Page 102 of Nikolay

“Think about how wonderful life could be by my side,” he said.

Not with me.

By my side.

A phrasing so small another woman might not have marked it.

I did.

He let me go then as smoothly as he had taken hold, stepped back, and walked to the door before my body had fully caught up to my mind. His hand closed around the knob. He looked at me once more, unreadable now in the softened lamplight.

“Sleep well, Madelyn.”

Then he stepped out and closed the door behind him.

I stood in the middle of the room without moving.

My back still held the heat of the wall. My mouth still held the warmth of his. My fingers remained curled uselessly from where they had gripped his shirt.

For one disorienting instant I could still feel the run in my body—the openness, the joy, the deep animal relief of pack under moonlight. And beneath that, under all of it now, something cold began settling into my gut.

Wrong.

Not because I had kissed him back. That would have been simpler. Easier to condemn. Easier to understand.

Wrong because I had told him about Nikolay, and he had not looked surprised, only confirmed. Wrong because of the word unnatural. Wrong because of that half-made sentence about things being corrected. Wrong because the kiss had felt too good and too inevitable, and I did not know where my own wanting had ended and his gravity had begun. I had wanted it, hadn’t I?

I lifted trembling fingers to my mouth.

Then I looked toward the dark window as if I might somehow see all the way back to the Kozlov estate through the Pennsylvania night.

I needed to leave first thing in the morning.

No delay. No lingering brunch. No polite goodbyes that stretched into another day.

I needed to go back.

And more than that, I needed to talk to Nikolay. Not later. Not after another shift. Not after another misunderstanding thickened around us and hardened into something worse. I needed the truth from him with no ballroom manners around it. No corridor games. No old-world evasions. Truth or the ruin of it.

The room remained silent.

My body, traitorous thing, was already beginning to feel the drag of sleep again under the adrenaline crash.

So I locked the door.

Then I stood there a second longer with my palm flat to the wood, like I could keep the night out by force, and wished with a sudden, aching ferocity that the vampire prince who had booped my nose and wrapped a first edition in linen were the man I could speak to right this minute instead of tomorrow.

Chapter 16

Nikolay

By the time the house surrendered to that thin, miserable hour before dawn, I had stopped pretending I would sleep. The estate lay in a hush too elegant to be called silence, all old stone and dark wood holding its breath around me, while inside my chest the bond to Madelyn throbbed with a wrongness so profound it made every other sensation feel ornamental.

I was still dressed from the night before. Same trousers. Same shirt, now creased and half untucked from having paced my rooms like an idiot since I got home from the club. My eyes burned. My jaw ached from how long I had held it clenched. Several times I had taken out my phone, stared at her last message, and told myself not to become melodramatic. She was at Ironwood. She was among wolves. She had said she wanted to talk to me when she returned. She had said she might stay a couple of days.

Promising, I had called it.

I had actually stood in my room like a besotted schoolboy and called it promising.