Page 19 of The Iron Alpha

"Thane reports to me." I tilt her chin up with two fingers. Her teeth set behind closed lips, but she doesn't pull away. "Everything you did today, everywhere you went, everyone you spoke to. I know about the shoes Margery gave you. I know about Aldric in the corridor. I know you stood at the south wallarrow slit and watched the river long enough to count the boats that passed."

The fingers on her chin hold her face angled toward mine, and the heat between us in this close distance is staggering. Her lips are parted. A tendon in her neck flexes through a swallow she can't suppress.

"And I know you ate standing up in the kitchen because sitting down hurts." My thumb traces the line of her jaw. Slow. "Does it still hurt?"

She holds my gaze. "Yes."

One word. Delivered without flinching. Without asking for sympathy she knows I won't give. She's telling me the truth because lying about it would be weakness, and this woman is constitutionally incapable of appearing weak. I note the pattern: she doesn't lie, even when the truth costs her. Useful. A woman who won't fake pain won't fake anything else, which means every response I get from her tonight is real.

"Good." I let my hand drop from her face. "Turn around. Hands on the bed."

The silence that follows fills the room the way smoke fills a corridor. She doesn't move. Her eyes hold mine, and I watch the calculation run behind them: what this costs, what it buys, where she can bank whatever she learns tonight against whatever I take.

She turns. Her hands flatten against the furs, shoulder-width apart, and her spine is a rigid line beneath the thin linen. She's bracing. Every muscle from her shoulders to her calves is locked, and the sight of her bent at the waist with her palms pressed to my bed and her hair falling forward sends a heat through me that the bond amplifies to something nearly unbearable.

I step behind her and push the chemise up past her hips. The undergarments beneath are the same ones she retrieved fromthe bedding this morning, and I pull them down to her knees with one motion. She flinches at the exposure. Absorbs it. Holds.

The bruises from the night before are still vivid. My handprints in purple and red, layered across her skin, marking territory I've already taken. The sight of them should satisfy me. Instead it makes me want to add more.

"What happens next is discipline." I press my palm flat against the small of her back, holding her in place. The muscles under my hand are trembling, fine vibrations she's trying to suppress. "You're going to count them."

Her fingers dig into the pelts. "I wasn't aware I'd done anything wrong."

"You spent all day walking through my Tower gathering intelligence to use against me. You sat beside me at the evening meal and gave me nothing while your mind was working behind your face like a siege engine." I step close enough that my chest presses against her spine and the length of my cock presses against her bare skin through my unlaced breeches. "I see all of it, Eleanor. Every move you make. And it changes nothing about what's going to happen to you right now."

This is becoming a rhythm. The night before, the discipline was a response. Tonight it's a sequence: I take her across my lap or bend her over furniture, and afterward I take the rest. She knows what comes after the spanking now. The knowledge is in the tension of her body, the way she's bracing for every stage of what I'm about to do.

My hand comes down.

The crack is sharper than before. Harder. I'm not warming her up. I'm making a statement, and the sound it pulls from her is a gasp bitten off between clenched teeth, her body lurching forward against the bed.

"One." Her voice is a wire pulled tight.

Again. Lower. Where the bruises from the night before overlap, and the impact against already-tender skin draws a ragged sound from deep in her chest.

"Two."

I find a rhythm. Each strike placed with calculation, alternating sides. She counts them in a voice that starts controlled and shreds as the numbers climb. By five her shoulders are shaking. By eight her fingers are twisted in the bedding and her breath is coming in hitches between each count.

The bond pours everything into me. The heat spreading across her skin. The pain that spikes and diffuses with each impact. And beneath the pain, threading through it, the involuntary arousal she's been fighting since I bent her over this bed. The bond reads her with an accuracy no man should have: a pull, a gathering heat, the kind of want that builds against will.

I use it. I time the next strike for the moment her body begins to settle, when the pain has ebbed just enough for the warmth underneath to surface. Her gasp at nine is different from the others. Sharper. Confused. She doesn't know why that one landed differently. I do.

By ten, she's wet. I can see the evidence of it between her thighs, a slickness catching the light from the hearth that she can't hide and can't control. Arousal making decisions her mind hasn't sanctioned. She knows I can see it. The tension in her spine tells me she'd rather bleed than acknowledge what her body is doing.

"Twelve," she grits out. Her voice is rough. Scraped raw.

I drop to one knee behind her. Run my thumb through the wetness between her thighs, a slow deliberate stroke from front to back, and hold my hand where she can see it over her shoulder. My thumb glistens in the firelight.

"Your mouth tells me you don't want this. Your body says otherwise." I press my thumb against my lips and taste her. Saltand heat. She goes rigid watching me do it, and what comes from her throat is something between fury and a moan.

"That proves nothing."

"It proves everything. Thirteen."

I bring my hand down again. She lurches forward, her hips pressed hard against the edge of the bed, and this time the count comes out on a half-sob she can't contain. Not a cry. Eleanor doesn't cry. Something more dangerous. Something that tells me she's losing her grip on the wall she's built between what she wants and what she'll admit to.

I give her sixteen. By the last one her voice is barely a whisper, her face pressed against the bed, her fingers twisted in the pelts. Her skin is blazing under my palm when I rest my hand against the heat and feel her pulse hammering through inflamed flesh.