Page 28 of The Iron Alpha

The wanting hits me in the corridor between the outer ward and the great hall, sudden and specific enough to stop my stride. The image of her palm on my scarred shoulder. The warmth of it through the fur. She saw something in the animal I've spent years keeping out of my human expression, and instead of running she stepped closer. I'm going to have to be careful. Careful is not something I do well with her.

I carry that thought into the council chamber and bury it under the work that's waiting. Two coordinated strikes on two territories in the same week. Whoever is directing this has resources and patience and a map of where the brotherhood is thin. Every adjustment requires a raven, a decision, a piece of attention I'm splitting between the map table and the pull in my chest that tells me exactly where Eleanor is at any given moment.

She's been in the restricted channels without escort. I know this because the mortar dust on her fingers when she comes to the evening meal is fresh, and Thane is somewhere on the Dover road running down the people who burned a loyalist family alive. I sent her escort into the field and left her unwatched, and she walked straight into the gap I created.

Revoking access would cost me the cistern seal, and the only person who can finish the work is the woman sitting beside me with clay under her fingernails and defiance in the set of her jaw.

The door of my chamber closes behind us and she turns to face me before I've thrown the bolt. The defiance is already in her posture: shoulders back, chin level, weight forward on the balls of her feet. She knows. She's been waiting for it since the meal, reading my silence as she reads everything.

"The channels," I say.

"I finished the seal on the lower junction. The one Thane couldn't reach because his shoulders are too wide for the crawlspace." She holds my gaze. "You gave me access to theinfrastructure. The infrastructure includes the sections your wolves are too large to maintain."

"I gave you access with an escort."

"You sent my escort to Dover. The leak wasn't going to wait for him to ride back."

There's a logic to what she's saying that I can't dismiss entirely, and that I can't dismiss it is part of what makes her dangerous. She doesn't defy me for the sake of defiance. She defies me because she's usually right, and being right is the most effective weapon she carries. "Turn around."

The command is familiar now. She knows what follows. The tension in her jaw tells me she's already bracing for the impact, her muscles preparing for the ritual that has become the architecture of our nights: discipline, then everything else.

She turns. Places her palms flat on the edge of the bed, shoulder-width apart. Her spine straightens, and the linen of her tunic pulls tight across her back.

I step behind her and push the tunic up past her hips. The undergarments come down. The marks from previous nights have faded to yellow and green, and the sight of them healing is a fact I register without the satisfaction I expected. The skin beneath my palm when I rest it on the curve of her backside is warm, smooth, and tensed for what she knows is coming.

My hand comes down. The impact is firm, precise, placed low where the sensation concentrates. She absorbs it without a sound, her fingers digging into the bedding.

Again. The second strike is harder, and the gasp she releases is controlled, clipped short by teeth and will.

After a few more her shoulders are trembling. Further and the trembling has spread to her thighs, the heat beneath my palm rising, her skin flushing dark under my hand.

The bond gives me everything. The sharp spike of pain with each impact. The bleed of warmth that follows. And underneathboth, threading through her body with every conscious decision she's making, the arousal building in her core, spreading through her hips and down her inner thighs. She hates that I can feel it. She hates more that she can't stop it.

My hand comes down again and I pause with my palm resting on the heat I've raised. Her breathing is rough. Her fingers are twisted in the pelts. The firelight catches the tension in her arms and the rigid line of her neck.

Her fury floods through me alongside her arousal in equal measure, two currents tangled so tightly that separating them would be like pulling thread from woven cloth.

I should take her now. Bend her further, open my breeches, push inside her while the discipline is still burning and finish what every night before this one has established as the sequence. Discipline. Then possession. Then her mouth. The rhythm. My hand moves instead. Not down. Across.

I don't decide to do it. The motion happens before strategy can intervene, my palm sliding from the flushed skin of her backside to the curve of her hip, and my thumb traces the hollow above her hipbone in an arc that has nothing to do with punishment. The pattern is breaking and I can feel it giving way beneath me like rotten floorboards, and the part of me that has run every encounter in this bed by design is watching the rest of me make a decision it didn't authorize.

I feel the change register in her before I've fully registered it myself: a hesitation, a held breath, the confusion of something expected not arriving.

I turn her over. She lets me. That's the detail that will keep me awake later: she lets me. I put my palms on her hips and rotate her so she's facing me, her back to the edge of the bed, and she doesn't fight it. Her gaze finds mine and what I read there is wary, searching, trying to locate the edges of this new territory.

I pull the tunic over her head. She raises her arms for it. I strip the rest of her clothing and she stands naked in front of me, her skin mottled with the fresh heat of discipline and the fading marks of previous nights, and I look at her.

I look at her, and something has gone wrong with my gaze. It isn't doing what I tell it. It's moving across her body without the tactical grid I've been using since Dover—no assessment, no measurement of what she can be used for, no calculation running underneath. My attention is simply resting on her, and the absence of purpose behind it makes me feel more exposed than she is.

Beauty has never been a factor in my calculations. Hers is refusing to stay out of them. I've known since Dover, since the bond hit and the wolf howled and every calculation I'd ever made reorganized itself around the single imperative of having her. But I've been using that beauty as one more weapon in the arsenal of her captivity. I haven't stood still and let it reach me. I'm standing still now. It reaches me. The impact is worse than anything that connection has delivered.

"Lie down," I tell her, and my voice sounds different. I hear it. She hears it.

She lies back on the bed. Her gaze doesn't leave mine. Her palms are at her sides, flat on the furs, and there's no defiance in the position. There's no submission either. She's watching me with the careful attention of a woman trying to understand something she hasn't seen before.

I undress. She watches me do it, and her gaze tracks the planes of my chest, my stomach, the scar on my shoulder where she touched me this morning.

When her attention drops to the hard length of my cock, she doesn't look away. In previous nights she's met the sight of me with fury, with calculation, with the particular defiance of a woman who refuses to be intimidated by what she knows iscoming. Tonight her gaze holds and her lips part, and what I read in her expression isn't hostility. It's hunger she's choosing not to hide.