Page 59 of The Iron Alpha

I will find it. And when I do, I don't know whether it will save us or finish what the raven started.

15

RYLAND

Eleanor is still sleeping when I dress. The bond tells me she's not, that the rhythm of her breathing is too controlled, the careful performance of a woman who has spent weeks learning when to let me believe she isn't watching. I let her perform it. Today the performance serves both of us.

My fingers work the lacing of the tunic without thought. The leather is stiff from the days of riding, salt-hardened, carrying the road between Dover and the Tower in its creases.

I pull it over the scratches she left on my back and welcome the sting because pain is honest and honest is the one thing I wasn't with her.

I gave her something I can't take back. The words were a failure of containment, but words can be buried under action and time, and I've buried worse.

What I can't bury is the version of myself that touches her like she matters more than the pack. That version lives in a space between the alpha and the man, and I've kept him sealed behind command discipline since the day I took this seat.

I cracked the seal. I know exactly when. Her body against mine in the dark, the knot locking us together, and the words that came out of my mouth while I was still inside her. I didit deliberately and I'd do it again, and that admission is the problem.

The council chamber is dim, the hearth unlit. Thane is waiting, standing at the far end of the table with his hands clasped behind his back, his face blank with held intelligence. Two other wolves flank the door.

The maps on the table are weighted at the corners with iron, the same borders, the same corridors of trade and threat that make up the spine of everything I've built. I look at them and they look the same, and the sameness is a lie because the man reading them has changed.

"Report," I say.

"Overnight developments." Thane steps forward and places a message cylinder on the table. Soren's seal, the wax cracked but legible. "The threat assessment holds. But Soren's situation has worsened. His second granary is a total loss. Contamination traced to the supply line between Warwick and the western farmsteads. Someone is dosing the grain before it reaches his walls." He pauses. His jaw works once. "Soren is requesting brotherhood support. In writing. He's never done that."

Soren, who runs his territory like a stonemason runs a wall, every block in place, every joint sealed. Asking for help is a fracture I can read from across the country.

Whoever is coordinating these attacks understands that the brotherhood's strength is its independence. Strike each territory separately. Force them to choose between self-sufficiency and calling for aid. Either choice weakens the structure.

"The scouts?" I ask.

"The Canterbury settlement has gone dark." Thane's voice carries nothing. "The families who supplied under the treaty aren't responding to runners. The last convoy that passed through reported the road clear, but that was days ago. When a treaty settlement goes quiet, it's never good."

"How many gaps does that make."

Thane doesn't consult notes. "The burned loyalist family on the Dover road. The settlements that stopped supplying after the execution. And now this." He meets my eyes. "Several gaps in the supply corridor between here and the coast. If the pattern holds, the next one will be closer to the Tower."

I absorb it systematically, each piece placed against the broader structure to identify where the load is transferring. The pattern is deliberate.

Someone is dismantling the treaty's infrastructure from the ground up, targeting the human settlements that keep the brotherhood fed and supplied. The weapons the Dover insurgents carried came from a source we never identified. The grain contamination at Warwick carries the same signature of coordination, the same measured escalation, the same understanding of which threads to pull.

"Increase the patrols on the Dover road. Double the guard on our own granaries." I look at the map. The gaps in the supply corridor form a line running northwest. The line points at something I can't see yet, but the angle of it makes the wolf under my skin pace with a restlessness that has nothing to do with territory. "Send a raven to Soren. Tell him I'm dispatching scouts to trace the western supply line from Warwick to the source. And send word to Emric. If the Midlands are being targeted, the Welsh borders are next."

Thane nods. He doesn't leave.

The quiet stretches. I know what he wants to ask. He's been carrying it since Dover, since he watched me ride with Eleanor at my flank and then watched me ride with her behind me. Thane is too disciplined to question my decisions. He isn't too disciplined to notice when they contradict each other.

"Speak," I say.

"The woman." He says it carefully. Not Eleanor. Not my mate. The woman. The neutrality is pointed. "She goes in the lower corridors. The cisterns, the grain stores, the drainage channels. Margery has been bringing her requests from the taken women, and she's been fulfilling them."

"I'm aware."

"The pack is aware as well." Thane's voice doesn't change, but the words carry weight he's choosing to leave unspoken. "Aldric's wolves have been watching. They're taking note of how much access she has. Where she goes. What she touches."

The information isn't new. I've been tracking Aldric's attention since before Dover. The scarred wolf has been methodical, operating within the bounds of loyalty while building something beneath it, and the something is patience. Aldric doesn't challenge directly. He waits for the structure to develop a weakness, and then he applies pressure at the joint.

Eleanor is the joint. Eleanor's influence in the Tower has grown because I allowed it, because her competence fills gaps my wolves can't, because watching her solve problems I didn't know existed made the bond sing in a register I stopped trying to muffle.