Page 54 of The Iron Alpha

I press further into her, bottoming out, and hold there while I brace my arms on either side of her. My body covering hers. My cock buried to the root. No space between us that isn't occupied by skin and heat and breath.

"You've made me a liability to my own pack." The admission comes out flat and factual, and the content is the mostdangerous thing I've ever said aloud. "Every decision I've made since Dover has been distorted by the fact that you exist. The convoy response. The execution. The ride here with you beside me, where I spent days running scenarios in which you were hurt and discarding every other tactical priority until I'd accounted for your safety. My wolves aren't stupid. They'll see it. Aldric already watches me with the attention of a man taking notes for later."

She goes still beneath me. Her hands are on my face, her thumbs resting against my cheekbones, and she’s listening with the full attention of someone who understands exactly what this confession costs a man who has never let a cost go unaccounted.

I pull back and push into her again, slow and deliberate, and the wet drag of her around me makes both of us shudder. I hold her gaze while I fuck her, and the words come out between strokes, each one timed to the motion of my body.

"I don't know how to want you and lead them." The last sentence is the one I shouldn't say. The one that turns the lock on a door I've kept shut since the treaty hall, since the bond hit me and I buried it under the first strategic framework that would hold. "I don't know how to keep you safe without making the choices that keep you safe smaller than the choices that keep my pack alive. And I've been running the calculations since the night I took you, and they don't balance. They've never balanced. I've been operating on a deficit I can't close, and the interest is compounding, and I don't know what happens when a position I've built my entire command around turns out to be unsound."

The fire pops in the hearth. Outside, the wind carries the Channel's salt through the shutters. Dover sleeps the uneasy sleep of a settlement that learned today what obedience looks like when it wears teeth.

Eleanor's hands leave my face. She wraps her arms around my neck and pulls herself against me, chest to chest. The changein angle draws a low, raw noise from both of us, stripped of every performance either of us has ever given.

"Then stop running the calculations," she says against my neck. "Just for tonight."

I can't. She knows I can't. I'm the man who runs calculations the way other men breathe, involuntary and constant and necessary for the continued function of everything that depends on me. Stopping would mean trusting the unmeasured, and I have never in my life trusted what I couldn't measure.

The vulnerability is still open like a wound, and the only response I have is the one my body knows.

I grip her waist, hard, and drive into her with a force that shoves her up the bed. She gasps and her arms tighten around me and I do it again, harder, setting a punishing tempo that's the opposite of everything I gave her before.

The grief isn't gone. The confession isn't gone. I'm fucking her through both of them, and what fills the room is raw and rough and nothing like what happens when a man is being tender with a woman he's just laid himself bare for. I'm not being tender. I'm reminding us both what I am.

Her fingernails rake down my back hard enough to draw blood. She rises to meet every stroke. "There he is," she says through her teeth. The words hit me like a fist because she's right. This is the version of me she signed up for against that wall. The wolf wearing a man's skin. The quiet confession was the aberration, not this.

Her orgasm hits with her teeth in the muscle between my neck and shoulder and her body locked tight around my cock, wrenching through her in hard contractions that strip every thought from my head.

I follow her seconds later, the release brutal, my body slamming flush against hers, my hands on her waist hardenough to leave bruises, a groan torn from my throat that I don't recognize as mine.

I stay in her. Neither of us moves. My body pins her to the pelts. For a span of seconds the only noise in the room is our breathing and the Channel murmuring against Dover's walls like it has for every prisoner, every ruler, every fool who thought the stone would keep him safe.

Her breathing settles before mine does. Her arms loosen. She turns her head toward the wall, and the withdrawal is so clean I almost don't register it as a door closing.

I ease out of her and lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, and I feel the exact moment when the walls I breached with my confession begin to rebuild. Mine.

The exposure settles into me with the weight of a tactical error, and the part of me that has never once allowed a vulnerability to outlast its usefulness begins closing what I opened.

I told her I don't know how to want her and lead. That statement is true. It is also, I realize with the cold clarity that returns to me now like blood returning to a limb I've been lying on, a piece of intelligence I handed to a woman who was trained from birth to identify leverage and use it.

She won't use it. I know this with a certainty that doesn't answer to evidence. But certainty that doesn't answer to evidence is the first brick in every empire that's fallen, and I have never built anything I wasn't prepared to watch fall.

The wind dies outside. Eleanor's breathing settles beside me. I don't know whether she's sleeping or performing sleep. The fact that I can't tell the difference is itself a failure of intelligence I should find unacceptable.

I close my eyes. I run the numbers on what I've exposed, and they tell me what they've been telling me since Dover: that Eleanor is the gap in my defenses I can't close withoutdestroying the only thing I've wanted more than the pack's survival.

The calculations don't balance. They've never balanced. For tonight, I stop running them.

In the morning I'll be the alpha again. I'll dress, and walk through Dover with my jaw set and my wolves at my flanks, and give Godwin the terms for the next tribute with the flat certainty that every man in this settlement expects from the wolf who tore out a throat on their flagstones. I'll ride back to the Tower with Eleanor beside me and the bond between us pulled taut as a bowstring, and I'll bury what I said tonight under the weight of every decision that comes next.

But the words are loose now. I told her I don't know how to keep her safe and keep my pack alive, and she didn't flinch, and she didn't try to solve it, and she didn't offer me the comfortable lie that both are possible without cost. She told me to stop running the calculations. For a span of seconds with her body wrapped around mine, I did. The silence where the numbers should have been was the most exposed I've been since the day I took the pack from the wolf who held it before me.

A scratch at the shutters. Talons on stone. A raven settles on the windowsill, and the cylinder strapped to its leg is sealed with Tower wax.

I don't get up.

Somewhere in the castle, a door closes. The sound carries through Dover's stone, through the tunnels and the passages and the corridors where a girl once played with a boy whose throat I tore out this morning.

Eleanor breathes beside me. The bond hums beneath my ribs. The numbers start again, automatic as my heartbeat, and the first thing they calculate is the cost of what I've already given away.