Page 55 of The Iron Alpha

14

ELEANOR

Iwake knowing something has changed. Not in the room. The room is the same: bare stone, rough pelts, the Channel's gray light pressing through the shutters.

My body carries the evidence of the night in the usual places, the bruises and the tenderness and the particular exhaustion that follows being taken apart by a man who treats precision as a weapon and violence as its edge.

The change is beside me. Or rather, the change is in the empty space beside me.

Ryland is dressed. Standing at the window with his back to the bed, the shutters open, the morning light cutting across his jaw and the scar that runs beneath his collar. His trousers are laced. His tunic is pulled on but not fastened, and the scratches I left on his back are not visible, but I know they’re there—long red lines running from his shoulders to his waist.

On the windowsill, a raven's talon marks have scored the stone. Scratches in the frost-damp surface, fresh, the bird already gone. A wax cylinder sits on the ledge beside his hand, cracked open and empty.

The message came in the night. He didn't wake me to read it.

He's already read the message. I can tell by his shoulders, the set of his spine. When Ryland is at rest, his body has a particular stillness. This isn't rest. This is containment. Intelligence has gone into him and he's holding it the way a flask holds poison, sealed and steady and designed to keep the contents from touching anyone else.

I sit up. The pelts slide from my shoulders and the cold hits my skin, and I let it.

I've learned to read Ryland's silences with the same attention I once gave my father's supply manifests: line by line, looking for the gap between what's presented and what's missing.

"How bad?" I ask.

He turns his head but not his body. The glance he gives me over his shoulder is brief and assessing, the look he gives Thane before issuing an order.

"Get dressed. We're riding within the hour."

He leaves before I can ask again. The door closes behind him with the measured care of someone who wants to slam it and won't.

I dress in trousers, tunic, the leather vest that laces at the side. My fingers work the lacing with the efficiency of repetition while my thoughts run a separate inventory.

Last night he told me he doesn't know how to want me and lead his pack. He said it while he was inside me, his voice flat as a field report, and the words carried the weight of someone who has never admitted an engineering failure in his life.

This morning he looked at me like I was a variable he's decided to isolate.

The ride back to the Tower takes days. My body protests every hour of it, the bruises from last night grinding against the saddle with each stride, and I welcome the discomfort because it gives me something to track besides the distance Ryland is putting between us.

He rides at the front of the column with Thane at his shoulder, and the space he establishes is so precisely calibrated that anyone watching would see an alpha leading his party and his woman trailing at the appropriate distance.

I know better. Every other ride we've taken, he positioned me beside him. Not behind. Beside. Where he could reach me, correct me, command me. The rearrangement is a message delivered in the language of proximity. Whatever he read has pulled him back inside the walls he rebuilt in the dark last night, and this time the mortar is setting faster.

The wolves feel it. Thane's attention stays fixed on Ryland in a way that suggests the beta has received information I haven't. The other wolves run with the coiled alertness of predators expecting contact.

Nobody speaks to me. Nobody has to tell me why.

The bond hums between us like a wire pulled taut. He registers at the other end of it, a presence somewhere beneath my sternum, constant and specific. Since Dover, the bond has been louder. I don't have a better word for it. Louder in clarity, not volume, like a frequency sharpening when interference drops away. I feel his tension in my own body, a tightness across my ribs that isn't mine, and the awareness is relentless. Every change in his posture travels through the bond and lands in me, and I can't stop it, and I've stopped wanting to.

That's the part I haven't said aloud. The wanting.

Not wanting him. That capitulation happened weeks ago, somewhere between the first knotting and the night I sat in his chair and told him to prove it. I want him the way I want breath, involuntarily and past the point of strategy.

What I haven't admitted is that I want the bond. The connection itself. The constant awareness of another person's existence running like a second heartbeat beneath my own.

My father taught me to need no one. The bond is teaching me something else, and the lesson is more dangerous than anything Ryland has done to me in bed.

We reach the Tower on the last evening of the ride.

I know before the portcullis rises. The walls are fully manned. Every torch bracket holds a live flame, the parapets lit up against the dusk. In the weeks I've lived here, I've never seen the Tower at full illumination.