Page 79 of The Iron Alpha

The howl carries. I don't know how far. Far enough.

The mist takes us both on the return. My transformation is clean, practiced. Hers stumbles, catching on joints that don't remember how to be human yet.

I catch her when her legs buckle—both of us naked on the flagstones, her skin flushed and the mark luminous at her throat. Her clothes didn't survive the mist. My breeches didn't either. The silver ring from Dover glints on the stone beside her, returned by the transformation as precious metals always are.

She looks at her hands. Human hands. Calloused. Familiar. Then she looks at me.

"Again," she says.

I almost smile. Almost.

The word is pure Eleanor. She has just experienced the most terrifying transformation of her life and her first response is a demand for another round.

She's not broken. She's not overwhelmed. She's taking inventory of a new capability and she intends to master it before dawn.

I pick up her ring from the cold stone and close her fingers around it. "Tomorrow."

"Tonight."

"Tomorrow." I pull her to her feet. She's unsteady, her body still recalibrating between the form it's held for her entire life and the one it just discovered. I hold her upright because the alternative is letting her fall, and I don't let her fall. "Your body needs time."

"My body is mine to manage."

"Your body is half wolf now. The wolf doesn't take orders from you yet." I look at her, standing naked in the raven yard with her hair wild and her eyes still carrying the too-bright clarity of the change. "Give it a day."

She holds my gaze with the same direct gray-green stare she gave me the first time I pointed at her in the treaty hall. The defiance hasn't changed. The mouth that argues with me hasn't changed. The intelligence running behind those eyes, mapping the new territory of her own body the way she mapped my Tower, hasn't changed.

What's changed is that the woman looking at me can become a wolf, and when she masters it she'll be the most dangerous thing I've ever created.

I didn't create her. I gave her the bite. She did the rest.

I lead her inside. Wrap a cloak around her shoulders because the night air is cold and the wolves on the parapet are staring and some things are still mine alone.

She lets me. The letting is its own kind of possession now, negotiated rather than taken, and I've learned to read the terms she sets without needing them spoken.

In the chamber, the fire is burning. The furs are turned down. The maps are where she left them, her supply counts stacked beside my threat assessments, two systems of governance overlapping on the same desk.

She sits on the edge of the bed. Her fingers find the claiming mark. She touches it as she always does now, not testing the scar but reading it for the information it contains.

Then she goes still. Her head tilts.

"Your heartbeat," she says. "I can hear it from here."

She's sitting on the bed. I'm standing at the desk. The distance between us is the width of the chamber, and she's hearing the blood move through my chest.

"It's faster than I expected," she says. Not teasing. Measuring. Eleanor, discovering a new data set and already running the numbers. "Faster than mine."

"Wolf metabolism." I cross to the bed. Sit beside her. "The wolf's body is more efficient than the human one."

She's quiet. Listening. Not to me—to the room. The fire's crackle, the river's voice through stone, the individual wingbeats of the ravens settling on the ledge.

Her world has been rewritten in the space between dusk and dark, and she's already inside it with both hands, sorting what she hears into patterns she can use.

Her hand closes around my wrist. She presses her thumb to the pulse point and holds it there, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted. Counting. Mapping the rhythm against what her ears are telling her and calibrating the difference between the two inputs.

"I can feel your blood move," she murmurs. "Through the skin."

I don't pull my hand away. The woman who spent weeks learning my body in the dark is learning it again in a language her bones didn't speak until tonight.