her worktable instead. She tells me to get off her worktable. I don't.
"Balric was here," I tell her. "In the hall. In person."
Her hands still on the dressing she's folding. The stillness lasts a fraction too long before the folding resumes.
"I'm aware," she says. "I provided the medical assessment."
"And?"
"His cortisol management is exceptional. His resting output reads as genuine ease rather than controlled suppression, which makes him significantly harder to assess than the emissary." She folds another dressing. "He's more dangerous than his wolves."
"I know. He put a blade through my father at his own council table, and nobody saw it coming."
"Then you should understand why Stellan kept you out of the hall." She doesn't look up from the dressing. "You warped the stock in the forge. I can smell the scale on you from here. What would you have warped in the same room as your uncle?"
"Something that wouldn't grow back."
"Exactly." She sets the dressing down. "Stellan made the right call."
"Stellan is considering handing me back to him."
Her hands stop. The composure cracks for a fraction of a second before it reassembles, and the crack tells me more than anything she's said.
She didn't know. Gunnar didn't tell her.
"That won't happen," she says. The professional register is back, but the certainty underneath it is personal. Her scent spikes with something the compound can't bury fast enough.
She looks at me. Underneath the mask, the woman I've held is looking back.
The omega is thickening in the air between us, and she knows I'm catching it the same way she knows I caught it last time, and the time before that. The knowledge sits between us alongside the memory of what my mouth did the last time her scent got this strong.
"I'm not going anywhere," I tell her. "Balric can make his arguments. Stellan can consider them. The border can close. I'm not leaving this fortress, not without you."
"That isn't your decision," she says. Steady, measured, and the scent underneath it tells a different story.
"No. But it's what's happening."
She holds my gaze a beat longer than the distance between us permits, and the distance is small enough that I can count the pulse at her throat. The pulse contradicts everything her voice just said.
"Get off my worktable, Eirik."
I don't move. She doesn't make me.
Gunnar finds me in the corridor outside the infirmary after the fortress has gone quiet for the night. The beta's face is stripped of everything except the careful blankness he uses when he's delivering information he's already decided is accurate.
"The healer," he says. His voice is low enough that the stone won't carry it past the two of us. "Her scent has been off for days. I've been tracking it since the emissary's visit." He pauses. "I saw what happened when Revna's suppressant failed. The progression looks the same."
He doesn't ask what I intend to do about it. He doesn't need to. The information lands between us with the weight of a wolf who has seen this before and is telling me, without saying it, that the time I think I have is shorter than I think.
"How long?" I ask.
"I'm not the healer," Gunnar says. "But if it's following the same progression I watched before, you're looking at days."
He walks away. The corridor holds the silence where his words used to be, and in the infirmary behind the closed door, Signe is grinding compounds with steady hands and a scent that betrayed her once today and will betray her again tomorrow.
She'll adjust the dose. She'll refine the formula.
She'll treat the degradation like a clinical problem she can solve with enough precision, because that's what she does.
Her precision is the thing that's going to bury her.
She'll be measuring ratios and adjusting concentrations right up until the moment the compound fails completely and every wolf in the fortress turns to look at her at once.
The woman who saved my life is running out of time.
She doesn't know it yet.
Three steps from my father, and I was too slow. The distance between Signe's infirmary door and Balric's diplomatic smile is longer than three steps, but not by much.