Page 74 of The Iron Alpha

I thrust deeper. Her breath catches and her fingers dig into my back and the sensation of her nails scoring my skin sends a bolt of heat through me that makes my jaw clench.

She hooks one leg over my hip, changing the angle, and the adjustment seats me so deep inside her that the pressure borders on pain for both of us.

"Don't close your eyes," I tell her. The words are ragged. Half-breath. "Don't look away from me."

"I'm not going anywhere." She says it against my mouth. Her hands catch my jaw, hold my face where she can see it, and the reversal makes my heart slam against my ribs. She's holding me still. She's making me be seen.

I've taken Eleanor in every position this bed and this room and this Tower have allowed. I've bent her over furnitureand pinned her against walls and put her on her knees and commanded her body into configurations designed to prove my authority over every inch of her.

None of it felt like this.

This feels like being claimed.

I slow the pace. Not because the urgency has faded but because the urgency has changed shape. I want to feel this. Every part of it. The slick grip of her body around me as I withdraw and press back in. The catch in her breath when I hit deep. The way her fingers trace the scratches she's leaving on my back, not apologizing for the marks, claiming them.

Her hips roll to meet mine. The rhythm we find isn't the punishing pace of every night before this, the fury and the discipline and the desperate tenderness that was really a farewell. This is slower and heavier. This is two people who nearly lost each other and are proving with their bodies that the losing is over.

I brace on one arm and look down at her. Her hair is spread across the furs in dark tangles. Her lips are swollen from kissing me. Her skin is flushed from her throat to the tops of her breasts, and the color is more honest than anything I've seen in this room since the night I brought her here.

She's not performing. She's not resisting. She's not calculating.

She's here. With me. Looking at me while I move inside her.

I drop my mouth to the hollow of her throat. Her pulse kicks against my lips and her hands slide into my hair, holding me to her skin, and the permission in the gesture nearly breaks me open.

I've bitten this spot before. Kissed it. Laid my mouth there while she slept and pretended the tenderness belonged to the wolf. Now she's pulling my face to her throat and the offering is so deliberate it makes the wolf surge against my spine.

Her legs tighten around my hips. She says my name on a breath, not loud, not desperate, just my name spoken into the dark above my head as if she's saying it for the first time.

My hips stutter. I thrust deep and hold there. The sensation of being buried to the root inside a woman who is keeping her eyes open, saying my name like it means something other than "alpha" or "captor" or "the man who owns me," is the most dangerous thing I have ever felt.

I could stay here. In this exact moment. Her body around mine and her hands in my hair and her voice saying Ryland like it belongs to her instead of to the pack.

The knotting urge hits with a force that locks my spine. I feel it building at the base, the swell that demands completion, and the decision is immediate. I choose this. I chose it on the ride south when the numbers finally told the truth. I choose to lock inside her because she looked at me while I entered her and she said my name and the name wasn't a concession. It was an acceptance.

I thrust deep. Hold there. Let the knot form.

The swell begins. Eleanor feels it. Her eyes widen and her lips part and her hands grip my shoulders hard enough to bruise. The knot expands at the base, thickening inside her, stretching her wider than my cock alone ever has.

She gasps, her body clenching around the pressure, and the bond delivers the intensity of the stretch from her end—the fullness that verges on overwhelming, the burn of accommodation, and beneath it the pull that demands more. Her hips press down against me. Taking it. Wanting it.

"Stay with me," she whispers. Her legs lock around my hips. Her forehead presses to mine.

The knot completes. Full. Locked. Neither of us can separate. Every pulse of blood through the swell transmits sensation toboth of us, the bond amplifying the feedback until the boundary between her body and mine dissolves.

She clenches around the knot and the pressure drives a groan from my throat that has no strategy in it. Her fingers grip the back of my neck and her breathing shatters into my mouth.

Then the wolf takes my teeth.

It isn't a decision. It isn't strategy. It isn't the man at all. The bond reaches through every layer of control I've spent a lifetime constructing and grips the wolf at the deepest level of my biology. My eyes flood amber—I feel the change in my vision, the room sharpening to a clarity no human eye was built for—and my canines lengthen past human proportion with a pressure in my jaw that has no precedent in any experience I own. This has never happened. This is not supposed to happen. The wolf's claiming teeth in a human mouth, driven by a bond that has burned past every containment I built for it.

My mouth finds the place to the right of the hollow of her throat. The place the wolf has known since Dover. The place my lips have pressed night after night without understanding what they were mapping.

I bite down.

Eleanor screams. The sound fills the chamber and rebounds off the ancient stones and the bond detonates between us with a force that whites out my vision. Her body arches beneath me, the knot locking us together through the convulsion, and the bond rips her experience open and pours it into me.

Pain. Enormous, precise, the pressure of teeth breaking skin and the burn that follows. Then something else. The bond cracking open like a sealed room blown apart, one-directional becoming two, and for the first time she feels me. Not the proximity. Not the awareness. Me. My want. My fear. My possession. The thing beneath all of it that I have never saidaloud because saying it would have made it real and real things can be taken.