Chapter 12 #2
I move to stand beside Brennan's body, next to the man whose mouth is still dark with the kill, who just showed every person in this courtyard what he is. The wolf killed him. The man made the decision. Both of them live inside the body standing next to me. I chose to stand next to him. I’ll never be able to undo that choice.
The man who was my father hasn't moved from the steps. His face is the color of old parchment, and his hands have stopped shaking.
The tremor I saw from horseback is gone, replaced by a stillness I recognize because I inherited it: the composure of a leader absorbing a blow he saw coming and chose not to dodge.
He looks at me across the courtyard, over the body, through the silence, and what I see in his face isn't the father who traded me. It's the strategist who understands that the woman standing beside the blood-soaked alpha is no longer his to grieve.
Someone brings Ryland a cloak. He takes it without looking, wraps it around his shoulders, and the blood on his chest disappears beneath dark wool.
The wolf is gone. The man is back. Dover will remember both.
We're given quarters. I know these corridors better than anyone alive.
I walk with Ryland past the stairwell where I used to sit and count the guards, past the kitchen where I learned to stretch grain stores, past the door to the room where my father and I sat the night before the treaty and reviewed counterproposals that were never going to matter.
The corridor narrows. The walls press close. The stone is Dover's stone, the same cold gray I've known since before I could walk, and the familiarity of it under my fingertips is what breaks me.
Not the execution. Not Brennan's face. Not my father's hands.
The stone.
I know this stone. I know where the mortar is weak and where the damp gets in and where the wall sweats in heavy rain.
I know it the way I know my own body. Walking through these halls as the alpha's woman while Brennan's blood is still wet on the courtyard is doing something to the careful, controlled, tactical part of me that has kept me alive since the day they bound my wrists and walked me out of this castle.
The careful part is failing.
My pulse is running high and fast, the adrenaline from the courtyard still flooding my veins with nowhere to go.
My hands are steady but my jaw aches from clenching.
The muscles in my thighs are tight with the effort of standing still through something that made every instinct in my body want to run.
I press my palms flat against the stone and breathe. I know what to do with this. I've been managing adrenaline since I was old enough to stand beside my father during sieges. You breathe. You think. You channel the energy into the next task, the next problem, the next thing that needs fixing.
I breathe. I think.
And what I think about is Ryland's hands on me.
No. Not now. Not here. Not in the corridors where I played as a child, not with Brennan's blood still wet on the courtyard stones, not with my father standing at the base of those steps watching the last of what he recognized in me walk away beside the wolf who took it.
I press harder against the stone. The cold helps.
For a moment. Then the bond surges beneath my ribs, a pull so visceral I feel it between my hips, and my body delivers the answer my mind is trying to refuse: I want him.
I want the man who just killed for me, killed in front of me, killed wearing the same skin I've been sleeping against for weeks.
I want his hands and his weight and the fullness of him in the spaces no amount of strategy or composure can reach.
I try to fight it. I last until Ryland turns the corner ahead of me and the firelight catches the line of his jaw under the cloak.
Then I stop fighting.
Ryland walks ahead of me. The cloak covers the blood but not the posture, the set of his shoulders, every wolf in the passage pressing against the wall to let him pass.
He moves through Dover as he moves through the Tower: as if the stone belongs to him, because it does now, because the body in the courtyard proved it.
I grab his arm.
He turns. The amber hasn't fully left his eyes.
The cloak is rough under my fist and the muscle beneath it is warm and hard.
The teeth that just ripped out a throat are behind lips I've kissed, and the hands that folded his clothing with methodical precision before the kill are the hands I want on my body.
The contradiction should horrify me. It doesn't.
I shove him against the wall. The stone behind his back used to be mine. It isn’t any more.
The man I've pinned against them just did the most violent thing I've ever witnessed, and I’m shaking with something that is not grief, not anger and not the moral reckoning I should be having.
It's hunger. The same hunger that drove me to my knees in front of him, that made me say ‘prove it,’ that responds to the worst of what he is with a need I've stopped trying to justify.
