Page 12 of The Iron Alpha

I guide myself past her lips, and the first contact—the wet heat of her tongue, the stretch of her mouth around me—sends a jolt from the base of my cock straight up through my spine. A low vibration hums against me from the back of her throat. Involuntary. It travels through my shaft and settles at the root, and my fingers tighten in her hair hard enough that she gasps.

The gasp opens her wider and I push deeper, watching her jaw stretch around me, watching her eyes water, watching her hands curl into fists in her lap because she has nowhere else to put what she's feeling.

I set the pace. Slow. Deliberate. Pulling back until only the head rests on her lower lip, slick and heavy, then pushing forward in a measured stroke that fills her mouth again. Each thrust controlled, because if I let go of the rhythm I’ll lose the last thread connecting my actions to anything resembling strategy, and what happens after that won't be slow.

Her tongue curls against the underside of my cock on every stroke, a flat pressure that makes my thighs lock, and the wet sounds her mouth makes against me echo off the stone walls. Her mouth is hot and slick and tight. Her tongue moves against me with an instinct that has nothing to do with experience and everything to do with the bond lighting up every nerve she has. My wolf is pressed so far forward against the inside of my skin that I can feel it in my teeth.

"Deeper. Suck me down and breathe through your nose."

She takes me deeper. Her bound hands come up against my thigh, bracing, and I feel the rope scrape my leg as she adjusts. Her eyes are still open. Still locked on mine. Still furious, still recording, still promising consequences.

She hollows around me, the suction pulling a groan from somewhere I didn't authorize, and the muscles in her throat contract as I hit the back of her mouth. Spit gathers at the corners of her lips and slides down her chin. She doesn't pull back. She holds me there while her whole face trembles and her eyes stream, and the defiance in that—the refusal to flinch even with my cock in her throat—makes my hand shake in her hair. One tremor. She sees it from her knees. I see her see it.

That is the first crack in my control she has found, and she found it on the floor of my chambers with her mouth full and tears running down her face.

I pull out. Her mouth releases me with a wet, obscene sound that fills the room, and she sits back on her heels, breathing hard through swollen lips, spit on her chin, her eyes glittering in the firelight. She wipes her mouth with the back of her bound hands. The gesture is defiant and pointed, and it sends a bolt of heat through me that isn't compatible with controlled behavior.

I lift her off the floor. One arm under her knees, one behind her back. She doesn't fight the carrying. She goes rigid, stiff as iron in my arms, her body refusing to soften even as I set her on the bed and cover her with my weight.

I've already crossed the line. The discipline was justifiable. The oral was an assertion of terms. What comes next has no strategic framework I can dress it in, and I stopped pretending it did somewhere between the hall and the stairs. What matters now is that this happens on my terms, not the bond's. Not hers. Mine.

Her back hits the furs. I'm between her legs before she can close them, my hips against hers, my hands pinning her boundwrists above her head. The rope bites into my palm—Dover's knots against my skin, another man's work holding her for me—and I pin them harder.

The blades on the walls catch firelight. The river murmurs outside the narrow window. The room is a warlord's chamber, built for a man who governs from the same place he sleeps, and the woman underneath me is taking in every detail even now. I can see her eyes moving, tracking the distance to the door, the angle of the nearest blade on the wall, filing it all away behind her composure. Even now, even pinned under me, she's running reconnaissance, and the part of me that should find that threatening finds it something else entirely.

The length of her pressed against me from chest to thigh is the most complete sentence the bond has spoken since the hall at Dover.

"I don't want this." Her voice is steady. Quiet. A lie delivered with perfect composure, and we both know it's a lie because her hips have just tilted up against mine and her breath caught on the contact. The heat between her thighs is something neither of us can pretend away.

"You don't have to want it." I push her tunic up. Pull her undergarments the rest of the way off. Her legs are bare beneath me, long and strong, and I can feel the heat of the discipline still radiating from her skin where it presses against the furs.

I reach between us and press two fingers against her, parting her, and the slick heat I find there makes the lie she just told me burn away to nothing. She's soaked. Her body has been ready since the discipline, maybe since the hall at Dover. Her sharp intake of breath when my fingers slide through the wet folds of her is the most honest reaction she's given me since I brought her to this room. "You just have to survive it."

I enter her in one stroke. My cock buries to the hilt, and her body resists, then yields, then locks around me with a grip that nearly ends me before I've begun.

She's tight. Tighter than ready. The resistance I met on the way in wasn't just tension. No one has been here before me. I feel it in the way her body fought to accommodate me, in the sharp hitch of her breath, in the rigid lock of her thighs against my hips. She's never had a man inside her, and the first one she gets is me, and the satisfaction that rolls through my chest at that confirmation is not something I'll examine or apologize for.

She grips me so hard I feel every ridge of muscle inside her, and the heat is staggering: wet, clenching, pulling me deeper.

Her mouth falls open on a silent gasp. Her spine lifts off the furs, her wrists straining against my grip, and her gaze goes to the ceiling, wide and blind.

"Look at me."

Her focus drops back to my face. Wet. Blazing. Full of everything she can't say with my cock buried inside her and her wrists pinned above her head.

"This is mine now." I roll my hips once, slow, grinding deep enough that her breath shatters. I can feel the head of my cock pressing against something deep inside her that makes her whole body jolt. "Every part of you that just told me no. Mine."

"Go to hell," she whispers. Her voice cracks on the second word, and her hips tilt up to meet me, taking me deeper. The contradiction between her mouth and her body is the most honest thing either of us has done tonight.

I pull back until I'm barely inside her, just the tip, stretching her entrance, holding there while she breathes. Then I push back in. Slow. Every inch measured, making her feel the full length of me filling her again. Her head falls back. Her throat works. Every response maps onto my own body with merciless clarity: the stretch, the fullness, her muscles locking around me when Ihit the spot that makes her breathing fracture. I use that. I angle my hips, find the place that makes her gasp, and I drive into it with a precision that isn't kindness. It's strategy applied to her body, and it's working.

I drive in again, harder, and a sound tears out of her. Low, ragged, pulled from somewhere behind the wall she's built. Her legs wrap around my hips. I don't think she knows she's done it. Her heels dig into the small of my back, changing the angle, pulling me deeper. The wet heat gripping my cock tightens with each stroke. Her mind is still fighting me. Her body has stopped pretending.

"Is this what you planned?" Her voice is raw, scraped to nothing, barely above a whisper, and it still carries the edge of a woman running numbers. "At Dover. When you pointed at me. Is this what you saw?"

I don't answer. I press my forehead against her collarbone and fuck her in long, grinding strokes that push the air out of her lungs in rhythmic bursts. The question lodges somewhere behind my ribs, because the answer is yes. The answer is also that what I saw at Dover was nothing compared to the reality of her underneath me. I won't give her that.

"You were made for this." My voice is rough. Lower than I've heard it. I punctuate the words with a thrust that drives her up the furs, her bound wrists straining above her head, and the cry it pulls from her is half fury and half something she'll deny until her last breath. "For me. This body. This cunt. Made to take me, and you're so wet right now you can hear it."