Page 68 of Nikolay

“I’m not looking for another alpha,” I said.

“You don’t have to explain that to me.”

“I know. I just—” I huffed a breath. “Bronc’s my alpha. Always will be.”

Sloan nodded once. “And you can still need somewhere to run.”

There it was. No challenge to my loyalty. No hidden agenda in the words that I could hear. Just permission to want a thing my body had already been asking for.

“Tomorrow night,” she said. “I’ll text you the details.”

“Okay.”

Then she shoved the door open, and the Philadelphia night met us.

I stepped outside and breathed.

Behind me, Obsidian kept its secrets.

Somewhere inside that black-glass pleasure house, a vampire prince still carried my black lace panties in his suit pocket like a man who had lost the plot and intended to stay lost. Ahead of me, a night away, a wolf run sat on my calendar like a promise my wolf had already begun to lean toward.

For the first time all evening, those two facts did not feel like they were tearing me clean in half.

Just pulling.

And maybe, for tonight, that was survivable.

Chapter 11

Nikolay

Long after the last patron had gone and Obsidian had settled into the uneasy stillness that followed appetite, I stood alone behind the dark sweep of my desk with a fistful of black lace crushed in my hand and the empty club spread beneath me like the aftermath of a confession nobody had meant to make.

The one-way glass wall ran the length of the office, ten feet high and merciless in what it offered. Below me, the main floor had been restored to order so completely that one might have mistaken it for innocence if one were stupid enough to believe in such things. The bar had been wiped to a black gleam. Stools stood tucked beneath it in a line of obedient shadows. The stage sat unlit, its amber performance light gone, its sins reduced to shape and structure. The swing had long since been removed and taken to the room where it would find its more permanent home.

To my left, the surveillance screens cycled in soft, shifting glow: the basement casino with its deserted ancient tables and silent dealers’ stations; the private halls below, empty doors shut over rooms that had hosted every permutation of pleasure and barter; the second-floor lounges abandoned at last to scattered glassware and the ghostly echo of laughter. Closing music still moved somewhere far beneath the building, reduced now to a low residual pulse through the walls and floor, as if Obsidian itself possessed a heartbeat too stubborn to cease simply because the night had ended.

I brought the boy shorts to my face one final time.

God help me, I did it slowly.

The cotton lace was soft, plain, indecent only because I knew exactly where it had been and what it carried. Her scent rose at once—warm woman, lemon sugar lingering faintly, wolf beneath it all, and the unmistakable slick trace of what my body had already catalogued with far more enthusiasm than dignity. My eyes shut of their own accord. For one hideous, exquisite instant, my whole awareness narrowed to that fragrance and the memory attached to it: fluorescent corridor, her back to the wall, my fingers opening her fist, that black lace, and my own voice gone coarse enough to shame me.

Then I forced my hand down.

The impact against the desk was harder than necessary. Wood thudded under my knuckles. The cotton remained trapped in my fist a beat longer before I made myself unclench.

Beside my hand, arranged with infuriating composure on the blotter, sat the parcel.

It was flat and rectangular, wrapped not in gaudy paper nor in any decorative nonsense, but in archival linen the color of old cream. The folds had been made with exactitude. A conservator’s work. Inside lay the first edition I had set in motion the same afternoon Maddie had slapped my hand away from her own battered copy and told me, with devastating justice, that I had not earned the right to touch it.

I had not.

So I had done what men of my station and species too often do when confronted with moral failure. I had reached for acquisition.

The book had arrived that evening by private courier from a collector who owed my family more favors than wisdom advised. Even through the linen and protective board beneath it, my senses caught what human ones would not—the faint, dry perfume of aged paper and binding glue, the whisper of leather and cloth, the cool, clean absence that belonged only to things preserved at great expense against decay. When I had unwrapped it earlier to inspect the condition before re-wrapping it myself, the sight had nearly offended me with its perfection.

The dust jacket had survived. The colors remained deep, unbroken, not bleached by sunlight or ruined by careless hands. The spine was uncreased. No cracked hinge. No softened corners. Collector’s tissue had lain between jacket and boards like a veil over a relic. The pages inside were bright for their age, edges sharp, no foxing worth mentioning, no childish folds, no margin argument, no evidence that anyone had loved it enough to bruise it with rereading.