Page 25 of The Iron Alpha

My body remembers him before my mind permits it: his hands on my hips, the fullness of him inside me, the sound I made when I stopped fighting it. The memory is physical, involuntary, and I bury it the way I've buried everything else since Dover.

There's a tension in his jaw that wasn't there last night. Whatever that message contains, it's sitting behind his composure alongside everything else he's carrying, and his summoning me before dealing with it is a detail I register without understanding.

He doesn't ask how I slept. He doesn't acknowledge what he did to me last night. The absence of acknowledgment is its own statement: what happens in that bed is ordinary. Expected. Not worth discussing in daylight.

"Your cistern," he says.

Two words. My cistern. Not the Tower's, not the inner ward's. Mine. Because I looked at it, and in his mind that makes it my problem now.

"It's failing," I say. "The mortar seal has degraded past temporary repair. If it isn't rebuilt within the week, the interior water supply will drop to river hauls. Your kitchens are already compensating. Your wolves are spending labor on water transport that could be spent on patrol."

His expression doesn't change. His gaze stays on mine, and I hold it because looking away would be retreating, and I don't retreat in rooms where decisions are made.

But holding his gaze in this room is different from holding it in the dark. In the bed, those same eyes pinned me while his body took what it wanted. Here, they're assessing me across a table of maps and intelligence, and the distance between us is doing nothing to quiet the pulse that kicked up the moment I walked through the door.

My body doesn't distinguish between the alpha who disciplines me at night and the one who runs this territory by day. It responds to both with the same traitorous heat and being aware of it while presenting a case for plumbing access is the kind of contradiction that would be funny if anything about my life were funny.

"You know how to fix it," he says. Not a question.

"I designed and built the distribution system that feeds Dover's upper settlement. I can rebuild your seal. I need clay, tallow, sand, hand tools, and access to the lower channels beneath the water gate."

"The lower channels are restricted."

"The lower channels are neglected. There's a difference."

Something moves behind his eyes. Not amusement. Something closer to the expression I caught on his face in the great hall when I gave Thane a response he wasn't expecting: the look of a man hearing something he didn't expect from someone he assumed he'd already solved.

"Thane will escort you to the lower channels this afternoon. He stays with you the entire time. You touch water infrastructure and nothing else. You'll have your materials by midday." He turns back to his maps. "Don't make me regret the access."

"I don't intend to."

I leave the council chamber with my spine straight and my pulse steady. The first stone of something real laid down beneath my feet.

He gave me access. He gave me materials. He gave me a project that will take days to complete, which means days of movement through the Tower with a legitimate purpose, days of access to areas I haven't been allowed to see, days of demonstrating that I am more than a body he disciplines at night.

The rhythm of my life, he said. Discipline. Sex. My mouth. Every night.

He forgot to account for the days.

The commotion starts in the inner ward just before midday.

I'm at the cistern with Thane, examining the lower channel access, when the sound reaches us: a bark that isn't a bark. A sharp, urgent vocalization from the wolves near the water gate, followed by the scrape of claws on stone and the heavy, fast breathing of something large moving through a space too small for it.

Thane's head comes up. The neutral mask drops in the span of a heartbeat, revealing something older and harder underneath. He steps in front of me without thinking about it, and the gesture tells me everything I need to know about what's coming through that gate.

The wolf drags itself through the water gate and into the ward, and the first thing that hits me is the blood. A trail of it, thick and dark, painting the stone from the gate to where the animal collapses a body length into the open ground. No pack markings. Gray-muzzled. Old.

The Tower wolves appear from everywhere at once. They pour into the yard in a silent tide, bodies low, hackles raised, teeth bared. A wall of muscle and focused aggression surrounding the dying animal, and the coordination of it chillsme more than the gore. They move like soldiers who have drilled formation until it lives in their bones, every wolf finding its position without a spoken word or visible signal.

I step sideways to see past Thane's shoulder. Through a gap in the ring of wolves, I can see the wound in the rogue's flank: deep enough to show the white flash of rib through matted fur.

Ryland comes through the far archway at a walk. Not running. The alpha doesn't run to crises. He arrives, and the crisis waits.

Then the dying wolf begins to change.

It isn't the silver mist I've heard described in the old stories from Dover, the ones the elders told in low voices about beautiful, terrifying transformations wreathed in light and thunder.

This is a body failing. The mist comes in stuttering pulses, silver wisps that gutter and die like a candle in wind. Beneath the failing mist, the transformation happens in pieces: fur receding in patches, leaving raw pink skin exposed between tufts of gray. Joints wrench and reset wrong, the noise carrying across the silent courtyard with a wet precision that makes my stomach lurch.