Page 82 of Nikolay

His hand stayed where it was.

I caught myself and corrected with a half-smile. “Sorry. No, Sage.”

That earned the faintest hint of amusement from him. “You may call me whatever makes you comfortable.”

Something in the wording brushed the underside of my nerves.

Because what comfortable meant on a man like this was likely a matter of negotiation rather than assumption.

The front doors opened before either of us reached for them. Someone inside must have been watching. Warmth spilled out immediately, scented with polished wood, expensive liquor, wood smoke, and pack. Real pack scent this time, stronger than what lay out in the trees—wolves layered over one another in family patterns too complex to parse at once.

I crossed the threshold into Ironwood’s castle with Sage Lynch’s hand still warm at my back and the quiet, unsettling thought that I may have just made a very interesting mistake.

Chapter 13

Nikolay

The monitors cast a cold blue wash over my office, flattening the old wood, silvering the edges of the desk, and making my untouched glass of blood-wine look almost black. Below me, Obsidian breathed in its usual disciplined rhythm—music, laughter, appetite, transaction—while on the blotter before me Ironwood pack dossiers lay open like evidence I had already failed to interpret. My phone rested face-up beside my hand. Maddie’s text remained on the screen.

The gift is beautiful.

Thank you.

I’d like to speak with you about something important when I get back. I may stay a couple of days depending on how the pack handles the run festivities, but I want to talk.

I had read those lines often enough that the back light should have burned them into my palm.

Something important.

A couple of days.

They had acquired a kind of private life inside my head. Every time I looked at them they reorganized themselves into some fresh instrument of torment. Something important could mean confession. It could mean departure. It could mean she wished to leave the estate. It could mean she intended to tell me she had found ease among wolves and did not wish to return to the exhausting half-war we had made of fate. A couple of days could be ordinary hospitality. It could be caution. It could be distance chosen kindly, before harder words.

I picked up the phone.

Read the message again.

Set it down.

Reached for one of the dossiers instead.

Sage Lynch stared back at me from a professionally indifferent photograph clipped to the front of the file—immaculate, composed, expensive, all the civilized surfaces behind which predators of every species preferred to conceal their teeth. I had read through his file three times. His corporate holdings, his recognized Council status, the rough size of his pack, the date of sanctioning, the notes regarding his separatist politics, the whispers too unsubtle to count as rumor and too unproven to count as fact. I retained none of it in any useful sequence. Facts slid off my mind, leaving only instinct behind.

He had watched her.

That was what remained.

He had watched Maddie cross my club’s floor with the attentive patience of a man already imagining her elsewhere.

I turned a page.

Saw words.

Understood nothing.

My gaze drifted back to the phone as if pulled by a hook under the breastbone. I told myself to stop indulging in it. I had spent centuries mastering kingdoms, negotiations, blood law, predation, and diplomacy. A single message from a wolf woman should not have reduced me to this idiotic orbit of rereading and inference.

And yet, there I was.