Page 53 of The Iron Alpha

"I don't ask." I hold her gaze until the silence between us thickens with a heat that has teeth. "Turn over."

Her mouth twitches. Not a smile. Something sharper. Then she turns. Slowly. Settling onto her belly, her cheek against the bedding, her spine a long pale line in the low light.

I run my hand down her back. Over the ridge of each vertebra, the hollow above her waist, the curve of her backside where bruises from nights at the Tower have faded to faint shadows. I push her thighs apart with my knee and settle between them. The sight of her spread open on the pelts, flushed and swollen and glistening with her own arousal and what I leftin her earlier, is a view I will carry into every tactical meeting for the rest of my life.

I lean over her, my chest against her back, my lips beside her ear. "Look at you." My hand slides between her thighs from behind, parting her, and the slickness I find there coats my fingers, warm and copious. "Soaked through. After tonight, after what you saw me do in that courtyard, after what I am. This cunt is still mine. Still dripping for the wolf who tore out a man's throat in your father's courtyard." I push two fingers into her from behind and she lifts off the bed with a choked cry that the bedding swallows. "And you're still here."

She turns her head enough that I can see her profile. The line of her jaw. The set of her mouth. "I'm still here," she says. And the words carry the weight of every reason she shouldn't be, and the single reason she is.

I withdraw my fingers and replace them with my cock, pushing into her from behind in a single measured stroke. The angle is tighter from this position, the pressure different. What she buries against the bedding is guttural and animal and nothing like the composed woman who rides beside me through settlements and sits at my table with her spine straight.

I brace one hand beside her head and grip her hip with the other, setting a pace that's slower than she asked for and more precise, each stroke bottoming out with a force that makes the bed frame creak against the stone wall.

Her fingers claw the fabric. She rocks back to meet me, and the slap of my body against her backside fills the room alongside the slick, obscene noise of every thrust.

"Every man in Dover heard what I did today," I tell her, my mouth against the back of her neck, maintaining the cadence that's making her thighs shake. "Every man in Dover knows what I'm doing tonight. The alpha's woman, in the alpha's bed,in the castle the alpha owns. And you're making noises that carry through stone."

Her orgasm hits without warning. A cry she can't muffle, her face pressed into the bedding, her body clenching around me in waves so tight I have to stop moving or follow her over the edge.

I lock every muscle and hold still, feeling the contractions ripple through the bond like an echo in my own body. My free hand fists in the fabric beside her head while I fight to hold back what her pleasure is trying to drag out of me.

I ease out of her. She breathes. She's trembling with the kind of full-muscle exhaustion that follows a release drawn out past its natural length, and the sheen of sweat on her spine catches the firelight.

She rolls onto her back. Looks up at me. And then she slides down the bed, her hands on my thighs, and takes me in her mouth.

I've had her mouth before. On her knees in our chamber at the Tower, my hand in her hair, commanding the depth and the pace. The resentment she usually brings to the act has its own charge, a defiance that translates into pressure and technique and the way she watches me from below with fury in her eyes.

This isn't that.

This is Eleanor using her mouth as a weapon, her teeth dragging along the underside of my cock with enough pressure that the line between stimulation and damage blurs. The edge of her incisors catches the ridge below the head, and the bright flare of it makes me buck. She doesn't ease up. She takes me further in, her cheeks hollowing, her tongue working the length while her teeth maintain that dangerous friction. Every stroke is a negotiation between wanting to bring me pleasure and wanting to make me pay for what she saw on those flagstones.

Her hand wraps around the base, working in tandem with her mouth. She twists on the upstroke in a way that tells me she'sbeen paying attention, learning what makes my control slip. She's using that knowledge now with precision and malice.

I let her. The teeth, the fury, the ragged vibrations she's making around my cock. The danger is part of what we're processing and taking it away would be a lie.

My hand finds her hair, not to guide but to feel her, to hold the silk of it between my fingers while she takes me apart with a skill that owes nothing to obedience and everything to rage.

She increases the pace. The wet, obscene work of her mouth fills the room, louder than the fire, louder than the wind off the Channel, louder than the careful silence of a settlement trying to forget what happened today.

I feel the release building at the base of my spine, tightening, and I pull her off before it crests. Not because I want to. Because if she keeps going I'll finish in her mouth, and that isn't what either of us needs from the rest of this night.

She comes up with her lips swollen and her eyes glazed and the faintest trace of blood on her lower lip where she bit herself or bit me.

I don't ask which. I push her onto her back and settle between her thighs and fill her again, and the wet heat of her takes me so easily that the last resistance in my body dissolves. She's swollen, oversensitive. What escapes her when I bottom out is half pleasure and half pain and entirely without shame.

She wraps her arms around my neck. Her forehead touches mine. Our breathing tangles together, ragged and uneven, and in the narrow space between our mouths she says, "You ruined me."

The words land in the place where I keep everything that matters, the sealed compartment where strategy lives alongside the things strategy can't touch, and the impact cracks something I didn't know was load-bearing.

I drive into her harder. A sharp breath escapes her. Her hands clutch my shoulders, her fingers digging fresh crescents into my skin. I do it again, setting a pace that she matches with the instinct of a body that knows mine the way a lock knows the key that opens it.

"You ruined me," she says again, and this time her voice is steadier. Not a lament. A report from the front lines. "The woman who walked out of Dover with bound wrists is dead. And the one you built in her place wants things the first one would have slit her own throat before admitting." She rolls against me, deliberate, and her eyes don't leave my face. "I hope it keeps you warm when it burns your pack down around you."

I should answer with possession. I should tell her she's mine, that the ruins are mine, that everything she was and everything she'll become belongs to the man who's buried in her right now. I've said those words before and meant them with the certainty of a man who builds empires from raw materials and considers the human cost a line item. I don't say them.

"I know." My voice comes out lower than I intend. Stripped of the command register I maintain for the pack, for the hall, for every room I enter. "I know what I've done to you. And I can't undo it. And I wouldn't."

Her motion falters. She stutters against me, and the loss of control sends a tremor through the bond that I feel in my teeth. She searches my face for the strategy beneath the words, the angle I'm working, the tactical advantage I'm leveraging. She won't find one. There isn't one.