Page 13 of The Iron Alpha

She can. We both can. The slick, rhythmic sound of my cock moving inside her filling the chamber alongside the crackle of the fire and her broken exhales. Her face turns away. Her teeth find the fur beneath her head, biting down, and the flush that crawls from her chest to her throat is visible even in the dim light.

Then she turns back. Looks at me. Directly, with intention, with an expression I'm not prepared for. Something quieter than hatred and worse than defiance: a recognition, naked and unguarded, as if she's seeing through every layer of control I've built between us and finding the man underneath.

For one uncontrolled heartbeat I feel completely exposed, stripped down to something I haven't shown anyone in years, and the bond translates that exposure into a vulnerability so sharp it borders on pain. My rhythm falters. One missed beat. I recover, but she saw it. She saw it the same way she saw my hand shake during the oral, and now she has two cracks in my armor instead of one. I have the sick certainty that this woman is collecting my weaknesses like weapons she'll use when the time is right.

I hook my hand under her knee and push her leg higher, spreading her wider, burying myself deeper, using force to bury what just happened, to drown the exposure in the physical, in the thing I can control. The headboard thuds against the stone wall with each thrust. The bond is a furnace. Every point of contact between our bodies feeds it, and the heat is building in the base of my spine with a pressure that demands release.

My wolf wants the knot. The urge is a roar behind my ribs, the primal drive to lock inside her and hold her there until the bond has finished what it started. All I have to do is choose it. One decision and I'm buried in her, sealed, impossible to separate, and she will feel every pulse of me for as long as it lasts.

I don't. The knot is mine to give, and I'm not giving it tonight. Tonight she gets the lesson. The knot is something else entirely, and she's nowhere near ready for what it would mean.

She gets close. I feel it through the bond before her body shows it: the tightening deep inside her, the heat concentrating, the tremor building in her thighs where they grip my hips. Her pulse hammers against my chest where our bodies are pressedtogether, and her back arches, and for a handful of strokes she's on the edge of giving me something she'll never be able to take back. Her inner muscles flutter around my cock, her body coiling toward a release she hasn't given permission for.

She fights it. I feel that too. The clench of her fists above her head, her wrists twisting against the rope as she forces her breathing to slow, dragging herself back from the edge through sheer will. Her body shakes with the effort. Every muscle locked against what I'm doing to her, and she holds. She holds.

Good. Watching her war with her own body is worth more than the surrender would have been. She'll remember this. Not what I did to her, but what she almost gave me. I don't need to take it from her. I just need to make sure she knows I could have.

I finish inside the next minute, pulling out at the last moment, spending myself against her thigh in hot, pulsing streaks. My cock jerking against her skin, my breath ragged, my hand still pinning her wrists. The release hits harder than I expected, and for a span of heartbeats my vision whites out and my forehead drops against her collarbone and I'm not the alpha or the builder or the strategist. I'm just a man emptied against a woman who hates me, and the silence that follows is total.

What I won't do is leave anything inside her that she can interpret as permanent. That's for later. When the lessons have been absorbed. When the woman underneath me has stopped pretending she doesn't want what I'm giving her.

I let go of her wrists. She pulls them against her chest immediately, curling inward, turning her back to me. Every line of her is rigid—shoulders, spine, the locked muscles of her legs—and the ragged pull of each inhale tells me she's closer to breaking than she has been since Dover.

I get off the bed. Adjust my breeches, re-lace them. I cross the room and stand at the door with my hand on the iron latch.

She doesn't look at me. She's curled on her side on the furs, her wrists pressed against her sternum, her hair a dark tangle across the pillows. The firelight catches the shape of her spine, the curve of her hip, the marks on her skin that are my handprint repeated in red.

"Eleanor."

She doesn't turn. Her shoulders tighten, bracing for whatever comes next.

"The evidence of my discipline marking your skin. My seed drying on your thighs, mixed with the blood that tells me no man has ever been where I just was." I let each word land. "You're marked inside and out. Every inch of you that fought me tonight is carrying evidence that you belong to me. Sleep well."

I pull the door shut behind me.

The corridor is dark. My boots echo on the stone for six steps before I stop. I stand with my back to the corridor wall and my hand flat against the wall. The bond tells me she's still in there, still awake, still holding herself together through sheer will. I can feel it the way I've felt her all night: a low pulse beneath my skin that won't quiet.

Below me, the Tower lives its evening: the murmur of wolves in the hall, the distant clang of the gate watch changing, a raven settling on the battlements with a hoarse call that carries through the arrow slits. For a long moment there is nothing from the chamber. Just stone and silence and the faint hum of a woman on the other side of a door that might as well be a wall between countries.

Then a crash. Something shatters against the far wall, swung two-handed, bound wrists and all. The cup. A second crash. One of the candle holders, the iron ringing off stone. A third, heavier, something wooden that splinters on impact. A woman who isn't going to cry, who's going to break every object in this roominstead, because breaking things is the only language she has left.

I stand in the corridor with my palm still pressed to the wall and let myself feel what I've been refusing to examine since the great hall at Dover. Underneath the strategy, underneath the terms, underneath the careful scaffolding of control I've built around every interaction with this woman, there is something I can't calculate. Something the bond has woken that my planning didn't account for.

She throws something else. The impact shudders through into my palm. My feet don't move.

I should walk away. I stand there. I listen to her break my things and I let myself want something I can't justify, can't strategize around, can't fold into the framework that holds every other part of my life in place.

She goes quiet. The silence afterward is louder than the breaking was.

I press my palm harder against the stone and I think:I have never wanted anything I couldn't justify. Until tonight.

I should walk down the stairs. Run my pack. Put distance between myself and the door and the woman behind it and the wanting that has no place in my operational framework.

I open the door.

She's on the bed where I left her, curled on her side, surrounded by the wreckage of everything she could reach. The cup is in pieces against the far wall. The candle holder lies bent near the hearth. The wooden chest lid is cracked down the center. She's breathing hard from the effort, her rope-burned wrists pulled tight against her collarbone, and when the door opens she goes rigid. Waiting.

I cross the room without speaking. I pull the knife from my belt and cut the rope from her wrists. She flinches at the blade, then holds still while the cord falls away. The skin beneath israw, chafed red from hours of Thane's knots and everything she's done against them tonight.