Page 3 of The Iron Alpha

I don’t answer it. I’m too busy forcing my breathing back to normal while my wolf paces behind my ribs. My cock hardens against my thigh. Every thread of self-control I’ve cultivatedsince I took my first kill is being tested by a woman who hasn't said a single word to me.

I study her instead, now that I can think again, now that the tactical part of my mind has reasserted enough control to function alongside the animal. She’s Godwin's daughter, Eleanor. The resemblance is in the height, the bearing, the way she holds her spine, how she carries weight that aged her without letting it bend her.

Standing at her father's side. An equal, a co-commander, and from the way the other council members glance at her, she is. She has a body built for work, not decoration. Long legs, strong shoulders, hips that would fit in my hands like they were measured for them. Everything about her saysuse,notdisplay,and I want to find out what she looks like when every layer of that practicality has been stripped away.

While I watch, her eyes leave mine and track along the east wall. She counts my wolves. I see her do it: a deliberate sweep, left to right, her gaze pausing at each position, the count running behind her eyes like a ledger. Then the west wall. Then back to the entrance, to Thane, measuring him with the quick efficiency of someone who knows how to identify the second-in-command in any room.

Her attention returns to me, and there’s something new in her expression, layered beneath the fury: assessment. She’s mapping this room as precisely as I mapped it when I walked in. She’s looking for the gaps.

A strategist. Godwin raised a strategist.

I am going to enjoy taking her apart.

The selection needs to be quick. I designed it this way: the treaty is signed, each alpha chooses, and Dover's gates close. No lingering. No renegotiation. Speed prevents resistance.

I cross the hall. Toward the council table, not toward the semicircle of women along the far wall. Every boot fall lands onstone that echoes off the vaulted ceiling, and every head in the room turns to track me, because when a wolf walks toward a group of humans, they watch.

She tracks me too. Her expression doesn't waver. She watches me approach with an assessing gaze, already measuring threat levels and exit distances and the number of bodies between her and the nearest door.

Good. Fight me. I want her fighting. I want her exactly like this: coiled, furious, refusing to fold. I want to be the one who finds out what it takes to make that composure crack, and I want to have my knot buried inside her when it happens.

I stop close enough that she has to decide whether to hold her ground or give way. She holds. I let her see me. Not the alpha. Not the strategist. The wolf. The thing underneath the planning and the politics and years of calculated restraint, the thing that is looking at her right now with a hunger I’m barely, barely keeping off my face.

She holds my gaze. Her jaw tightens. Her fingers curl tighter against her palms, knuckles pale.

I reach out, take her chin between my thumb and forefinger, and turn her face toward the torchlight.

Her skin is warm. Soft in a way that the calloused hands didn't prepare me for. Her pulse jumps once under my fingertips, rapid and hard, and the bond translates it directly into my own body: a jolt that travels from my hand straight down through my belly and settles low, thick, unmistakable. My thumb moves a fraction, tracing the edge of her jaw, and her breath catches. A tiny sound, barely there, involuntary, and the look in her eyes is pure self-directed fury. Her body just did something her mind will never forgive.

That catch in her breath. It’s the most honest thing that has happened in this room since I walked in. The part of me that should be cataloguing it as leverage is instead replaying it, overand over, trying to hear what it would sound like if she made it on purpose. If she made it for me. Not because I took it from her, but because she gave it.

I have never cared whether someone gave or whether I took. The distinction has never mattered. It matters now, and I don’t know why, and I don’t have time to find out.

I release her chin. Turn to Godwin.

"Her."

One word. The only word necessary.

Godwin's face drains. Not slowly. All at once, the color leaving his skin in a tide that starts at his hairline and pulls everything with it. His mouth opens, and for a fraction of a second, the politician vanishes and the father surfaces: raw, desperate, searching for any move left on the board that saves his daughter without costing him his people.

There isn't one. We both know it. I designed the terms to ensure it.

"No."

Eleanor's voice. A flat, definitive refusal delivered at conversational volume, and it carries more authority than anything her father has said since I walked into this room. She steps forward, away from the council table, and the motion puts her directly between me and Godwin. Her shoulders are square. She's blocking her father's line of sight to me, forcing him to look at her instead of the treaty.

Clever. Desperate and doomed, but clever.

She turns back to me, and her voice drops. Not quieter. Lower. The voice of a woman who wants to be heard by everyone in the room and understood by only one person in it. "The treaty says a woman. It doesn't say which woman. My father has a hall full of women to offer you. Pick one who isn't running his supply lines and keeping his council from collapsing, and Dover might actually survive long enough to keep its end of the bargain."

With her back to her father and her life in my hands, she’s running the numbers and making a counteroffer. The logic is sound, which is the most dangerous part. She's right that removing Godwin's most competent advisor weakens Dover. A weak Dover means a treaty with no foundation.

I take a step closer. Close enough that she has to look up to hold my eyes. "You think I chose you for your father's sake?"

Her teeth set behind closed lips. She doesn't step back. "I think you chose me because you're the kind of man who takes the most expensive thing in the room to prove he can afford it."

The hall goes silent. My wolves have gone still. Thane, somewhere behind me, has gone rigid. No human has spoken to me like that since I took this pack. No wolf has dared.