Page 39 of The Iron Alpha

This soreness is deeper. Internal. The place where his knot locked us together—the swell, the pressure, the moment when separation became impossible and we were held face to face with nothing between us but the truth that I chose this.

I went to my knees before him and said,'prove it.'He proved it with parts of himself I didn't know existed until they were expanding inside me and I couldn't pull away and didn't want to.

The afternoon light is amber through the window. We slept. I didn't intend to, but I slept deeply, with his arm across my waist and his breath warm against the back of my neck. I am still trying to decide whether that alarms me or comforts me.

There is also the matter I haven't allowed myself to think about directly. Even with my limited understanding of shifter biology, I know the knotting had a purpose beyond intimacy. If his biology locked him inside me to increase the chance of conception, then the chance has been increased.

I am carrying the possibility of the alpha's child beneath the bruises on my hip.

I file the thought in the place where I keep the things too large to process and too important to ignore. It sits there. It does not shrink.

Ryland is gone when I open my eyes. The bed beside me is cooling but not cold. Minutes, then.

He left recently, and I knew the moment he moved. Not because I heard him—I was asleep. But something in me tracked his absence the way a compass tracks north, a pull I felt in the space behind my sternum before I was conscious enough to name it.

The awareness unsettles me because I have no framework for it. I have frameworks for everything. I have built my survival on frameworks. This one doesn't fit any structure I know how to build.

I rise, then wash and dress with the careful economy of a body taking inventory of its own limitations.

The bruises on my hip are shaped like his fingers, and when I touch them through the linen of my tunic, the memory of his grip while he took me from behind sends a current through me that I shut down with the precision of someone closing a valve.

The chamber door is unlocked. It never has been. The cage wasn’t built with iron or keys, and somewhere along the way I stopped measuring my freedom by whether I could walk through it. That realization frightens me more than any lock ever could.

The corridor outside is empty. Late afternoon in the Tower means the wolves are rotating watch, the kitchens are preparingfor the evening meal, and the taken women are finishing whatever work they've claimed for themselves in the hours between industry and performance.

I've mapped these rhythms so thoroughly they've become the pulse I set my own schedule against.

My feet carry me to the cistern before my mind has finished deciding where to go.

The air below changes as I descend. Cooler, damper, the stone walls slick with condensation and the low murmur of water moving through channels that are older than the wolves who claim them. The junction is dark except for the light I carry, and the flame throws my shadow long against the tunnel wall.

The east junction is holding. The repair I made last week has settled, the mortar cured and the channel running clean, and the overflow drain I added to the lower basin is handling the river-surge runoff without the backup that flooded the west kitchens every heavy rain since before I arrived.

I kneel beside the lower basin and run my fingers along the seal where the new drain meets the old stone. The join is tight. The water runs through it without weeping at the edges, which means the mortar I mixed with river clay and ash is holding better than the lime-based compound the original builders used. I make a note to mix a larger batch. The upper junction will need the same treatment before the autumn rains arrive, and the west channel has a hairline crack I've been watching for weeks.

Nobody fixed it because the pack doesn't fix things. They endure. They adapt. They route around the problem and spend labor on workarounds that would be unnecessary if anyone looked at the system as a system instead of a series of individual failures.

I looked at the system. It works now.

Margery finds me at the basin, the way Margery always finds me: appearing from a corridor with the quiet certaintyof a woman who has learned every shortcut in a fortress by necessity rather than curiosity. She's carrying a ledger. Rough parchment bound with cord, the pages covered in her small, careful handwriting.

"The stores are off," she says. No greeting. Margery doesn't waste words on ceremony. "The grain count from the last delivery doesn't match what the kitchens received. The difference is small enough to be an error and large enough to be a problem."

I take the ledger and scan the columns. Margery has been tracking supplies since long before I came to the Tower, but the tracking was informal: notes in margins, conversations with the kitchen women, a mental inventory she maintained through habit and suspicion.

I asked her to write it down. She did.

The resulting ledger is the first organized accounting the Tower has seen since Ryland took it, and the data it contains is already telling stories the wolves would rather not hear.

"How long has the discrepancy been running?" I ask.

"At least since the last supply delivery from Dover. Possibly longer."

I flip a page. Study the figures. The variance is consistent, which means it isn't error. Errors are random. Consistent loss is either theft or diversion, and either answer has implications for the pack's food security that Ryland should know about. He probably doesn't.

Food security lives in the kitchens, the storage cellars, the daily labor of women who carry sacks of grain while wolves carry swords.

He understands borders. He doesn't understand pantries. And pantries will kill a settlement faster than any army if the grain runs out during the wrong winter.