Chapter 8 #2
"Threaten her, and I will let you live long enough to watch me destroy everything you love." I lean closer, dropping my voice to a whisper that only he can hear. "She is mine. And you will never speak to her again. Do you understand?"
He nods, frantic and broken.
"Good." I stand and turn to where Iris is watching, her face pale, her eyes wide with something that is not quite fear. "Apologize to your luna."
Ragnar crawls forward on his knees, his broken arm hanging useless at his side, and presses his forehead to the floor at Iris's feet.
"Forgive me," he gasps. "Luna. Please. Forgive me."
Iris looks down at him, then up at me. I cannot read her expression.
There is shock there, certainly. Perhaps horror at the casual brutality of what I have done.
But beneath it, flickering like a flame behind glass, I see something else.
Recognition. Understanding. The acknowledgment that this is what I am, what I have always been, and that she has known it since the moment she read those journals in my study.
"Take him to the cells," I tell Torben, who has appeared at my shoulder. "He will remain there until I decide what to do with him."
Torben hauls Ragnar upright and drags him from the hall. The three wolves who had stood at Ragnar's back scatter like leaves before a wind, unwilling to meet my eyes, desperate to distance themselves from a rebellion that has just been crushed.
I turn to the assembled pack.
"Does anyone else have concerns about my choice of mate?"
The silence is answer enough.
The hours after the hall are filled with quiet work. Reports from Torben, orders for increased patrols, the tedious business of maintaining control. I do not seek her out. I wait.
Iris comes to my chambers late that night, when the fires have burned low and the fortress has settled into the quiet of sleeping wolves.
I hear her footsteps in the corridor before she reaches my door.
I recognize the rhythm of her pace, the slight hesitation as she pauses outside, the small breath she takes before she knocks.
I open the door before her knuckles can connect with the wood.
She stands in the dim light of the hallway, wearing one of the simple dresses the pack women provided for her, her hair loose around her shoulders, her feet bare on the cold stone floor.
She looks like she has not slept since the confrontation in the hall.
Like she has spent the last several hours trying to talk herself out of coming here.
I step aside and let her enter.
She crosses the threshold and stops in the center of the room, her arms wrapped around herself as though she is cold. The fire burns hot in the hearth. She is not cold. She is afraid of what she has come here to do.
"You almost killed him," she says finally.
"I showed restraint."
"That was restraint?"
"He threatened you." I close the door behind me and lean against it, giving her space, giving her the illusion of control over what happens next. "Restraint was letting him keep his tongue."
She stares at me, processing what I am capable of.
What I committed for her. I can see her working through it, turning it over in her mind the way she turned over the photographs and journals in my study.
Trying to reconcile the man who watched her from a distance for years with the man who just shattered another wolf's arm in front of his entire pack.
"Why?" The word is barely a whisper.
"You know why."
"Say it."
I push off from the door and walk toward her. She does not back away. Her chin lifts, stubborn and defiant, even as her breath quickens and her heartbeat flickers visibly at her neck.
"Because you are mine." I stop close enough to touch but do not reach for her. Not yet. "Because anyone who threatens what is mine forfeits their right to mercy. Because I have spent years watching you from a distance and I will not spend a single day watching someone else make you afraid."
She moves before I finish speaking.
She closes the distance between us and takes my face in her hands, dragging my mouth down to hers, kissing me with the same violence she showed in my study, all desperation and demand.
I let her take what she wants for exactly three seconds.
Then I grip her hips and spin her, pressing her back against the wall with my body.
The kiss changes. Deepens. Her mouth opens under mine and I taste desperation and hunger and something sweeter underneath. Something that might be surrender if she would let herself name it.
I slide my hands down her sides, gathering the fabric of her dress, dragging it up until my palms find bare skin.
She gasps against my mouth as I grip her thighs and lift, and then her legs are wrapped around my waist and her back is arched against the wall and I am pressed against the heat of her through nothing but thin fabric.
"Stellan." My name on her lips is a prayer and a curse combined.
I press my mouth to her neck, feeling her pulse hammer against my tongue. My hand slides between us, finding the wet heat of her, and she cries out as my fingers stroke through slick folds.
