Page 4 of The Iron Alpha

I lean down. Not far. Just enough that my mouth is level with her ear, and my voice is for her alone. "I chose you because you just tried to outmaneuver me at my own treaty table. And you almost made it work."

I pull back. Her eyes are blazing. Her pulse is visible in her throat, fast and hard, and she wants to hit me. I can see the decision run behind her eyes: the distance to my jaw, the angle, whether she'd land it before my wolves reached her. Her hands stay at her sides. She's not going to hand me the excuse to discipline her publicly, and we both know it.

Instead, she looks at her father. "Father."

Godwin doesn't meet her eyes.

The deal closes with his silence. And in the quiet that follows, I see her hand move. Her fingers find the end of her braid where it hangs over her shoulder, and she pulls. A slow, deliberate tug, the only part of her body that moves while the rest stays locked. She does it again. And again. A tell. An unconscious gesture that will be useful later, when I need to read what she's feeling and she's trying to keep it from me.

The hall holds its breath. I can feel every wolf along the walls reading my posture, waiting for a signal that won't come because this does not require one. The woman who just told me no, then tried to renegotiate the terms of her own captivity, then called me a man who buys trophies to impress himself, has more spine than any human I have encountered since I took the Tower.

The refusal doesn't anger me. The insult doesn't either. Both of them put warmth in my blood that has nothing to do with anger, and I register that response as a problem, because wanting a woman's defiance the way I want hers is the kind of weakness that gets alphas killed.

I step back and nod to Soren.

The oldest alpha moves through the crowd with the unhurried precision of a man who has never rushed anything in his life. He surveys the women. A girl near the back is trembling, fourteen at most, pressed against the wall, and a woman beside her has positioned her own body as a shield. Soren's gaze falls on the trembling girl and lingers.

The shielding woman steps forward. "Take me."

Two words. Delivered with the same flat certainty Eleanor used, except this woman's voice is shaking and she's doing it anyway. She places herself between Soren and the girl, shoulders set, volunteering for a fate she cannot imagine because the alternative is watching the girl be taken instead.

Soren studies her for a long moment. Something in his expression changes. He extends his hand.

"You," he says. Not the girl. The woman who stepped forward.

A man at the council table dips his pen. "Name," he says, without looking up. Treaty protocol. Every selection recorded for the accord.

The woman's voice is steady. "Anne."

The girl sobs. Anne doesn't look back. Somewhere in the semicircle, a woman presses her knuckles against her mouth, and the sound she traps behind them carries through the hall.

I track the faces of the women still standing along the wall. Some have gone blank. Some are weeping. A few are watching the wolves with the flat, measuring look of people deciding how long to wait before they do something about this. Good. I want to know which ones those are.

Godwin's hidden women in the tunnels are an inventory problem. These women, the ones with rage instead of tears, are a security problem I’ll need to monitor through the annual tribute.

Emric takes his time. He walks the line of women like a man reading text he finds distasteful, his face blank, his hands loose at his sides. The council members have positioned certain women closer to the front. There’s a girl with wide, dark eyes, pushed forward by an elder's hand on her shoulder. The shove is visible from across the room: fingers gripping fabric, a rough push, the girl stumbling forward a half step and catching herself.

Emric's jaw tightens. A controlled reaction that I note for later. He looks at the elder who did the pushing, and the elder's hand drops. Then he looks at the girl.

"Come," he says. Quiet enough that only she can hear it. She goes.

The scribe's pen scratches. "Isabella," the elder who pushed her supplies, as if ridding himself of something.

Cael doesn't walk the line. He stands near the hearth with his arms crossed, scans the group once with the flat, efficient sweep of a predator assessing a herd, and points.

Dark-haired, standing at the edge of the group, slightly apart from the other women. She hasn't been trembling or crying. She’s been watching the proceedings with an expression I recognize because I wear it myself: tactical assessment. She’srunning her own calculations, and Cael has just interrupted them.

She looks at his extended finger. Looks at his face. Something passes between them that I can’t read, and she walks toward him without a word.

The scribe's pen scratches again. "Victoria." She doesn't react to her own name being recorded. She’s already watching Cael with the same flat attention he gave the room, and I recognize the look: she’s deciding how much of a problem he’s going to be.

Four women. Four alphas. The treaty holds.

I nod to Thane. He crosses to Eleanor with the rope.

Her eyes track the cord in his hands, and I watch her weigh it: fight and give the room a spectacle or hold still and deny them one. She holds still. Thane binds her wrists in front of her, the loops tight and efficient, and the sound of rope pulling taut against skin rings off the stone walls.

Every human and wolf in the room registers it. This is the message. Not the treaty on the table. Not Godwin's signature. This: the leader's daughter in rope, standing in her father's hall, with the man who owns her watching from across the room.