Page 5 of The Iron Alpha

Rope, not chain. I specified this in advance, before I knew who I would choose, before the bond detonated every plan I had. Rope, not chain, because rope saystemporaryand chain sayspermanent,and the psychology of captivity matters more in the first hour than at any point after.

She doesn't look at the rope. She looks at me. Her expression is a locked door, and behind it I can hear the machinery of what she is going to do to me the moment she gets the chance.

I chose her. I won’t pretend it was random, or kind, or anything other than what it is: the most powerful man in Dover pointing at Godwin’s daughter and sayingmine.And underneath the politics, underneath the strategy, underneath every justification I built for this moment, there’s a truth I won’tshare with her yet. I would have chosen her if she were a farmer's daughter. I would have chosen her if she had nothing to offer me but the defiance in her jaw and the sound of her breath catching against her will.

The bond chose her. But my hands are already planning what I’ll do with her, and none of it is the bond's idea.

"The accord," I say to Godwin.

He picks up the pen. His daughter is standing across the hall from him with rope on her wrists and her eyes on his face, and he picks up the pen. His hand doesn’t tremble, because Godwin is the kind of leader who saves his trembling for private. The scratch of the nib on rough vellum is the loudest sound in the room.

Eleanor watches him sign. Something behind her eyes goes quiet, and the quiet is worse than the fury, because fury means she still expected something from him. The quiet means she's finished expecting.

My wolves escort the four women from the hall. Eleanor goes first. She walks between two of my wolves without looking at either of them, her back straight, her wrists held in front of her. The women she's leaving behind are silent, and I read that silence the way I read every room: not as grief but as pressure. Grief dissipates. Pressure builds. This settlement will need careful management in the first year, or what I'm watching right now will calcify into the quiet hatred that breeds insurgents.

The portcullis drops behind us. Iron teeth biting into stone, definitive as a door that locks from the outside.

Eleanor stops walking.

She’s been controlled since the moment I said her name. Controlled through the refusal, through the negotiation, through the binding, through the signing. Her mind has been running the situation the way a general runs a losing battle: contained, strategic, looking for the move that costs the least. But theportcullis is the sound of the last move disappearing, and I can see the moment it lands. Her shoulders tighten. Her hands come up. And then her body does what her mind has been refusing to let it do since I pointed at her across the hall.

She runs.

Away from everything. Three steps before my wolves close the gap, and she drops her shoulder and drives it into the chest of the nearest one hard enough to stagger him. He outweighs her by half her own body weight and she moved him. The second wolf grabs her arm and she twists, wrenches free, kicks out at his knee with a precision that says someone taught her to fight, and then she's past both of them and sprinting for the cliff path with her wrists swinging in front of her and her hair coming loose from its braid.

She makes it fifteen feet.

I don't run. I don't need to. I cut the angle, step into her path, and catch her by the rope between her wrists. Her momentum carries her forward into my chest, and I absorb the impact without moving. All force, no effect. My free hand closes around the back of her neck, and I hold her there, her face against my chest, her body heaving, her wrists trapped between us.

She fights. Knees, elbows, her forehead driving toward my jaw. I take the knee to my thigh and let her feel how little difference it makes. I keep my hand on her neck, not squeezing, just holding, the way you hold something that needs to understand it has been caught.

She bucks against my grip. I tighten my fingers just enough to feel the tendons in her neck go taut. She makes a sound against my chest that’s fury and grief and something she’ll deny until her last breath. The bond translates every vibration of it directly into the base of my spine.

"Finished?" I ask.

She tries to bite me through my shirt. Her teeth graze my collarbone. The pain is sharp and real, and my cock responds with a surge that I have no intention of examining right now.

I pull her back by the neck, just far enough to see her face. Flushed. Her hair half undone, auburn strands falling across her forehead, her eyes wet with rage, not tears. She’s panting, her chest heaving against my grip, her mouth open, her lips bitten red. The bond is roaring so loud in my skull that I can barely hear the wind.

"You will not run," I tell her. My voice is level. My hand on her neck is not. "You will not fight my wolves. You will not waste your energy on theatre that changes nothing about where you sleep tonight. Those are the first three rules. Break them again and I will add more, and you will like the additions less."

She stares up at me. Her breathing is ragged. Her pulse is hammering under my palm, fast and hot, and the space between our bodies is close enough that I can feel the warmth of her through two layers of clothing. Her eyes drop to my mouth. One fraction of a second. She catches herself and drags her gaze back up, but I saw it. She knows I saw it. The color that crawls up her throat has nothing to do with the fight.

"Get your hand off my neck," she says. Quiet. Measured. A woman who is perfectly aware that she lost this round and is already deciding how to win the next one.

I release her. She steps back. Her chin comes up. Her hair is wrecked, half undone, falling around her face, and she looks nothing like the composed strategist who tried to renegotiate my treaty. She looks like a woman who just threw herself at a wall and discovered it was made of something she can't break.

The composed version of her was dangerous. This version, breathing hard with loose hair in her face and teeth marks on my collarbone, is something else entirely. I preferred the danger. This is going to be harder to manage.

"Mount up," I tell Thane.

My stallion is the largest horse in the column, bred for war and temperament. I swing into the saddle and look down at Eleanor, who’s standing in the mud with rope on her wrists and her ruined hair and her eyes already measuring the distance to the cliff edge.

"No," I say, because I can read her intentions from here.

She looks at the cliff. Looks at me. Her mouth tightens. She doesn't jump. She's not a woman who quits, and the cliff is quitting. She's a woman who survives and then makes you pay for every day she had to.

I lean down from the saddle, hook my arm around her waist, and lift her off the ground. She's lighter than I expected, all muscle and bone and furious resistance, and I lay her across the front of my horse face-down, her belly over my thigh, her wrists hanging on one side and her legs on the other.