Page 49 of The Iron Alpha

Ryland walks ahead of me. The cloak covers the blood but not the posture, the set of his shoulders, every wolf in the passage pressing against the wall to let him pass. He moves through Dover as he moves through the Tower: as if the stone belongs to him, because it does now, because the body in the courtyard proved it.

I grab his arm.

He turns. The amber hasn't fully left his eyes. The cloak is rough under my fist and the muscle beneath it is warm and hard. The teeth that just ripped out a throat are behind lips I've kissed, and the hands that folded his clothing with methodical precision before the kill are the hands I want on my body. The contradiction should horrify me. It doesn't.

I shove him against the wall. The stone behind his back used to be mine. It isn’t any more.

The man I've pinned against them just did the most violent thing I've ever witnessed, and I’m shaking with something that is not grief, not anger and not the moral reckoning I should be having. It's hunger. The same hunger that drove me to my knees in front of him, that made me say ‘prove it,’ that responds to the worst of what he is with a need I've stopped trying to justify.

His eyes find mine. The amber is still there, threaded through the darker color, the wolf not fully receded, and the look he gives me isn't surprise.

He knew this was coming. He reads everything. Plans everything. Runs every outcome before the first move is made. He saw this in my face in the courtyard, and he's been waiting for it through every step of these corridors.

He doesn't stop me. He doesn't command me. He lets me pin him against the stone and watches me with those amber-threaded eyes, and the absence of an order is the most dangerous thing he's given me since the night he stayed in the bed.

I kiss him with Brennan's blood still drying on his skin.

The taste of iron is on his lips. His mouth is hot and hard and opens under mine, and the kiss is nothing like the ones before it. There's no strategy in this. No seduction. No slow unraveling of a woman who's been fighting what she wants. I climb him the way you climb a wall you're desperate to get over, my fingers in his hair, my thighs locking around his hips. The cloak falls from his shoulders. He's naked against cold stone with my body wrapped around him, and I don't care.

His hands find my hips. The grip is bruising. The wool of my trousers is the only barrier between us, and his cock is already hard against me, the length of it pressing through the fabric with a heat I feel in my spine. He pulls my hips forward, grinding me against him, and the friction drags a sound from my throat that echoes off the stone walls.

"Eleanor." His voice is rough. Lower than I've heard it. A warning or a permission, and I don't wait to find out which.

I reach between us and unlace my trousers. His hands take over, yanking the fabric down my thighs, and his fingers find me slick and swollen before the laces are fully undone. The sound he makes when he feels how wet I am is guttural and immediate, an exhale that isn't controlled, that isn't strategic, that belongs to the wolf more than the man.

He lifts me. One arm. The muscles in his shoulder flex against the stone. I wrap my legs around him, and he enters me in a single hard thrust that drives my back against the opposite wall.

The impact knocks the air from my lungs. He fills me completely, thick and deep, stretching me around him with a sudden fullness that borders on pain and crosses into something my body recognizes before my mind does. The angle of my body against the wall means he's pressing against the place inside me that makes my vision go white, the head of his cock grindingagainst the swollen spot that has owned me since the first time he found it.

I bite his shoulder. Hard. Hard enough to taste the copper that's already on his skin, Brennan's blood mixed with the salt of the man underneath it, and the savagery of that doesn't stop me. Nothing is stopping me.

He thrusts again. Pulls back until I feel the loss of him, the emptiness, and then slams forward so hard my body slides up the wall. My fingers claw down his back, leaving marks on skin that still carries the wolf's heat, and the sounds we're making fill the narrow space: raw, percussive, rhythmic, closer to violence than anything we've done in his bed.

My spine grinds against stone with every stroke. I'm so wet I can feel it on my inner thighs, can hear it in the obscene slick sound between our bodies. The evidence of how much I want him while Brennan's blood is still on his chest is the darkest corner of whatever I'm becoming.

His teeth find the curve of my neck and bite down, not the claiming bite, not the mark that would change everything, but with enough force that I feel the bruise forming and I want it. I want every bruise he can give me because the bruises are proof that I'm here, that I chose this, that the girl who played with Brennan in the tunnels became the woman who pinned the alpha to the wall in this castle and took what she wanted from the body that just ended a life.

He drives into me with a force that rattles the iron torch bracket above us. My hands slide in the sweat on his shoulders. I grip the back of his neck and pull his face to mine, and the kiss is teeth and fury and the salt of his skin.

"Harder." The word comes out of me like something torn free.

Not a request. A demand. My first demand since Dover, and the weight of it registers in his eyes before his body answers.

He fucks me harder. His hips slam forward, pinning me between his body and the wall, and each thrust is so deep I feel it in my ribs. The wet sound of him inside me fills the narrow passage alongside my breathing, ragged and broken and loud enough that every wolf in this castle can hear what the alpha's mate is doing to him against a wall in her father's stronghold.

Let them hear. Let Dover hear. Let every person in this settlement who watched me walk away with bound wrists hear what came back.

The orgasm builds with the inevitability of a wall giving way. I've been fighting since the courtyard, fighting since the blood, fighting since the sound Brennan made when the wolf's jaws closed, and the fight has nowhere left to go except through my body and into the man inside me.

I come against him with a cry I don't recognize. The release tears through me in waves, my body clenching around him so hard he groans against my throat, every muscle in my core locking down on his cock in spasms I can't control and don't want to.

His hand covers my mouth, not to silence me but to feel the shape of the sound against his palm. His hips keep moving, driving through the contractions, extending it until my thighs shake and my nails draw blood from his shoulders. I'm holding onto him because my legs won't support me.

He finishes inside me with a sound that comes from somewhere deeper than his chest. I feel him pulse, the heat of his release flooding the space where our bodies meet, his cock throbbing inside me with each wave. His hands on my hips grip hard enough to leave marks that will last longer than anything Brennan's death put on my conscience.

His forehead drops to my shoulder. His breathing is destroyed.

His arms hold me against the wall as if the wall is the only thing keeping either of us vertical. For several heartbeats there's nothing between the stone walls except the sound of two people breathing like they've just survived something that should have killed them.