Page 43 of The Iron Alpha

The thought I don't give him is the one that sits behind my sternum like a blade turned inward:I need what she knows. And I can't take it from her.

In every other interaction with Eleanor, the dynamic has operated on a single axis: I command. She complies or resists.The consequences belong to me. Her body, her time, her movements through my fortress. All within my authority to direct.

Her knowledge of Dover's people is different. It lives inside her, organized by years of proximity and the strategic mind that sorted every relationship and alliance and grudge into categories I can't access by ordering her to open them.

She could give me names that mean nothing. She could give me the right names with the wrong context. She could give me everything, and the accuracy of what she gives depends entirely on a factor I have never needed to account for in any other negotiation: whether she chooses to help me.

I leave the council chamber and climb the stairs.

The chamber door is open. Eleanor is sitting in the window alcove with her knees drawn up and her gaze on the inner ward below. The firelight from the low hearth catches the line of her jaw and the dark auburn of her braid where it falls across her shoulder.

She is wearing one of my tunics over her own clothing, the hem long enough to cover the bruises I left on her thighs. The sight of her in my garment does something to the wolf under my skin that I suppress with the same discipline I apply to everything about this woman that threatens to dismantle what I've built.

Her eyes find me when I enter. Her gaze goes to my face, reads it, and arrives at the conclusion before I speak.

"Who's dead?" she asks.

The exactness of the question stops me in the doorway. The raven's arrival at dinner. Thane's reaction. My jaw. My departure. She has been sitting in this window for hours, processing those inputs, and she's already past the part where I explain what happened and into the part where the details matter.

"Three of my wolves. Supply convoy on the Dover road."

Her fingers press against her knees. The pressure whitens the skin over her knuckles. "The faction."

"Armed with weapons that match the ones hitting Soren's territory. Manufactured. Distributed from a single source."

The intelligence lands in her and converts instantly, the same immediate strategic assessment that makes her the most dangerous mind inside these walls.

"You're going to Dover," she says.

"Tomorrow. I need you with me."

Her gaze holds mine. The current between us carries information that belongs to the dark hours in this chamber, the lock of the knot, the sound she made when she couldn't hide anymore. All of it runs beneath what we're discussing, and neither of us looks at it directly.

"Why?" she asks. The word is careful, weighted, a test rather than a question.

"Because I need to know who led the attack. The pack can identify the ambush site, the weapons, the tactical signature. They can't identify the men. You can."

"You're asking me to name people I grew up with so you can kill them."

The sentence sits in the air between us. She has reduced the request to its simplest, most brutal terms, and every word of it is true. I don't soften it.

"Yes."

Her fingers release from her knees. She stands. The movement is slow, controlled, the economy of a body that has learned to manage soreness without revealing it. She crosses to the table, takes the water pitcher, and pours a cup.

The ordinary domesticity of the gesture makes the conversation more real, not less.

"Dover erased me." Her back is to me. Her voice carries no self-pity. She is stating a fact with the same clinical accuracy I used to state the ambush casualties. "The treaty terms are permanent. No return. No contact. My father made that condition himself because he understood what it costs when a sacrifice can be undone. I walk through those gates tomorrow, and every person in that settlement will see a woman who was given to the wolves and came back wearing the alpha's clothes. They won't see a daughter. They'll see proof that the treaty turned me into something that isn't theirs anymore."

"Your father's terms ended the moment I pointed at you in that hall." I don't raise my voice. I don't need to. "No one erases what belongs to me. You answer to one authority now, and it isn't your father or his council."

She doesn't turn around. But her shoulders settle a fraction, and the rigid line of her spine eases into something that isn't relief and isn't surrender. It's the recalibration of a woman who has just been reminded that the ground beneath her feet, however brutal, is solid.

She drinks. Sets the cup down with a deliberateness that tells me the next words carry weight she's choosing to spend.

"If I give you what you need, I want the families who stayed loyal to my father's council left untouched. Not threatened. Not used as examples. The faction is the faction. The settlement is not."

A negotiation. With me. With the alpha who punished her for mapping his fortress, who locked himself inside her hours ago and let her feel his heartbeat. Standing in my chamber in my tunic, bruised from my hands, setting terms for the intelligence I just admitted I can't take by force.