"So wet." I push one finger inside her and she clenches around me, her hips rolling instinctively, seeking more. "How long have you been like this? Since the hall? Since you watched me break him for daring to speak your name with disrespect?"
She does not answer. She cannot. I add a second finger and curl them inside her, finding the spot that makes her spine arch and her breath shatter into pieces.
"Answer me, Iris."
"Yes." The word is torn from her throat. "Since the hall. Since you called me yours in front of everyone. Since you made him kneel."
I reward her honesty with my thumb against her clit, circling slowly while my fingers work inside her with ruthless precision. She is close already. I can feel it in the flutter of her walls, the desperate clench of her thighs, the way her nails dig into my shoulders hard enough to draw blood.
"Good girl," I murmur against her throat. "Come for me. Let me feel it."
She breaks apart with a cry that echoes off the stone walls, her body shuddering against mine, her heat pulsing around my fingers as the orgasm crashes through her. I hold her through it, drawing out every wave, every tremor, until she is limp and gasping in my arms.
I carry her to the bed and lay her down on the furs. She reaches for me as I settle over her, her hands fumbling with my belt, trying to free me from my clothes.
I catch her wrists and pin them above her head.
"Not tonight."
"Why?" The word is ragged, confused. "I want you."
"I know." I press my mouth to hers, soft this time, gentle in a way I have not been since she arrived.
"But when I fuck you, when I knot you and claim you as my mate, it changes everything.
Forever. The bond completes. There is no going back.
" I release her wrists and stroke the hair back from her face.
"And I want you desperate for it. Aching.
I want you to come to me not because your heat forces you, but because you cannot stand another moment without me inside you.
When I finally take you, Iris, you will beg for it. And you will mean it."
She stares up at me, her eyes dark and wide, her lips swollen from my kisses. I can see the war playing out across her features. The part of her that wants to argue, to demand I finish what I started. And the part of her that knows it will do no good.
I don't wait for her to decide.
I slide down her body and settle between her thighs, spreading them wider with my shoulders.
"What are you—"
"Taking what I want." I hold her gaze as I lower my mouth to her center. "Lie back and let me watch you shatter."
I taste her, dragging my tongue through slick heat, and her hips buck off the bed.
I pin them down with one hand splayed across her stomach and take my time.
Long, slow strokes that make her whimper.
Tight circles around her clit that make her curse.
I learn what makes her thighs tremble, what makes her breath catch, what makes her fist the furs so hard her knuckles go white.
She is soaked. Dripping for me. Every stroke of my tongue brings a fresh flood of arousal that I lap up like a man dying of thirst. I slide two fingers inside her while I suck her clit, curling them against that spot that made her scream earlier, and she shatters with a cry that echoes off the stone walls.
I don't stop.
I work her through the first orgasm and straight into the second, relentless, my mouth never leaving her cunt, my fingers pumping steadily while her walls clench and flutter around them.
She tries to close her thighs, tries to push my head away, but I growl against her flesh and she goes limp, surrendering to whatever I want to take.
The third orgasm breaks her. She comes soundless and shaking, tears streaming down her temples, her body arched like a bow, and I watch every second of it. Watch her fall apart beneath my mouth. Watch her become mine in a way that has nothing to do with bonds or bites or ceremonies.
This is ownership. This is what it means to belong to me.
When it is over, I pull her into my arms and wrap the furs around us both. She is asleep within minutes, her body curled against mine, her breath warm against my chest.
Outside, the wind howls against the fortress walls and somewhere in the cells beneath us, Ragnar nurses his broken arm and dreams of revenge.
Korren's wolves patrol our borders, testing, probing, waiting for a weakness to exploit.
Tomorrow there will be challenges to face, threats to neutralize, a pack to hold together through force and will and the kind of violence that has kept me alpha for fifteen years.
But tonight, Iris sleeps in my arms. And for the first time since I caught her scent all those years ago, the hunger that has driven me feels something close to peace.
Tomorrow, Korren's wolves will test our borders again. Tomorrow, I will deal with what remains of Ragnar's rebellion. Tomorrow, the world will remember that I am not a man who rests.
But tonight, she is here. And that is enough.