Page 36 of The Iron Alpha

"Dover's council is holding. The problem is that the faction is growing."

She absorbs this. Her arms unfold. Her hands go to her sides, fingers pressing into her thighs.

I watch the information settle into her as it always settles into Eleanor: quickly, completely, with the immediate conversion into strategic assessment that makes her the most dangerous person I've brought inside these walls.

"If you want me to stop gathering intelligence," she says, "you'll have to stop leaving intelligence where I can find it."

The fracture in the wall moves again. Wider. The weight of her standing in front of me, brilliant and bruised and entirely unbroken, is the force that's finding every weak point I've buttressed.

She doesn't step back. Her weight settles forward onto the balls of her feet, and the bond transmits a surge of intent so sharp I feel it between my ribs. Her gaze drops to my mouth and comes back to my eyes, and the precision of that look is an act of war dressed as an invitation.

I cross the remaining distance between us. My hand goes to the back of her neck, and her breathing catches, and the soundof it runs through me like current through wet stone. I bring my mouth to hers. The kiss is not gentle. It is not a reward. It is possession expressed through the only language I have left for what she does to me. When her lips open under mine, her hands come up to grip the front of my shirt, and the hunger I've been managing with corridors and distance and the cold discipline of strategy floods the space between us. Every calculation I've made about what Eleanor is to me drowns in it.

She pulls back. Breathes. Her fingers are still fisted in my shirt and her look is fixed on mine and what I see in it is not surrender and not defiance but something that occupies territory I don't have a name for. She holds my gaze for three heartbeats.

Then she puts her palms flat against my chest and pushes me backward.

The pressure is intentional rather than forceful. She pushes me toward the chair beside the hearth, the heavy oak seat where I sit when I read messages and plan campaigns and administer the governance of a pack that answers to no one but me. The chair is mine. Every wolf in this Tower knows it. No one else sits in it. The wood is scarred with years of use and the arms are worn smooth where my hands rest, and Eleanor pushes me into it with an authority that registers at the base of my skull.

I sit. The realization of what she's doing arrives in the same heartbeat.

She goes to her knees.

Not the way she went to her knees the first time, when the command was mine and the compliance was a calculation and the fury in her expression was the only thing she had left to hold. Not as she knelt in the later nights, when the pattern had been established and the ritual was known and the hatred had softened into something more complicated that neither of us named.

She goes to her knees in front of my chair because she has chosen to, and the ground beneath everything I thought I understood about Eleanor gives way.

Her hands find the lacing of my breeches. She works them open with fingers that are steady, unhurried, precise. The same hands that rebuild mortar seams and map escape routes and tear bread with the careful economy of someone raised on rations. She frees me from the fabric and wraps her fist around the base of my cock, and the contact of her palm sends a pulse through the bond that I feel in the marrow of my back.

She lowers her mouth.

In this chair. In the seat of every decision I've made since I took this Tower from the wolf who held it before me. The symbolism is not accidental. She chose this location the way she chooses everything: with full awareness of what it means, what it costs, what it says to the man who will spend the rest of his life remembering that she put him in his own seat of power and took him apart with her mouth.

Her tongue runs the length of me, base to head, slow, and the sensation collapses every thought I'm holding into a single point of focus. She circles the tip and takes me past her lips, and the wet heat of her mouth is so thorough it makes my hands grip the arms of the chair hard enough that the wood creaks beneath my fingers.

She finds a rhythm. Deep, unhurried strokes that take me to the back of her throat, her jaw stretched wide, the muscles of her neck working as she swallows around me. Her fist works in counterpoint to her mouth, and the dual sensation builds a pressure low in my gut that I have to actively resist.

Her gaze comes up to mine. Unwavering, the look in it while she does this is a declaration of intent that no words could carry with this precision.

She is not serving me. She is taking something that belongs to her, and the fact that it happens to live inside my body is a complication she has decided to manage on her own terms.

"Mine." The word leaves me without permission. Low, rough, scraped from somewhere deeper than language. "You're mine when you do this."

She pulls back just enough to speak. Her lips are wet, and her breath is warm against me when she says, "Prove it."

The command snaps something loose. The wolf surges behind my ribs, and the man lets it. I stand from the chair in a single motion, pulling her up with me, my hands on her hips lifting her until her legs wrap around my waist. Her mouth finds mine, and I can taste myself on her tongue, and the rawness of that drives me across the chamber to the bed.

I don't set her on the bed. I put her on the edge and follow her down, my weight pressing her into the furs, my hips between her thighs before she's finished drawing breath.

Pulling her tunic over her head, I strip the undergarments down her legs with a roughness that tears the lacing and leaves the fabric in pieces on the stone floor.

She's bare beneath me, and the marks from the punishment are visible in the daylight, and the sight of them should satisfy the part of me that needs evidence of ownership. It doesn't. It makes the need worse, because the marks are mine but Eleanor wearing them is something I'm only beginning to understand I cannot own.

"Hands above your head."

She raises her arms and crosses her wrists against the pelts. The position is known. Weeks ago it was punishment. Here, in the broad light of midday with her gaze on mine, it is something she gives me because she wants to see what I do with it, and the exposure embedded in that gesture is a fault line in my defenses I didn't authorize and can't seal.

I pin her wrists with one hand. Press them down and hold them there, my fingers wrapped around both wrists, my weight behind the grip.