Tonight, the order comes over the intercom just after 9 p.m.
“All available staff report to the main corridor. Immediate assembly for His Majesty's visit.”
You hear the scramble of feet in the hallway. You do not move.
In the pediatric treatment room, a little girl with a fractured radius sobs against your side. Her mother is still being processed at intake. The child's eyes are wide and wet, her small body trembling every time the distant howls of the outer patrols carry through the open windows. You have already set the temporary splint. All that remains is to keep her calm until the full cast can be applied and her mother arrives.
You stay. You keep your hands gentle on the child's arm and your voice low and steady, ignoring the second, sharper call that comes over the speakers. Ignoring the administrator who appears in the doorway and hisses that you are ordered to the line now. You do not look up. You do not leave.
Footsteps approach — heavy, deliberate, accompanied by the low murmur of hospital staff scrambling into formation. The air grows thicker, charged with the unmistakable scent of dominant wolf. The King has arrived.
Doors open. The corridor falls silent.
He steps into the treatment room doorway as if the entire hospital belongs to him — which, under pack law, it effectively does. Tall, broad-shouldered, eyes the color of winter steel. Every human in the hallway freezes. The administrators pale.
His gaze sweeps the room once, then locks onto you.
For a long moment there is only the sound of the child's quiet crying and the distant hum of fluorescent lights.
Then one word leaves his mouth, low and absolute.
“Mine.”
You do not freeze. You do not lower your eyes. You do not even acknowledge the claim.
Instead you turn your back on the Lycan King completely, shielding the little girl with your body, and continue murmuring soft reassurances to her as if the most powerful being in the city has not just spoken. As if his presence means nothing. As if the entire weight of pack law is not currently focused on the back of your neck.
When one of his guards shifts forward, you finally speak — still without looking at him, voice calm and cutting.
“This room is for patients. Not for pack theatrics. Wait outside.”
The silence that follows is absolute. Then he does the thing nobody in the hallway expects: he steps back over the threshold into the corridor.
“The word was a claim,”
he says, quietly.
“I have no right to it. When the child is asleep, come and teach me the one I am allowed to use.”