Page 14 of The Iron Alpha

She rubs her wrists. Watches me. Waiting for the explanation that will make this make sense.

I don't give her one. I pull my shirt over my head. Sit on the edge of the bed long enough to pull off my boots. Unlace my breeches the rest of the way and step out of them. Her eyes track the movement, and I can see the calculation running: why is he undressing, what comes next, how much more can she take tonight.

"Stand up."

She stands. Slowly. Her legs are unsteady and she grips the bedpost for balance, the same bedpost she held after the discipline. I pull her tunic over her head. She doesn't fight it. She's too spent to fight, and the look on her face says she's saving whatever she has left for whatever comes next.

Nothing comes next. Not what she's bracing for.

I turn her around, press my hand flat against her belly, and pull her back against me. Skin to skin. My chest against her spine. My hips against her backside, my cock settling into the cleft of her, half-hard and heavy against the welts my hand left earlier. She stiffens. Every muscle in her body locks.

Her nipples are hard. Tight and swollen, peaked from cold or desire or both, and when my hand slides up from her belly and cups her breast, her whole body tries to pull away from me. I don't let her. I catch the nipple between my thumb and forefinger and pinch, rolling the stiff peak until her breath hisses through her teeth. She grabs my wrist with both hands but she doesn't pull. She holds on, and the difference between pulling away and holding on is something I file for later.

"Lie down."

I guide her down onto the furs. Pull them over both of us. Arrange her the way I want her: on her side, her back pressedagainst my front, my arm locked around her waist, my hand spread flat across her belly. My cock nestled between the curves of her backside, thick against tender skin. She can feel every inch of me against her, and she can't move away because my arm is an iron bar across her body.

She is shaking. Not with cold.

"This is where you sleep." My mouth is close enough to the back of her neck that she can feel my words on her skin. "Every night. Against me. You don't get a separate bed. You don't get distance. The last thing you feel before you close your eyes is me, and the first thing you feel when you open them is me."

She says nothing. Her hands grip my forearm where it crosses her body, and I can feel her pulse hammering through her wrists where they press against my skin.

"Tonight I chose not to knot you." I keep my voice level. Conversational. As if I'm reviewing supply routes with Thane. "When I do, you'll feel me swell inside you and lock. You won't be able to separate from me until my body decides you can. And when I claim you, my bite will change you into what I am. Permanently." I press my lips against the hollow below her ear, where her pulse is racing so hard I can feel it against my mouth. "Your mother told you stories about this. Your father wrote laws to prevent it. Every woman in Dover has been taught since birth that the worst thing a wolf can do is knot and claim her."

I let that settle.

"I'm going to do both. The only question is when, and that's my decision. Not yours."

The tremor that runs through her body is visceral, full-bodied, and the bond feeds it to me raw. She is terrified. She is also, beneath the terror and the fury and the exhaustion, wet against my thigh, and we both know it.

Her body is rigid, locked against the contact, refusing to yield even in exhaustion. My cock is pressed against skin that stillcarries the heat of the discipline, and she hasn't moved away from it. She can't. My arm won't let her.

The bond is feeding me everything: her anger, her humiliation, the traitorous warmth building where my body touches hers, the absolute refusal to acknowledge any of it.

I hold her. Not gently. The way you hold something you've claimed and intend to keep.

Her breathing evens out before mine does. I don't know if she's sleeping or just pretending. Either way, she stops fighting the arm across her body, and her weight settles against me in increments, grudging and involuntary.

I lie in the dark with my woman pressed against me and the wreckage of my things scattered across the floor, and I don't sleep for a long time.

Neither does she.

4

ELEANOR

I've been counting his breaths for hours. Slow and even when he first fell asleep, the rhythm of a man who trusts his own walls enough to close his eyes with a human woman pressed against him. Slower now. Deeper.

His arm across my waist hasn't loosened, and his cock is still thick against my backside, heavy and half-hard even in sleep. The man doesn't stop taking up space, conscious or not.

I haven't moved. My wrists ache where the rope chafed them raw, and between my thighs there's a soreness that isn't just muscle. Blood has dried on my skin, mixed with the evidence he left when he pulled out and spent himself against me.

The bruises across my backside still radiate heat where they press against him. The deep ache inside me where no one has ever been before he was. The tenderness in my jaw from being stretched around him. The raw scrape at the back of my throat.

I was a virgin until last night. In Dover that word carried weight. The elders guarded it like currency, because it was currency. An untouched woman was worth more to the wolves, which meant she was worth more to the settlement, which meant her body belonged to the council's ledger before it ever belonged to her.

I spent years knowing my virginity wasn't mine to give. Now it's gone, taken in a warlord's bed by a man who registered the blood between my thighs with satisfaction and kept going. The cost of it should feel enormous. Instead it feels like one more thing he's taken from a list I'm too tired to count.