Chapter 16
EIRIK
She runs. I watch her from the corridor where Gunnar's wolves haul the last of the Drakfell prisoners toward the cells, and I watch the way a wolf watches something it can't chase, with every muscle locked against the forward motion its body craves. Every instinct I own demands that I go after her
I don't.
Someone gets a cloak around her shoulders before she reaches the great hall. She catches the edges together without breaking stride and keeps going, through the hall, out the gate, and onto the mountain trail above the tree line.
No one tries to stop her. Neither do I.
They wouldn't dare. The woman who just cleared a corridor in wolf form with surgical precision has earned the kind of passage that doesn't require asking.
She's spent years making sure no wolf could know what she was. Now every wolf in this fortress knows the moment she passes him.
If she needs a mountain between herself and all those noses, I can give her that.
For now.
Gunnar catches my arm before I follow. "Balric's attack force is in our cells, but that doesn't mean the ridge is clear.
" His voice carries the flat urgency of a beta who has just repelled an incursion from that direction.
"She's heading toward Drakfell territory, alone, producing a scent that every wolf within range can track. "
"I know."
"Then stop her."
"You've met her." I pull free. "If she's going, I'm going. And anything between here and that cottage that catches her scent is going to have to come through me first."
Every instinct I carry wants to close the distance between her body and mine before she reaches the cottage.
The man overrides the wolf, the way the man has been overriding the wolf since the day I collapsed against her door.
The override costs more tonight than it ever has.
The cost shows in my stride: too long, too fast, eating the mountain trail with the urgency of a body that knows patience is the right choice and hates it.
The urgency isn't only about the woman. It's about the exposed ridge above the tree line where Balric's scouts were running days ago, and the omega scent she's trailing behind her like a signal fire.
The cottage sits in the fold of the ridge the way it sat the night I bled against its door, the stone walls dark against the snow.
Smoke is already threading from the chimney, which means she lit the fire before anything else, which means her hands were steady enough for flint and steel, which means whatever's breaking inside her hasn't reached her fingers yet.
I stop at the door. I don't knock. I open it.
The cottage smells the way it smelled the first night.
Dried herbs from the ceiling beams, the mineral bite of stone, the banked warmth of a fire built for function rather than comfort.
She's at the worktable. The mortar sits in front of her, and the pestle is moving.
The grinding fills the cottage with the same measured rhythm she's maintained since the first morning I woke up in this room with her hands inside my shoulder.
Her fingers are shaking. The tremor runs through the pestle into the mortar, and the sound of the grinding is wrong because of it, jagged instead of smooth. I can smell the alpine bloodroot, the glacier moss. She's preparing a suppressant.
She knows it won't hold. She's the smartest wolf I've ever met, and the smartest wolf I've ever met knows that the fortress watched her fight in wolf form, watched her stand naked in a corridor producing omega scent, No compound erases what the pack already witnessed. She knows that.
She's grinding anyway. The pestle moves because her hands don't know what else to do, because the rhythm is the only thing she's had since her mother taught her the stroke, because the grinding is how Signe holds herself together when the thing she's holding together has already come apart. The sound isn't strategy. It's grief.
I cross the cottage and sit on the worktable beside the mortar. The same place I've sat every time I've watched her work, the place she's told me to get off and I haven't, the place where the territory between us has been negotiated in inches since the night I woke up with her hands in my shoulder.
She doesn't tell me to move. She doesn't stop grinding. The pestle keeps its broken rhythm.
"You know it won't work." I keep my voice level. Not a command. An observation, the same kind she'd make over a patient whose prognosis she's already determined.
"I know." Her voice is flat. Controlled. The mask rebuilt from whatever raw materials she found between the corridor and this cottage. The pestle doesn't stop.
"Then why are you grinding?"
"Because my hands need to be doing something, and the something I've done my entire life is this." The flatness cracks for a fraction of a second. She seals it. "What do you want, Eirik?"
