Chapter 13 #4
I can't. She knows I can't. I'm the man who runs calculations the way other men breathe, involuntary and constant and necessary for the continued function of everything that depends on me. Stopping would mean trusting the unmeasured, and I have never in my life trusted what I couldn't measure.
The vulnerability is still open like a wound, and the only response I have is the one my body knows.
I grip her waist, hard, and drive into her with a force that shoves her up the bed. She gasps and her arms tighten around me and I do it again, harder, setting a punishing tempo that's the opposite of everything I gave her before.
The grief isn't gone. The confession isn't gone. I'm fucking her through both of them, and what fills the room is raw and rough and nothing like what happens when a man is being tender with a woman he's just laid himself bare for. I'm not being tender. I'm reminding us both what I am.
Her fingernails rake down my back hard enough to draw blood.
She rises to meet every stroke. "There he is," she says through her teeth.
The words hit me like a fist because she's right.
This is the version of me she signed up for against that wall.
The wolf wearing a man's skin. The quiet confession was the aberration, not this.
Her orgasm hits with her teeth in the muscle between my neck and shoulder and her body locked tight around my cock, wrenching through her in hard contractions that strip every thought from my head.
I follow her seconds later, the release brutal, my body slamming flush against hers, my hands on her waist hard enough to leave bruises, a groan torn from my throat that I don't recognize as mine.
I stay in her. Neither of us moves. My body pins her to the pelts. For a span of seconds the only noise in the room is our breathing and the Channel murmuring against Dover's walls like it has for every prisoner, every ruler, every fool who thought the stone would keep him safe.
Her breathing settles before mine does. Her arms loosen. She turns her head toward the wall, and the withdrawal is so clean I almost don't register it as a door closing.
I ease out of her and lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, and I feel the exact moment when the walls I breached with my confession begin to rebuild. Mine.
The exposure settles into me with the weight of a tactical error, and the part of me that has never once allowed a vulnerability to outlast its usefulness begins closing what I opened.
I told her I don't know how to want her and lead. That statement is true. It is also, I realize with the cold clarity that returns to me now like blood returning to a limb I've been lying on, a piece of intelligence I handed to a woman who was trained from birth to identify leverage and use it.
She won't use it. I know this with a certainty that doesn't answer to evidence. But certainty that doesn't answer to evidence is the first brick in every empire that's fallen, and I have never built anything I wasn't prepared to watch fall.
The wind dies outside. Eleanor's breathing settles beside me. I don't know whether she's sleeping or performing sleep. The fact that I can't tell the difference is itself a failure of intelligence I should find unacceptable.
I close my eyes. I run the numbers on what I've exposed, and they tell me what they've been telling me since Dover: that Eleanor is the gap in my defenses I can't close without destroying the only thing I've wanted more than the pack's survival.
The calculations don't balance. They've never balanced. For tonight, I stop running them.
In the morning I'll be the alpha again. I'll dress, and walk through Dover with my jaw set and my wolves at my flanks, and give Godwin the terms for the next tribute with the flat certainty that every man in this settlement expects from the wolf who tore out a throat on their flagstones.
I'll ride back to the Tower with Eleanor beside me and the bond between us pulled taut as a bowstring, and I'll bury what I said tonight under the weight of every decision that comes next.
But the words are loose now. I told her I don't know how to keep her safe and keep my pack alive, and she didn't flinch, and she didn't try to solve it, and she didn't offer me the comfortable lie that both are possible without cost. She told me to stop running the calculations.
For a span of seconds with her body wrapped around mine, I did.
The silence where the numbers should have been was the most exposed I've been since the day I took the pack from the wolf who held it before me.
A scratch at the shutters. Talons on stone. A raven settles on the windowsill, and the cylinder strapped to its leg is sealed with Tower wax.
I don't get up.
Somewhere in the castle, a door closes. The sound carries through Dover's stone, through the tunnels and the passages and the corridors where a girl once played with a boy whose throat I tore out this morning.
Eleanor breathes beside me. The bond hums beneath my ribs. The numbers start again, automatic as my heartbeat, and the first thing they calculate is the cost of what I've already given away.