Chapter 3
RYLAND
Her spit is still wet on my knuckles, and I've already decided how this will go.
She hasn't moved. An arm's length from the bed, chin raised, breathing fast, fists clenched at her sides with the rope still binding her wrists. My warning is still hanging between us, and she looks like she would do it again anyway.
Good. I need her exactly like this.
I cross the room in two strides. Her eyes track me, and to her credit she doesn't step back, doesn't flinch, doesn't give me the satisfaction of watching her yield before I've even begun.
She holds her ground with the rigid composure of a woman who has decided that if this is coming, she will meet it standing.
I take her bound wrists in one hand, turn her, and sit on the edge of the bed.
She realizes what is happening in the half-second before I pull her across my lap, and that half-second is all the warning she gets.
Her body lands across my thighs with her hips angled over my left knee, her torso dropping, her bound hands hitting the furs.
She fights.
Not strategically. Not the controlled resistance she used outside the portcullis, where every move was calculated for maximum effect with minimum energy.
This is raw. Her body bucks against my thighs.
Her boots scrape stone. She drives her elbow back toward my ribs, and I catch it, pin her wrists against the small of her back with one hand, and hold her there.
My forearm across the base of her spine locks her in place, and the strength required to keep her down tells me that whoever taught her to fight in Dover wasn't wasting their time.
"Let me go." Her voice is muffled against the furs. Venomous. Certain, as if the command still carries weight here.
I don't answer. I pull the back of her tunic up to her waist. Beneath it she's wearing the thin linen undergarments they gave the women at Dover, and I push those down to mid-thigh with one motion.
The rope on her wrists is still Dover's rope.
Thane's knots, I haven't cut it. Haven't replaced it.
The fact that she's being disciplined in another man's bindings registers as something I'll correct later. Not now.
The skin beneath is pale. Smooth. The muscles of her legs tense against the exposure, and from her throat comes a sound compressed so tight it's barely audible. Rage and humiliation and the effort of holding both inside a body that has nowhere left to put them.
My hand comes down.
The crack fills the chamber. Her whole body jerks against my thighs, and the noise she makes is closer to shock than pain.
I don't pause. I bring my hand down again.
Again. The same spot, then lower, then the other side.
Each strike deliberate, measured, carrying weight without doing damage.
I'm not trying to injure her. I'm trying to make sure she feels this for the rest of the night, and into tomorrow, and every time she sits down for the next few days.
She kicks. Her heel catches my calf and I absorb it. She curses me in language that tells me her education at Dover covered more than supply logistics. She calls me things that would earn a wolf a broken jaw. I let her spend the words. They cost her breath and buy her nothing.
"You absolute bastard." Her voice cracks on the last syllable. Pure rage, burning through the edges of her control.
I bring my hand down harder. Her back arches. She bites into the fur beneath her face, and the muffled scream that follows vibrates through my thigh directly into the base of my spine.
The fire pops in the hearth. Outside the narrow window, the river runs against the Tower walls, indifferent to everything happening inside them.
The bond feeds me every tremor of her body with obscene precision: the heat blooming across her skin, the way her muscles clench and release, the ragged sawing of her breathing.
And beneath all of it, underneath the fury and the humiliation and the bone-deep resistance, something her mind hasn't authorized.
Warmth. Not just where my hand has landed.
Lower. Deeper. The involuntary response of a body being handled with force by someone it recognizes on a level that has nothing to do with choice.
She knows I can feel it. Her thighs pressing together, the slight tilt of her hips against my leg between strikes, tells me she's fighting the response as hard as she's fighting me. Harder. Because she can survive being held down. What she can't survive is wanting it.
I don't tell her. She'll learn what I know when I decide the knowledge becomes useful. Tonight is about something simpler.
I continue until her struggles slow. Not surrender.
Exhaustion. Her body goes limp across my thighs, her chest heaving, her face pressed into the furs, and the only movement is the involuntary flinch each time my palm connects.