Everything. The word sits behind my teeth with a weight I can feel in my jaw. Everything, and the everything is the problem, because what I want and what I need align so perfectly that any wolf with strategic intelligence would question whether the wanting is real or manufactured.
"I want to tell you the truth." I watch her hands on the pestle. "All of it. And then I want you to decide what to do with it."
The pestle slows. She doesn't look at me.
"Day four." My voice comes out rough, stripped of the charm and the humor and the deflection I use to fill spaces that get too quiet.
"I knew for certain on day four. The suppressant was failing, and the scent underneath it came through while you were changing the dressing on my shoulder.
My wolf knew before my brain caught up."
Her jaw tightens. The pestle stops.
"I didn't tell you. Not because I was protecting you, and not because I was strategizing.
I wasn't ready for the conversation that comes after knowing, because the conversation ends with you either choosing me or not, and I wanted more days before I found out which.
" I hold steady. "That's selfish. I know it's selfish.
I'm not going to dress it up as something else. "
"Your cortisol is elevated." Her voice is quiet. Clinical. She's reading my biology from across the worktable, and the reading is a power move disguised as observation. "Your pupils are dilated. Your breathing is faster than your posture suggests it should be."
"I'm about to say the part that might cost me everything. The body knows before the brain does."
"Then say it."
"I need an omega bond to reclaim Drakfell.
An alpha with a bonded omega commands biological authority a packless alpha can't replicate.
" I don't flinch from it. "I can't separate what I want from what I need.
The wanting and the needing are the same thing, and I stopped trying to separate them the night you put your mouth on me and said it was on your terms."
She folds her arms. "So every instinct you have, every political need, every biological imperative is pointing you at the omega sitting across the worktable from you. And you expect me to trust that there's something underneath all of that which exists independent of what you'd gain."
"No." I meet her gaze. "I expect you to look at the evidence and make your own diagnosis. You're better at reading wolves than any wolf alive. Read me."
Something shifts behind her expression. The clinical assessment that has been running since I sat down reaches a conclusion I can't see.
"I'll take Drakfell back without the bond," I tell her.
"I'll do it the hard way, alone, with no biological authority and no omega at my side.
The territory is mine by blood, and blood is enough if I'm willing to bleed for it.
" I hold her gaze. "But that's not why I'm sitting on your worktable.
I want to know what your laugh sounds like when you stop catching it.
I want to be the scent you can't scrub out of this table.
I want to be the variable your formula doesn't account for, the wolf who knows what you sound like when you stop performing and won't let you forget he heard it. "
Her expression doesn't change. But her arms have dropped to her sides.
"I'm telling you I'll leave." The offer sits in my open palms. "If you want me gone, I'll walk out of this cottage and down the mountain.
I'll take my territory back alone. The offer is real.
I'd rather take the harder road than take anything from you that you don't give me with your hands steady and your eyes open. "
She doesn't answer.
The silence fills the cottage. She's assessing me with the thoroughness she brings to a compound fracture, and the assessment takes time, because the damage is extensive and the woman doing the reading doesn't trust easy diagnoses.
I stand. I walk to the door. I open it, and the mountain air hits my face with the cold clarity of a man who's just offered the only good thing in his life and is about to find out whether the offering was enough.
I close the door behind me. I sit on the ground with my back against the cottage wall, and I wait.
The waiting is the worst thing I've ever done. Worse than the truth, because the truth was action and action is what I know. The waiting is nothing. The waiting is the space between the offer and the answer, and the space is filled with every version of the future I can't control.
She'll grind the compound and I'll walk down the mountain alone. She'll grind the compound and I'll lose her. She'll grind the compound and the wolf she freed in that corridor will vanish behind a formula that won't hold. I won't be enough.
The cold settles into my bones. The mountain holds above the tree line, indifferent to the man sitting against a cottage wall with his hands open and his throat still feeling the ghost of her gaze.