Chapter 13 #3
Her hand wraps around the base, working in tandem with her mouth. She twists on the upstroke in a way that tells me she's been paying attention, learning what makes my control slip. She's using that knowledge now with precision and malice.
I let her. The teeth, the fury, the ragged vibrations she's making around my cock. The danger is part of what we're processing and taking it away would be a lie.
My hand finds her hair, not to guide but to feel her, to hold the silk of it between my fingers while she takes me apart with a skill that owes nothing to obedience and everything to rage.
She increases the pace. The wet, obscene work of her mouth fills the room, louder than the fire, louder than the wind off the Channel, louder than the careful silence of a settlement trying to forget what happened today.
I feel the release building at the base of my spine, tightening, and I pull her off before it crests. Not because I want to. Because if she keeps going I'll finish in her mouth, and that isn't what either of us needs from the rest of this night.
She comes up with her lips swollen and her eyes glazed and the faintest trace of blood on her lower lip where she bit herself or bit me.
I don't ask which. I push her onto her back and settle between her thighs and fill her again, and the wet heat of her takes me so easily that the last resistance in my body dissolves.
She's swollen, oversensitive. What escapes her when I bottom out is half pleasure and half pain and entirely without shame.
She wraps her arms around my neck. Her forehead touches mine. Our breathing tangles together, ragged and uneven, and in the narrow space between our mouths she says, "You ruined me."
The words land in the place where I keep everything that matters, the sealed compartment where strategy lives alongside the things strategy can't touch, and the impact cracks something I didn't know was load-bearing.
I drive into her harder. A sharp breath escapes her. Her hands clutch my shoulders, her fingers digging fresh crescents into my skin. I do it again, setting a pace that she matches with the instinct of a body that knows mine the way a lock knows the key that opens it.
"You ruined me," she says again, and this time her voice is steadier.
Not a lament. A report from the front lines.
"The woman who walked out of Dover with bound wrists is dead.
And the one you built in her place wants things the first one would have slit her own throat before admitting.
" She rolls against me, deliberate, and her eyes don't leave my face.
"I hope it keeps you warm when it burns your pack down around you. "
I should answer with possession. I should tell her she's mine, that the ruins are mine, that everything she was and everything she'll become belongs to the man who's buried in her right now.
I've said those words before and meant them with the certainty of a man who builds empires from raw materials and considers the human cost a line item. I don't say them.
"I know." My voice comes out lower than I intend. Stripped of the command register I maintain for the pack, for the hall, for every room I enter. "I know what I've done to you. And I can't undo it. And I wouldn't."
Her motion falters. She stutters against me, and the loss of control sends a tremor through the bond that I feel in my teeth. She searches my face for the strategy beneath the words, the angle I'm working, the tactical advantage I'm leveraging. She won't find one. There isn't one.
I press further into her, bottoming out, and hold there while I brace my arms on either side of her. My body covering hers. My cock buried to the root. No space between us that isn't occupied by skin and heat and breath.
"You've made me a liability to my own pack.
" The admission comes out flat and factual, and the content is the most dangerous thing I've ever said aloud.
"Every decision I've made since Dover has been distorted by the fact that you exist. The convoy response.
The execution. The ride here with you beside me, where I spent days running scenarios in which you were hurt and discarding every other tactical priority until I'd accounted for your safety.
My wolves aren't stupid. They'll see it.
Aldric already watches me with the attention of a man taking notes for later. "
She goes still beneath me. Her hands are on my face, her thumbs resting against my cheekbones, and she’s listening with the full attention of someone who understands exactly what this confession costs a man who has never let a cost go unaccounted.
I pull back and push into her again, slow and deliberate, and the wet drag of her around me makes both of us shudder. I hold her gaze while I fuck her, and the words come out between strokes, each one timed to the motion of my body.
"I don't know how to want you and lead them.
" The last sentence is the one I shouldn't say.
The one that turns the lock on a door I've kept shut since the treaty hall, since the bond hit me and I buried it under the first strategic framework that would hold.
"I don't know how to keep you safe without making the choices that keep you safe smaller than the choices that keep my pack alive.
And I've been running the calculations since the night I took you, and they don't balance.
They've never balanced. I've been operating on a deficit I can't close, and the interest is compounding, and I don't know what happens when a position I've built my entire command around turns out to be unsound. "
The fire pops in the hearth. Outside, the wind carries the Channel's salt through the shutters. Dover sleeps the uneasy sleep of a settlement that learned today what obedience looks like when it wears teeth.
Eleanor's hands leave my face. She wraps her arms around my neck and pulls herself against me, chest to chest. The change in angle draws a low, raw noise from both of us, stripped of every performance either of us has ever given.
"Then stop running the calculations," she says against my neck. "Just for tonight."