Page 145 of Nikolay

“Not yet,” Maksym said.

Bronc turned his head toward him just enough to sharpen the air. “You got a better use for this moonrise?”

“It is not moonrise I am measuring. It is the failure rate.”

“And I’m measurin’ my sister’s chances.”

I hated waiting.

Not because I lacked discipline. I had lived too long and negotiated too much to be ruled by mere impatience. I hated waiting because it left me alone with memory, and memory had become a vicious thing these last hours. Maddie in the kitchen at the estate with flour on the edge of her wrist. Maddie glaring at me because I had been an arrogant bastard and known it even while speaking. Maddie laughing Texas accent wrapping itself around every irreverent remark. Maddie on the edge of leaving, because I had made leaving easier than staying.

Mate.

I had spoken it aloud in the war room. A declaration after too much delay. The truth did not care that I had finally named it. Truth had already been charging interest.

Taras shifted, uncapped a slim glass vial, and glanced at Amelia. “Show me the first seam.”

She touched the earth with two fingers, then pointed to a place where the shadow of the oak root crossed the buried line of stones that marked Ironwood’s border. “There. Then twelve feet south, another. They’re nested.”

Maksym exhaled once through his nose. “Five minutes.”

Bronc made a low, disbelieving sound. “Absolutely not.”

“Five.”

“Not if—”

Then it hit.

There was no warning. No gradual swell. One moment I stood in cold air under a darkening moon with my father and brothers and wolves at my flanks. The next, something drove through my sternum so savagely that the world narrowed to impact.

Maddie.

Her terror flooded me whole and raw. Not emotion alone. Place. Sensation. The cold of stone under her back, ancient and inhumanly indifferent. The drag of leather at her wrists. The awful bodily helplessness of limbs that would not obey with proper speed. White and gold fabric bunched beneath her. Torch smoke. Ritual filth. A ring of attention around her like carrion birds around an altar.

Then my name, screamed in terror.

Then the crack.

Not heard with ears. Felt.

The strike landed across my jaw as though Sage’s hand had crossed the bond and found my face instead of hers. My head snapped slightly with the phantom force of it. Pain flashed hot and immediate. Not enough to injure me. More than enough to show me what he had done to her.

My fangs dropped.

Someone said my name. I do not know who.

My right hand had found the top rail of the low limestone wall without conscious instruction. I closed my fingers.

The carved stone gave way with a soft, obscene series of fractures. No great theatrical crash. Merely pressure, then surrender. Chunks of limestone fell to the cold grass at my feet in pale broken pieces, as neat as if some sculptor had changed his mind halfway through the work and struck it once with a hammer.

The entire group went still.

I did not scream. I did not lunge blindly into the ward line like an animal in a trap. If anything, the opposite happened. The force of what crossed the bond burned everything in me down to one hard, white center. Three centuries of measured speech, patient negotiation, cultivated softness, and strategic restraint stripped away in a single instant and revealed the thing beneath—the prince, the predator, the son of a king who had lived too long to mistake civility for weakness when blood was owed.

I turned from the shattered wall to the men and women waiting on my next breath. The monster was loosed.

“We are fucking done waiting.”