Chapter 12 #3
The orgasm builds with the inevitability of a wall giving way. I've been fighting since the courtyard, fighting since the blood, fighting since the sound Brennan made when the wolf's jaws closed, and the fight has nowhere left to go except through my body and into the man inside me.
I come against him with a cry I don't recognize. The release tears through me in waves, my body clenching around him so hard he groans against my throat, every muscle in my core locking down on his cock in spasms I can't control and don't want to.
His hand covers my mouth, not to silence me but to feel the shape of the sound against his palm. His hips keep moving, driving through the contractions, extending it until my thighs shake and my nails draw blood from his shoulders. I'm holding onto him because my legs won't support me.
He finishes inside me with a sound that comes from somewhere deeper than his chest. I feel him pulse, the heat of his release flooding the space where our bodies meet, his cock throbbing inside me with each wave.
His hands on my hips grip hard enough to leave marks that will last longer than anything Brennan's death put on my conscience.
His forehead drops to my shoulder. His breathing is destroyed.
His arms hold me against the wall as if the wall is the only thing keeping either of us vertical. For several heartbeats there's nothing between the stone walls except the sound of two people breathing like they've just survived something that should have killed them.
He doesn't let me go. His hands stay on my hips. His body stays inside mine.
The stone is cold against my spine. His skin is hot against my chest. Between those two temperatures there's a woman who just watched a man die and then used the man who killed him to burn the grief out of her body.
I don't know what that makes me. I know it isn't the Eleanor Godwin who left Dover as a transaction.
That Eleanor would never have grabbed a man covered in blood and climbed him in a corridor.
That Eleanor believed in systems, in negotiations, in the careful management of power through intelligence and patience.
The two Eleanors can't both exist. The corridor is too narrow for them both. One of them died on the courtyard with Brennan, and I'm not sure which.
This Eleanor bit the alpha's shoulder hard enough to draw blood and demanded harder while her childhood friend's body cooled in the courtyard.
Ryland lifts his head from my shoulder. The amber is gone from his eyes. They're dark again, the deep brown black of the alpha who governs and calculates and never stops planning.
He looks at me with an expression I've never seen on his face: something that isn't satisfaction and isn't dominance and isn't the cold assessment I've come to expect after he's had me.
He looks like a man who just discovered that the woman in his arms is capable of something he didn't calculate for.
Good.
Let him recalculate.
He lowers me to my feet. My legs are weak.
My thighs are slick. The bruises on my hips are already forming under the marks his fingers left.
I pull my trousers up. Lace them with hands that aren't steady, and don't try to hide the unsteadiness, because hiding things from this man is a game I stopped playing somewhere between the knotting and the killing.
He picks up the cloak from the floor. Wraps it around his shoulders.
The blood on his chest is smeared now, mixed with my sweat and the scratches I left on his back.
Evidence of what we just did to each other in a passage that used to belong to my father and now belongs to the alpha who just proved, in every way that matters, that it's his.
We walk the rest of the corridor without speaking. The room my father gave us is at the end of the hall. The door closes behind us, and the sound of the latch carries through the stone as every sound in Dover has carried since I was old enough to listen.
I sit on the edge of the bed. My body is still shaking. The anger hasn't burned out. It has burned down, the way a fire burns from roaring to embers, and what's left underneath the ash is something quieter, heavier, harder to put out.
Grief.
Not for Brennan. For the version of myself that would have mourned him. She's gone. I don't know when she left. The woman sitting on this bed inside my father's castle with the alpha's seed between her thighs and his blood under her fingernails is someone I haven't met yet.
I'll need to learn her. She seems dangerous.
Ryland stands by the narrow window, looking out at Dover. His back is to me. The cloak hangs from his shoulders, and beneath it the scratches I left are drying in the cool air. He doesn't turn around.
The quiet between us is different from every quiet before. Heavier than the tension of power and resistance. Deeper than the bond pulling between two bodies that want each other against every strategic objection.
Something beyond either of those. Something neither of us has a name for yet, and the weight of it fills the room as completely as the wolf filled the courtyard, with no space left for anything that came before.