Page 21 of The Iron Alpha

"Knees."

She slides off the bed. Her legs are unsteady and she catches herself on the bedpost before she goes down. She kneels on the stone floor and looks up at me, and the hatred in her eyes is so bright it's nearly beautiful.

I'm hard again already. Looking at her on her knees with her hair wrecked and her gaze leveled at me like a blade and my marks on her skin, softening isn't possible. My cock is slick from her body, shining in the firelight, and her gaze drops to it. Holds. Her lips press together, and I see the same calculation she made last night: the consideration of biting, weighed and discarded.

"Open your mouth."

She does. Slowly. Her lips part and she holds my gaze while she does it, making me watch her choose this, making sure Iregister that what comes next is a decision and not compliance. She wants me to know she could have clenched her jaw and made me force it. She didn't. And the fact that she chose to open her mouth instead of making me pry it open makes the heat in my blood surge harder than if she'd fought.

A woman who submits by choice is more dangerous than a woman who submits by force, because the choice can be revoked. She's reminding me of that on her knees with my cock in front of her face.

I step forward and guide the head of my cock past her lips. The first contact is devastating. Her mouth is hot and wet and tight, and she closes her lips around me with a suction that is immediate and punishing.

This is not the raw, furious inexperience of the night before. She learned. Eleanor, who can chart a fortress in a day and memorize a guard rotation by watching it change twice, applied the same intelligence to this, and the result is a mouth that is taking me apart with methodical, savage efficiency.

That's what makes her dangerous. Not her defiance. Her adaptability. I've broken defiant women before, and it's always the same: they resist until they can't, and then they stop. Eleanor doesn't stop.

She loses a battle and walks off the field already redesigning her tactics for the next engagement. I disciplined her, and she learned to count. I took her, and she learned to map my weaknesses mid-stroke. I put my cock in her mouth, and she learned how to make me lose control with it. Every weapon I use on her, she studies, strips down, and rebuilds facing the other direction.

Her tongue curls against the underside of my cock on every stroke, flat and firm, pressing into the ridge below the head where the sensation concentrates. She does it again, and again,and the pressure makes my thighs lock. My blood is hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth.

"Deeper."

She takes me deeper. The muscles of her throat constrict around the head of my cock, and the sound I make is low and involuntary and louder than I want it to be in this stone chamber. Her hands brace against my thighs, her fingers digging into the muscle, and she swallows around me with a control that turns the gag into pressure. Spit gathers at the corners of her mouth and slides down her chin. She doesn't pull back.

She sets the pace this time. Harder, faster, punishing, nothing like the rhythm I forced on her the night before. She's taking me into her mouth and pulling back and taking me again with a cadence that mirrors what I just did to her body, and the message is clear: she is doing to my cock what I did to her cunt, and she wants me to feel every second of it.

My hand finds her hair and grips. Her eyes narrow but she doesn't slow down. She hollows her cheeks and sucks hard enough that the sensation borders on pain, and my hips jerk forward involuntarily, pushing deeper. Her eyes water. She holds me there, her throat working, her jaw stretched wide around me. The look on her face from her knees is a promise. She is filing every sound I make, every involuntary thrust. She will use every one of them when the time comes.

She's weaponizing her mouth, and the worst part is that it's working.

The finish builds at the base of my spine, a pressure that coils tighter with every stroke of her tongue. I grip her hair harder. Thrust into her mouth with a control that's crumbling by the second. Her throat opens for me and closes around me, and the wet sounds fill the room.

I finish in her mouth because the alternative is pulling out and giving her the satisfaction of seeing me lose the last threadof control. The orgasm hits like a concussion, rolling through me in pulses that empty me against her tongue. My vision goes white. My hand clenches in her hair. The only thing in the world is the wet heat of her mouth and the suction that is draining me to nothing.

I don't know what sound I make. I know she heard it. I know she'll remember it. I know I just gave her another weapon, and I can't bring myself to care until the last pulse fades and I can think again.

She swallows. All of it. Sits back on her heels. Wipes her chin with the back of her hand. The look she gives me says she is keeping count, and the debt I'm building has no ceiling she can see.

I stand over her. Her face is flushed, her lips swollen and slick, my seed on her chin where the wipe didn't catch it all. My marks on her thighs. My handprints on her backside. The evidence of what I've done to her written across every inch of her body, and she's looking up at me from the floor of my chambers with more fire in her eyes than she had when she walked into the room.

"Every night." My voice is rough, scrubbed raw. "This is what happens in this room. Discipline. Then I take what's mine. Then your mouth finishes what your body started. That is the rhythm of your life now Eleanor, and nothing you map or memorize or plan will change it."

She doesn't answer. Her chin lifts. Her gaze holds mine without blinking. Her hands, resting on her bare thighs, are steady.

"Lie down."

She rises from the floor without help. Pulls her undergarments up. Tugs the chemise down. When she puts her weight on the bed, she catches herself with one hand, her hip hitching to the side to keep her weight off the worst of the marks.The movement is small and controlled and she'd kill me for noticing it. She crosses to the far side and presses her back to the wall, lowering herself onto her side so nothing touches the skin I've just ruined.

I dress enough to be decent and leave the chamber. The corridor air hits my skin like cold water, and I stand there long enough for my pulse to settle and my breathing to pass for steady.

The council chamber is on the second floor of the White Tower. Thane sent word during the evening meal that the night's messenger birds had come in heavy, and the briefing would be waiting when I was ready. When I enter, Thane and a handful of my senior wolves are already positioned around the table. The room is cold, the arrow slits open to the night air, and tallow smoke hangs in a low haze above the maps. Somewhere below, the river runs against the outer wall, steady and indifferent. Three leather tubes lie uncapped on the table, their messages weighted with flat stones.

I sit. Read.

Soren at Warwick: two supply shipments intercepted on the road. Not raided. Intercepted and diverted. Someone with intelligence about the route schedules is feeding information to the humans operating between his territory and mine. His handwriting is controlled, but the brevity tells me his patience is running short.

Emric at Ludlow: movement along the Welsh borders. Scouts are reporting campfires where there shouldn't be campfires, and the people tending them aren't Welsh settlers. They're organized. Armed. They move in patterns that suggest training, and they vanish before his wolves can close distance.