Page 149 of Nikolay

What he saw instead made him still.

I did not need the bond to know how I must have looked to him in that moment. I felt my own body as if from a great distance—too still, too centered, every line of me stripped down to function and intent. The shadows I had drawn around myself had not fully dispersed, and the failing torchlight cut what remained of them into my coat and shoulders so that even my outline seemed sharpened rather than softened.

Maddie made a sound then. Small. Not a scream. Not even my name. More the body’s involuntary answer to seeing rescue and not yet believing rescue had arrived in time.

My gaze moved to her again. Even though time seemed to stand still, only moments had passed since I’d stepped into the clearing.

Everything else receded.

The wolves at the perimeter still existed, I assumed. The witch’s half-collapsed work still trembled uselessly over the altar. The eclipse hung above us. Fear moved through the clearing in new directions. Somewhere beyond the trees, the breach still raged; men I loved were likely bleeding for the right to keep me this close to the center.

I perceived none of it in any meaningful sense.

There was only Maddie.

And the man who had put his hand on her.

Chapter 23

Maddie

The bond burst so hard through my chest that for one blinding second the leather at my wrists and the stone under my back both disappeared, and there was only him at the edge of the clearing with the eclipse bleeding above his head and death moving in his shape.

I had never seen Nikolay look like this.

Not angry. I had seen him angry before in quiet little fractures, in the sharpened edge of his mouth, in the cold, careful cruelty of a sentence he regretted as soon as it left him. This was something older than anger. Something that had outlived reason and manners and every civilized habit he had built over three hundred years to keep the world from meeting the thing underneath.

His amber eyes swept over me once.

My bound limbs. My dress. My split lip.

Then they landed on the bruise.

The change in him was precise enough to be monstrous. Not dramatic. Not wild. Worse. His face did not twist. His body did not tense. Rather, every trace of softness seemed to leave him in a single merciless withdrawal, as if some hidden hand had stripped the human-seeming layer clean off and let the ancient predator beneath stand bare at last.

My fear spiked so violently I nearly gagged on it.

Not because of him.

Because of Sage.

I knew, with the bright, ugly certainty terror sometimes granted, that if Nikolay came for me first, Sage would kill me before he let me be taken. Sage did not lose. Men like him renamed losing until it sounded principled, but they did not endure it. They scorched whatever they could not possess and called it order.

My heart hammered. I lifted my head as far as the bindings allowed and caught Nikolay’s gaze.

No.

It was barely a movement. Less than that. A tiny shake of my head, so small another person might have missed it entirely.

He did not look at my mouth. He looked into my eyes.

The bond tightened between us, hot and living and terrible.

Then he gave me the faintest nod.

Understanding.

My breath left me in a little broken rush.