Page 89 of Nikolay

Then she was gone, the door clicking shut behind her.

For a while neither Bohdan nor I spoke.

At last, I stood.

He did not stop me. He knew, I think, that conversation had reached the point beyond which words only multiplied helplessness. I crossed to the window set into the far wall of his office.

Obsidian moved beneath us in its usual composed indecency. Purple light pooled over black leather. Servers drifted through the aisles with practiced grace.

And all I could see was Sage Lynch’s face the last time he had watched Maddie on that floor.

Not lust alone.

Something worse.

The possessive stillness of a man unused to being denied what interested him.

My hand went into my pocket. I drew out my phone and opened her message again. The screen lit my palm in pale blue-white.

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.

When I get back.

Those four words had not comforted me before. They did now, a little. Not enough. But a little.

The bond had been with me all evening, a low, constant pressure behind my sternum, so steady I had nearly ceased distinguishing it from my own pulse. I had spent too long pretending such things could be ignored into irrelevance. They could not. What stretched between us was real. Divine, if one preferred the larger vocabulary. Merciless, certainly. It pulled now not with panic, but with awareness. She lived. She moved. She remained somewhere under the same moon, beyond my sight and not beyond my reach forever.

I could have messaged her:

Be careful.

Do not trust him.

Come home.

All of them would have been true to some degree. None of them would have been fair.

Maddie had gone to the wolves because she needed wolves. I had known that when I let her go. Loved her enough to know it still.

Slowly, I locked the screen.

Then I set the phone face-down on the glass shelf beneath the window and left it there.

Trust, I discovered, felt very little like peace. It felt more like standing unarmed in a room where one could easily have reached for steel and choosing not to.

Behind me, Bohdan said nothing.

I was grateful.

I remained at the window, looking down over the club, while somewhere in the administrative wing my office sat waiting with its unread dossiers, its cycling monitors, and the untouched glass of blood-wine gone cold on the desk.

Chapter 14

Maddie