Chapter 1 #4
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.
She thrashes. My hand comes down on the small of her back and presses her flat against the horse's neck, pinning her.
"Be still," I tell her. "It's a long ride to the Tower, and the road isn’t kind. If you fall, I'll put you back. Every time."
She goes still. She's conserving energy the way a fighter conserves energy between rounds, and I can feel the decision travel through her body: stop fighting. start thinking. survive the ride. plan for what comes after.
The column moves out. The road stretches ahead of us, rutted and broken, the ruins of what used to be England rolling past under a sky the color of old pewter.
My hand stays on the small of her back. Through the fabric of her tunic, I can feel the warmth of her skin, the flex of her muscles as she adjusts to the horse's gait, the ridge of her spine under my palm.
The bond is a low, constant pulse between us, feeding me information I didn't ask for: her breathing rate, her tension, the expansion of her ribs under my fingers with each exhale.
She’s draped across my lap like plunder.
The road is long, the horse is warm, and her body is pressed against my thighs.
For miles I feel every change in the distribution of her weight, every breath, every small unconscious adjustment that brings her closer to the curve of my leg.
She’s furious and humiliated and completely in my power.
The sustained contact is doing something to both of us that neither of us is going to acknowledge.
Halfway to the Tower, she stops bracing against the horse's movement and lets her body settle against mine. Exhaustion, not surrender. But the difference feels very thin from up here. My hand hasn’t moved. I don’t want it to move. That wanting is a fire I’m feeding by refusing to put it out.
At some point she turns her head. Forward, not back.
Her eyes track the road ahead, the ruined buildings, the overgrown fields, the shape of the land as it rolls toward London.
She’s memorizing the route. I can feel the focus enter her body, her breathing evening out, her muscles going still with concentration.
She’s slung over my horse like cargo, and she’s building a map in her head.
She’ll have this road committed to memory before we reach the Tower gates.
She hasn’t cried. She hasn’t begged. She hasn’t spoken a single word since I put her on this horse. She’s doing exactly what I would do in her position: gathering intelligence, conserving strength, waiting for the moment when what she's collecting becomes a weapon she can use.
I change my grip against her spine. No reaction at all. That absence tells me more about what kind of captive she’ll be than anything she's done since the hall.
Thane rides up beside me. His eyes drop to Eleanor's prone form across my saddle, then back to my face. He keeps his expression neutral, which tells me exactly how much he's choosing not to say.
"The council will hold?" he asks.
"Godwin will hold them."
"And the daughter?"
Eleanor's fingers, hanging near my boot, curl into fists. She's listening. Good.
"The daughter," I say, loud enough for her to hear, "is going to learn the rules. Or she's going to learn what happens when she doesn't. Either way, she'll learn."
Beneath my palm, her spine goes rigid. And her fists, curled tight near my stirrup, are already making promises her body will have to keep.
The Tower is waiting. The road unravels beneath us. And the woman across my saddle, silent and furious and burning against my thigh, is already the most dangerous thing I own.
She doesn't know it yet. By tonight, she will.