Page 6 of The Iron Alpha

She thrashes. My hand comes down on the small of her back and presses her flat against the horse's neck, pinning her.

"Be still," I tell her. "It's a long ride to the Tower, and the road isn’t kind. If you fall, I'll put you back. Every time."

She goes still. She's conserving energy the way a fighter conserves energy between rounds, and I can feel the decision travel through her body:stop fighting. start thinking. survive the ride. plan for what comes after.

The column moves out. The road stretches ahead of us, rutted and broken, the ruins of what used to be England rolling past under a sky the color of old pewter. My hand stays on the small of her back. Through the fabric of her tunic, I can feel the warmth of her skin, the flex of her muscles as she adjusts to the horse's gait, the ridge of her spine under my palm. The bond is a low, constant pulse between us, feeding me information I didn't ask for: her breathing rate, her tension, the expansion of her ribs under my fingers with each exhale.

She’s draped across my lap like plunder. The road is long, the horse is warm, and her body is pressed against my thighs. For miles I feel every change in the distribution of her weight, every breath, every small unconscious adjustment that brings her closer to the curve of my leg. She’s furious and humiliated and completely in my power. The sustained contact is doing something to both of us that neither of us is going to acknowledge.

Halfway to the Tower, she stops bracing against the horse's movement and lets her body settle against mine. Exhaustion, not surrender. But the difference feels very thin from up here. My hand hasn’t moved. I don’t want it to move. That wanting is a fire I’m feeding by refusing to put it out.

At some point she turns her head. Forward, not back. Her eyes track the road ahead, the ruined buildings, the overgrown fields, the shape of the land as it rolls toward London. She’s memorizing the route. I can feel the focus enter her body, her breathing evening out, her muscles going still with concentration. She’s slung over my horse like cargo, and she’s building a map in her head. She’ll have this road committed to memory before we reach the Tower gates.

She hasn’t cried. She hasn’t begged. She hasn’t spoken a single word since I put her on this horse. She’s doing exactly what I would do in her position: gathering intelligence, conserving strength, waiting for the moment when what she's collecting becomes a weapon she can use.

I change my grip against her spine. No reaction at all. That absence tells me more about what kind of captive she’ll be than anything she's done since the hall.

Thane rides up beside me. His eyes drop to Eleanor's prone form across my saddle, then back to my face. He keeps his expression neutral, which tells me exactly how much he's choosing not to say.

"The council will hold?" he asks.

"Godwin will hold them."

"And the daughter?"

Eleanor's fingers, hanging near my boot, curl into fists. She's listening. Good.

"The daughter," I say, loud enough for her to hear, "is going to learn the rules. Or she's going to learn what happens when she doesn't. Either way, she'll learn."

Beneath my palm, her spine goes rigid. And her fists, curled tight near my stirrup, are already making promises her body will have to keep.

The Tower is waiting. The road unravels beneath us. And the woman across my saddle, silent and furious and burning against my thigh, is already the most dangerous thing I own.

She doesn't know it yet. By tonight, she will.

2

ELEANOR

The wolves make camp in the ruins of a building that might have been a church. The walls are standing but the roof is gone, and through the gaps I can see stars scattered across a sky so clear it hurts to look at. Someone builds a fire. Someone hands me water and dried meat.

Ryland's beta, Thane, cuts the rope from my wrists for the first time since Dover and replaces it with a look that communicates one thing:Don't.

The other three women are gone. Separated at Dover, each taken by a different pack in a different direction. Anne, who volunteered for her sister. Isabella, whose own elder shoved her forward. Victoria, who walked to her wolf without a word. They're alive. These wolves didn't take women to kill them. What's being done to them tonight, on roads like this one, in camps like this one, is a question I press flat against the earth and hold there. I can’t answer it. I can’t afford to feel it.

Wolves are assigned to sleep on either side of me. They don't look at me. They don't speak to me. They arrange themselves like furniture, and the message is functional: to them I am a perimeter, not a person.

Ryland sleeps against a ruined wall on the far side of the camp. I spend the night on my back between two rough blankets, one beneath me and one pulled to my chin. I don’t close my eyes. Wolves breathe in their sleep around me, a low collective sound like something large and patient waiting in the dark.

The fire collapses in on itself, sending a scatter of embers into the air, and in the brief flare of light I see Ryland's face across the camp. His eyes are open. He isn’t sleeping. He’s watching, the same way his wolves along the walls watched the hall at Dover: loose, patient, missing nothing. The man doesn't stop.

The fire dies and the dark swallows his face, but I can still feel his attention on the camp the way you can feel weather changing. If I ran right now, he would be on his feet before I cleared the first wall. I add that to the list of things working against me.

I do the only thing I have left. I take inventory.

The night before the treaty, my father and I sat at the table in his quarters and reviewed counterproposals until the candle burned to a stub. He was patient. He always was. He listened to each point, nodded at the ones he liked, suggested refinements to the ones he didn't.

Lead with the grain surplus from the south terrace. Hold the tunnel access as a fallback. Keep the medical supplies off the table entirely. I wrote the notes in the margin of the parchment in handwriting that got smaller as the page filled, the same cramped script I’ve used on every planning document since I was old enough to hold the pen.