Page 60 of The Iron Alpha

I gave her access because she earned it. The access made her visible. The visibility made her a target.

And the work she's been doing, the drainage, the grain counts, the taken women's living conditions, is work my pack actually needs. Pulling her from it damages the Tower's operations. But leaving her exposed damages something worse.

"Restrict her movements," I say.

Thane doesn't blink. "To what degree."

"Quarters. The great hall. The inner ward with escort." The words land with the weight my wolves recognize as non-negotiable. "The cisterns are off limits. No grain stores. No lower corridors. No contact with the taken women without escort."

"She'll object."

"She'll comply."

The sentence sits in the air between us. Thane absorbs it, nods once, and turns to leave.

"Thane."

He stops.

"The restriction is operational, not punitive. She doesn't need to understand the distinction."

He leaves. I stand alone in the council chamber with the maps, the messages, and the weight of a decision that protects Eleanor from Aldric's calculation at the cost of everything she's built inside these walls.

The bond pulses. She's awake now, truly awake, and the tenor of what comes through is sharp and searching. She's gathering intelligence.

She has been gathering it since I spoke those words while the knot held, and the woman I'm trying to protect is the same woman whose mind works faster than any strategist I've commanded.

I lean into the maps and try to make the external threats occupy the part of my awareness that she's already claimed… they don't.

The morning passes in routine cycles. I send ravens. I receive reports. I walk the walls with Thane and assess the fortifications because I need my hands and eyes occupied.

The Tower is solid. The walls are sound. The portcullis functions, the guard rotation holds.

Every corridor I pass through feels different without Eleanor's work running through it, a barely perceptible change, like a building where the drainage has stopped and the damp is beginning to return.

Everything outside the bond is functioning. Everything inside is not. Could the bond we both feel be one of the fatedmate bonds described in our scrolls and told as romantic tales by our older she-wolves to the younger? Surely not. Eleanor is, after all, human… or at least she is until I inflict the claiming bite. Then she, too, will be a she-wolf. I shake my head and try to focus on what I can control.

Eleanor's presence registers as a constant frequency through the core of me, and today the frequency has changed. The warmth that usually flows through the connection has pulled back, replaced by something sharp and focused, the edge that means she's building toward a conclusion.

I've felt this from her before. When she was mapping the cisterns. When she was counting patrol rotations. When she sat in my chair and disassembled the logic of my own supply chains while I stood behind her and tried not to be undone by her mind operating like mine.

Today the focus isn't aimed at infrastructure. It's aimed at me.

I feel it every time she assembles another piece, a tightening in the bond like a rope drawing taut, and by midday the tension has become a sustained pressure that makes concentration on anything else an act of sustained force.

The great hall is half-full for the midday meal. I eat with my wolves and taste nothing.

Eleanor sits at the far end of the table where I placed her weeks ago, before she moved beside me, before the seat at my right became hers by an authority neither of us named. She's back at the far end today, and the retreat is deliberate. I recognize it because I taught it to her. Strategic withdrawal. Choosing your ground.

She eats. She doesn't look at me. The not looking is so studied it functions as a declaration, and every wolf in the hall marks the distance.

Conversations dim at the nearest tables. Two of the younger wolves exchange glances and return their attention to their plates with the practiced blankness of men who've decided to notice nothing.

Aldric, at his table, watches. He eats his bread and observes the space between his alpha and the alpha's woman with the unhurried attention of a man measuring a crack in a foundation. Beside him, one of his wolves lifts a cup and murmurs something against its rim. Aldric's jaw tightens once, a response so minimal it could be a swallow, except that the wolf who spoke sits back with the satisfaction of someone whose message was received.

The afternoon thins the light. Shadows lengthen through the arrow slits, and the river throws the late sun across the timber floor in long amber bars.

I'm in the chamber, our chamber, standing at the window because the river is the one thing in this fortress that hasn't changed, when the bond seizes.