Chapter 4
ELEANOR
I've been counting his breaths for hours. Slow and even when he first fell asleep, the rhythm of a man who trusts his own walls enough to close his eyes with a human woman pressed against him. Slower now. Deeper.
His arm across my waist hasn't loosened, and his cock is still thick against my backside, heavy and half-hard even in sleep. The man doesn't stop taking up space, conscious or not.
I haven't moved. My wrists ache where the rope chafed them raw, and between my thighs there's a soreness that isn't just muscle. Blood has dried on my skin, mixed with the evidence he left when he pulled out and spent himself against me.
The bruises across my backside still radiate heat where they press against him. The deep ache inside me where no one has ever been before he was. The tenderness in my jaw from being stretched around him. The raw scrape at the back of my throat.
I was a virgin until last night. In Dover that word carried weight.
The elders guarded it like currency, because it was currency.
An untouched woman was worth more to the wolves, which meant she was worth more to the settlement, which meant her body belonged to the council's ledger before it ever belonged to her.
I spent years knowing my virginity wasn't mine to give.
Now it's gone, taken in a warlord's bed by a man who registered the blood between my thighs with satisfaction and kept going.
The cost of it should feel enormous. Instead it feels like one more thing he's taken from a list I'm too tired to count.
His words replay in the dark, the ones he delivered against the back of my neck with the calm of a man reading a supply manifest.
'When I do, you'll feel me swell inside you and lock. My bite will change you into what I am. Permanently. Every woman in Dover has been taught since birth that the worst thing a wolf can do is knot and claim her. I'm going to do both.'
My mother warned me about this. She sat me on the edge of her bed in our quarters at Dover, her voice low enough that no one passing in the corridor could hear, and she told me the old stories, the ones from before the tainted-law provision, back when claimed women still returned to their families.
They came back changed. No longer human.
No longer themselves. The change couldn't be undone.
She also told me that eventually, the wolves' women stopped wanting to come back at all. That was the part that scared her most. That was the part that made my father write the ban.
I lie in the dark with his body curled around mine and I think about my mother's face when she said that. The fear in it wasn't about violence. It was about wanting. About a woman's own desire being turned against her until she couldn't tell the difference between captivity and choice.
My thighs are still wet. My body is still sore. And somewhere underneath the fury and the humiliation and the strategic assessment running on its own track behind my thoughts, there is a warmth that has nothing to do with the furs or the fire, or the man pressed against my spine.
It was there during the discipline. It was there during the sex. It was there when he told me he'd knot me and I felt my pulse climb for reasons I refuse to examine. My mother was right to be afraid of that.
I need to move. I need to think without his body against mine, without his breathing in my ear, without the weight of his arm reminding me with every inhale that I'm property being stored.
I test the arm across my waist. Ease my hip forward half an inch. His breathing doesn't change. Another inch. The arm tightens reflexively, his hand spreading against my belly, and I go still. Wait.
His breathing levels again and the grip loosens, fraction by fraction. I slide forward until my knees reach the edge of the furs and the cold air hits my bare skin.
Behind me, his breathing stays steady. Too steady. I don't think he's asleep anymore. I think he's letting me go to see what I do with it.
The room is a wreck. My wreck. The cup is in shards against the far wall. The candle holder lies bent near the hearth, iron twisted where it struck stone. The wooden chest lid is cracked down the center.
I did that with my bound hands, swinging two-fisted, and the memory gives me a satisfaction so sharp it borders on joy.
He can discipline me. He can take me. He can press his body against mine and tell me he'll turn me into what he is.
He can't stop me from breaking his things, and he can't undo the fact that I made him come back through that door when he'd already walked away.
Worth remembering. He left. He came back. Whatever he told himself about terms and lessons, the truth is simpler: he couldn't stay away. That's information. I don't know what it's worth yet, but I know what information is worth in general, and I've never thrown any away.
I find my tunic on the floor where he pulled it off me, shake the wrinkles from it, and pull it over my head.
My undergarments are tangled in the furs near the foot of the bed where he stripped them off during the sex.
I pull them on and dress in silence, keeping my movements small, watching his breathing for any change.
He lies on his side in the furs, one arm extended where my body used to be, and in sleep his face is different. Younger. The jaw still hard, the scar visible across his collarbone, but the control is gone. He looks like a man instead of a weapon.
I don't need him to be a man. I need him to be a problem with edges I can find. I stop looking.
The fire has died to embers. Gray light leaks through the narrow window, and the river is a dark line against the stone below.
Dawn, or close to it. The Tower is beginning to stir.
Through the narrow window, I see movement in the courtyard below: shapes crossing the open ground, the pale flash of a torch being carried between buildings.
The door is unlocked. I test the latch and it lifts without resistance.
He cut my rope before he slept. He left the door unlocked.
Both facts are deliberate, because nothing about this man is accidental, and I can't tell if they're gestures of trust or tests designed to see what I do with freedom I didn't ask for.
I step into the corridor. The stone is cold under my bare feet and the air hits my skin like a slap. The Tower's corridors are narrow, built to funnel enemies into kill zones, and the stone walls sweat moisture that catches the torchlight in thin streaks.
I know this kind of stonework. I grew up inside it. Dover's corridors were designed for the same purpose: hold people in, keep threats out. The difference is that Dover's walls were refuge. These corridors are demonstration.
Iron rings are bolted into the walls at intervals. I don't need to ask what they were for. I already know. I make it to the end of the passageway before a voice stops me.
Thane. Ryland's beta, the one who tied my wrists at Dover and cut them at the camp.
He's leaning against the wall at the top of the staircase, arms folded, and the look on his face is the professional neutrality of a man who has been assigned a task he considers beneath him.
"The alpha didn't mention you'd be wandering. "
Guarding the alpha's woman isn't a warrior's job. His expression says so. His posture says he'll do it anyway.
"I'm not wandering." I keep my voice level. The voice I use when addressing Dover's council members, the one that states facts rather than requests permission. "I'm learning where things are."
"There are places you can go and places you can't." He pushes off the wall. "I'll show you which is which."
He walks. I follow. The alternative is standing here in bare feet, and standing still has never been my approach to anything.
Thane moves through the Tower with the efficiency of a man who has mapped every stone.
The inner ward first: an open courtyard surrounded by high walls, the White Tower looming above everything.
Ravens line the battlements, black shapes against a pale sky, watching with an intelligence that isn't animal.
Someone trained them, or they trained themselves.
Either way, they're tracking my movements with the same attention the wolves in the courtyard give me. Predators registering prey.
We pass the water gate on the south wall.
The iron portcullis is down, but beyond it I can see the river lapping at stone steps that disappear into the dark water.
Cold air rolls off the Thames and through the bars.
This is where things enter and leave the Tower without passing through the main gates.
Thane doesn't slow. I note the location, the width of the portcullis bars, the absence of a guard on the inner side. Whatever passes through here, they rely on the river and the iron to keep it contained.
The kitchens are through a low archway, already occupied by women I don't recognize.
Human women. Their clothing is similar to mine, worn and practical, but their faces carry the specific blankness of people who stopped expecting rescue a long time ago.
Taken women. Collected through whatever system the wolves used before the accord made it formal.
I'm the first tribute under the treaty. These women came before the paperwork.
Some were claimed as mates, some started as slaves and became more, and some remained as they were when first taken.
They look up when I enter. Look at each other. Look away.
One young woman near the hearth, barely older than me, holds my gaze for a half-second longer than the others.
The look on her face isn't sympathy. It's measurement.
She's deciding whether the alpha's woman is an ally or a threat, and the fact that she's making the calculation at all tells me she's still thinking. The others have stopped.