Her skin is hot to the touch. Flushed dark.
She will carry the marks of my hand for days, and every time she adjusts her weight, she will think about why.
I stop.
The silence in the room is immediate and absolute.
The rough pull of her lungs fills it, uneven and raw.
My hand rests on the curve of her hip, my fingers spread across skin that radiates heat.
Her body lies across mine, spent and trembling, and every point of contact between us is a fire I'm choosing not to feed.
My thumb moves. A slow drag across the ridge of her hip bone, tracing the dip where her waist narrows.
I don't realize I'm doing it until I've already done it.
One stroke. Gentle. The kind of touch that has no place in what just happened and no explanation I'm willing to examine.
I pull my hand back as if the skin burned me.
I set her on her feet.
She staggers. Catches herself on the bedpost. Her undergarments are around her ankles, and she reaches down with her bound hands and pulls them up in a single rough motion, her face burning.
The tunic falls back into place. Her eyes, when she raises them to mine, are wet and red-rimmed but flat as river stone.
No tears. Tears would be easier. What's behind those eyes is a ledger opening, and my name just went into it.
"That was for disrespect." My voice is level. The effort it takes to keep it there is considerable. "Next time will be worse."
She says nothing. Her hands grip the bedpost, white-knuckled, and her jaw is locked so tight the tendons in her neck stand out against her skin. She's holding herself upright through will alone, and the will is formidable.
I leave.
I haven't finished. But if I stay in this room much longer, I’ll do something my strategy doesn't yet justify, and I am not a man who acts without justification.
My wolf disagrees. My wolf has been disagreeing since the moment she landed across my lap, pressing against the inside of my ribcage with an urgency that has nothing to do with discipline. Everything to do with the way she sounds when she can't control what her body gives away.
The corridor outside my chambers is cold.
Stone walls, narrow, the torches guttering in a draft that comes up from the river.
I put one hand on the wall and stand there long enough for my breathing to settle, for the blood to redistribute, for the hard length pressed against my thigh to subside enough that I can walk into the great hall without every wolf in my pack reading what just happened on my face.
It doesn't subside. I walk anyway.
The hall is half full. My wolves eat communally at this hour, gathered at the long tables in groups that reflect the pack's internal hierarchy.
Thane is at the far end, reviewing a supply manifest with two of his sentries.
The hall quiets when I enter, the way every room quiets when I enter.
An adjustment, automatic, the pack reorienting its attention around the presence of the alpha.
I don't sit. I stand at the head of the hall and let the quiet spread.
"No wolf touches my woman."
My voice carries to every corner. The acoustics of this hall were built for pronouncements, and the stone walls do the work for me.
"Not a hand on her arm. Not a shoulder in a corridor. Not a fingertip. No one disciplines her. No one corrects her. No one restrains her." I let each sentence land before the next. "No one but me."
The room processes this. Wolves exchange glances.
Small movements, the collective calculation of men who have followed me long enough to know when a command is routine and when it's something else entirely.
This is something else. Alphas don't make rules about individual humans.
Alphas don't legislate the handling of captive women with the specificity of a territorial decree.
A young wolf near the door looks at Thane, confused, waiting for the translation that makes this make sense.
Thane doesn't give him one. What I've just done is irrational.
I know it. Every wolf in this hall knows it.
Enforcing it in corridors barely wide enough for two men to pass will be a logistical problem I haven't solved. I don't care.
Thane watches from the back wall. His expression is carefully neutral, which means he has opinions he is choosing not to volunteer. Smart. I'm not in a mood that invites counsel.
In the corner of my vision, a wolf with a scarred face and pale eyes stands against the east wall, arms folded, his attention fixed on me with the flat assessment of a man taking notes for later. Aldric. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to. His posture says everything his mouth is keeping back.
I hold his gaze for two heartbeats longer than necessary. He drops it.