Chapter 14 #2
"Both." The word lands clean. "My uncle is sitting on a territory that borders yours, and he'll be a worse neighbor than my father ever was.
You need an allied border. The Ashwood and Greymoor packs need a Drakfell that doesn't answer to a wolf who murdered his way into the alpha's chair.
I need my home back, and I'm going to take it.
When I do, the territory that borders your northwestern ridge will be run by a wolf who owes you a debt for sheltering him when he had nothing. "
I stop. The next words are the ones that matter, and the mattering is why they need to come right.
"She needs a claiming bond before every unmated alpha in range decides she's worth fighting for." The words come out hard and clean, because they're true. An exposed omega without a mark is a target, and Stellan knows it better than anyone in this room. "I'm the wolf standing between her and that."
Signe's gaze catches mine. What I find there isn't gratitude. It's the hard, clinical precision of a woman who just heard the wolf next to her stake a claim on her future in front of the pack alpha, and is deciding whether to let it stand.
She lets it stand.
The restraint of not saying more takes everything I have.
My wolf is clawing at my throat, every instinct I own demanding that I make the rest of the case: that the pack's best healer has been serving this fortress with more skill and dedication than any wolf alive and the fact that she's omega doesn't diminish a single day of it.
I want to say all of that. I want to say more. I want to tell this alpha that the woman standing against his wall has been carrying a weight that would have crushed most wolves, and if Stellan can't see the value in what she's built then the loss is his.
I don't say any of it. Because that's her case to make, not mine.
She's the wolf who told me to get off her worktable, who hit me before she kissed me, who finished a surgery with her hands shaking because the steadiness that defines her isn't in her muscles but in her training.
She doesn't need me to argue her competence.
She needs me to shut up long enough for her to do it herself, which is the hardest thing I've ever done in a room where the silence is trying to bury someone I'd die for.
Signe's expression changes. The change is small enough that Stellan might miss it, but I don't miss it because I've spent weeks learning the difference between the mask and the woman.
She didn't correct me. She didn't add a qualifier or strip the claim back to clinical language.
She let it stand, and the letting shows in the tightness at the corners of her mouth.
Stellan watches both of us for a long moment. His gaze moves between the packless alpha who just made a territorial claim and the healer who just told him the foundation of their professional relationship has been a performance.
The silence stretches. Signe breaks it with the quiet precision of a woman who has decided she's done letting other wolves frame her situation.
"The fact that no wolf in this fortress detected what I am for years is evidence of my competence, not a reason to question it."
Her voice carries the quiet authority she deploys with patients who argue about their treatment, with patrol wolves who resist her orders, with anyone who has ever mistaken her composure for deference.
"I'm still the best healer in three territories. That hasn't changed. My designation doesn't diminish a single day of service I've provided to this pack."
Stellan holds her stare. The acknowledgment, when it comes, costs him nothing.
"No," he says. "It doesn't. What has changed is the political landscape of this fortress, and you'll navigate it under my terms or you'll navigate it somewhere else."
"Understood."
"The Drakfell situation." Stellan turns to me, and the alpha assessment strips away everything I just said and weighs the strategic core that was underneath it.
"If you reclaim the territory, the Northwestern border stabilizes.
If you fail, I've sheltered a packless alpha who brought Balric's wolves to my gate. "
"I won't fail."
"You failed your father."
The study holds the words the way stone holds cold.
Stellan doesn't blink. He doesn't soften. He lets the sentence sit between us with the full weight of a man who chose it for maximum damage and isn't sorry.
My left fist locks hard enough to feel the bones grind. My jaw locks. My wolf goes still with the focused silence that usually precedes violence, and the violence sits right behind my teeth waiting for the permission my body won't give it.
He's testing whether I'll lose control, whether the wolf who warped stock at the forge when Balric arrived can hold his composure when the man who holds his future puts a finger on the rawest wound available.
I hold.
"I was three steps away," I say. My voice is steady. "I won't be three steps away again."
Stellan holds my gaze. Whatever he's looking for, he finds it, because his attention releases with the finality of an assessment completed and filed.
"Reclaim your territory. Secure it. Then we discuss a claiming."
The condition lands clean. He's not saying no. He's saying earn it. Build something worth taking her to before you put your teeth on her throat.
"She comes with me," I say. "When I take Drakfell back, Signe comes with me."
Stellan's expression doesn't change. "Retake the territory first. Then we'll see who goes where."
He turns back to his desk. "Gunnar will brief you on the border intelligence.
The Drakfell reclamation becomes a strategic priority for this pack as of tonight.
" He picks up a piece of correspondence, the gesture a dismissal that carries the weight of every future conversation compressed into a single movement.
"The healer's designation is pack business.
It stays inside these walls until I decide otherwise. "
We leave the study. The corridor is empty, and the emptiness is Gunnar's work. The stone is cold and quiet, and our footsteps echo in the space between us, Signe's measured and mine too loud because I've never learned to walk through a fortress without filling the space I'm moving through.
The forge sound reaches us from below. Leif's hammer, still falling. The constancy of it should be comforting, and it is, in the way that a heartbeat is comforting when you've just been told your chest is still intact.
We don't speak. The silence between us isn't the weighted quiet of Stellan's study or the desperate hush of the infirmary floor. It's the silence after a storm, when the wreckage is visible but the damage hasn't been measured yet.
Signe's left hand lifts.
The movement is automatic, reflexive, the gesture I've watched her repeat since before I understood what it meant.
Her fingers press flat against the spot just left of the hollow of her throat, the diagonal toward the clavicle, covering the place where a claiming bite would go.
She presses flat against unmarked skin the way she's been pressing flat against unmarked skin for years.
She's been guarding that place on her body for longer than she's known me.
The guarding is so deep in her muscle memory that she does it walking down a corridor with a man whose mouth was on that exact patch of skin less than an hour ago.
The doing is automatic. The automatic is the thing that guts me, because it means the reflex doesn't belong to anything I've done.
It belongs to the years before me. All the years she spent alone, pressing her own fingers against the place where someone else's teeth were supposed to go, holding the absence closed like a wound she was trying to keep from bleeding.
My left fist closes at my side. She doesn't see it. She's looking straight ahead, walking with the same disciplined pace she's maintained through this fortress since she became its healer.
My wolf wants to pull her fingers away from the claiming site and replace them with my mouth. Every instinct I own wants to pin her against the corridor wall and put my teeth where her hand is and make the unmarked skin a territory that belongs to me.
The wanting sits in my jaw like a held breath, and the held breath is going to cost me sleep tonight and every night until the place she's guarding carries my scent instead of her fear.
I walk beside her. I've never practiced a harder patience, because patience requires accepting that the thing I want is close enough to taste and too important to take.
The fortress settles around us. The forge hums below. The mountain holds above. The corridor stretches between where a healer and a packless alpha walk side by side through the aftermath of the worst night of her professional life.
Where she is, that's where my future starts. Reclaiming Drakfell is how I build a home worthy of her.