His eyes find mine. The amber is still there, threaded through the darker color, the wolf not fully receded, and the look he gives me isn't surprise.
He knew this was coming. He reads everything. Plans everything. Runs every outcome before the first move is made. He saw this in my face in the courtyard, and he's been waiting for it through every step of these corridors.
He doesn't stop me. He doesn't command me. He lets me pin him against the stone and watches me with those amber-threaded eyes, and the absence of an order is the most dangerous thing he's given me since the night he stayed in the bed.
I kiss him with Brennan's blood still drying on his skin.
The taste of iron is on his lips. His mouth is hot and hard and opens under mine, and the kiss is nothing like the ones before it.
There's no strategy in this. No seduction.
No slow unraveling of a woman who's been fighting what she wants.
I climb him the way you climb a wall you're desperate to get over, my fingers in his hair, my thighs locking around his hips.
The cloak falls from his shoulders. He's naked against cold stone with my body wrapped around him, and I don't care.
His hands find my hips. The grip is bruising.
The wool of my trousers is the only barrier between us, and his cock is already hard against me, the length of it pressing through the fabric with a heat I feel in my spine.
He pulls my hips forward, grinding me against him, and the friction drags a sound from my throat that echoes off the stone walls.
"Eleanor." His voice is rough. Lower than I've heard it. A warning or a permission, and I don't wait to find out which.
I reach between us and unlace my trousers.
His hands take over, yanking the fabric down my thighs, and his fingers find me slick and swollen before the laces are fully undone.
The sound he makes when he feels how wet I am is guttural and immediate, an exhale that isn't controlled, that isn't strategic, that belongs to the wolf more than the man.
He lifts me. One arm. The muscles in his shoulder flex against the stone. I wrap my legs around him, and he enters me in a single hard thrust that drives my back against the opposite wall.
The impact knocks the air from my lungs.
He fills me completely, thick and deep, stretching me around him with a sudden fullness that borders on pain and crosses into something my body recognizes before my mind does.
The angle of my body against the wall means he's pressing against the place inside me that makes my vision go white, the head of his cock grinding against the swollen spot that has owned me since the first time he found it.
I bite his shoulder. Hard. Hard enough to taste the copper that's already on his skin, Brennan's blood mixed with the salt of the man underneath it, and the savagery of that doesn't stop me. Nothing is stopping me.
He thrusts again. Pulls back until I feel the loss of him, the emptiness, and then slams forward so hard my body slides up the wall.
My fingers claw down his back, leaving marks on skin that still carries the wolf's heat, and the sounds we're making fill the narrow space: raw, percussive, rhythmic, closer to violence than anything we've done in his bed.
My spine grinds against stone with every stroke. I'm so wet I can feel it on my inner thighs, can hear it in the obscene slick sound between our bodies. The evidence of how much I want him while Brennan's blood is still on his chest is the darkest corner of whatever I'm becoming.
His teeth find the curve of my neck and bite down, not the claiming bite, not the mark that would change everything, but with enough force that I feel the bruise forming and I want it.
I want every bruise he can give me because the bruises are proof that I'm here, that I chose this, that the girl who played with Brennan in the tunnels became the woman who pinned the alpha to the wall in this castle and took what she wanted from the body that just ended a life.
He drives into me with a force that rattles the iron torch bracket above us. My hands slide in the sweat on his shoulders. I grip the back of his neck and pull his face to mine, and the kiss is teeth and fury and the salt of his skin.
"Harder." The word comes out of me like something torn free.
Not a request. A demand. My first demand since Dover, and the weight of it registers in his eyes before his body answers.
He fucks me harder. His hips slam forward, pinning me between his body and the wall, and each thrust is so deep I feel it in my ribs.
The wet sound of him inside me fills the narrow passage alongside my breathing, ragged and broken and loud enough that every wolf in this castle can hear what the alpha's mate is doing to him against a wall in her father's stronghold.
Let them hear. Let Dover hear. Let every person in this settlement who watched me walk away with bound wrists hear what came back.