Chapter 20 - Viktor
The sparring yard was empty at five in the morning, which was why Viktor used it then.
He wrapped his hands in the dark. The tape was old, fraying at the edges. He wound it by feel—three turns around the knuckles, two across the palm, a figure-eight through the thumb—the way his father had taught him before his father stopped teaching him anything at all.
He’d been out here for twenty minutes when Damian appeared.
His brother leaned against the fence post with a cup of coffee he must have charmed out of Elena, which was a feat in itself—Elena didn’t brew before six, and she didn’t make exceptions. Damian had gotten an exception.
Viktor hit the bag. The chain rattled.
“You still do this,” Damian said. “Every morning?”
“Most mornings.”
“Doesn’t that get boring?”
“No.”
Damian sipped his coffee. The steam curled in the cold air, and the light was coming up behind the mountains in that grey-violet wash that preceded sunrise by half an hour. Viktor could feel his brother watching.
He hit the bag again—jab, cross, hook. The tape was starting to darken with sweat at the knuckles.
“She looks good,” Damian said.
Viktor’s fist connected with the bag a fraction harder than the last strike, and the chain swung wider.
“Olivia,” Damian clarified, as though there were anyone else he could have meant. “She looks settled, confident—more than she used to be.”
“She’s always been confident.”
“Not like this.” Damian shifted against the post, crossing one ankle over the other. “When we were together, there was always a flinch underneath it, something she’d cover before you could catch it.” He paused. “I don’t see the flinch anymore.”
Viktor unwound a strip of tape that had slipped and rewound it, keeping his hands busy, keeping his face toward the bag. The bond pulsed low and warm in his chest—Olivia, still asleep, her presence in his awareness a frequency he’d stopped being able to tune out weeks ago.
“The flinch was always there,” Viktor said, and he didn’t know why he was saying it, except that the wrongness of Damian’s version needed correcting. “You just weren’t looking for it.”
Damian’s coffee cup paused halfway to his mouth. He lowered it and studied Viktor with an expression that was harder to read than his usual open warmth—more careful behind it, more attentive.
“You were, though,” Damian said. “Looking for it.”
Viktor hit the bag.
“All those years.” Damian’s voice had dropped the lightness it usually carried, and what remained was quieter, more direct, a register Viktor hadn’t heard from his brother in a long time. “You were watching her the whole time I was with her, weren’t you? And before me, and after.”
“I watch everyone. It’s my job.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
The bag swung. Viktor caught it with both hands and held it still, his forearms braced against the leather, his breathing controlled, his heartbeat steady because he’d spent twenty years training his heartbeat to be steady when the rest of him wasn’t.
“What are you asking, Damian?”
His brother set the coffee down on the fence post, pushed off the railing, and stood straight. The resemblance between them was sharper in the low light, stripped of the differences in posture and attitude that usually obscured it.
“I’m asking what changed,” Damian said. “Because I was there, Viktor. You didn’t want her.
She kissed you, and you shut it down, and then I—” He stopped, recalibrated.
“You could have said something before me, before any of it. You had years, and you didn’t move, and now you’re married to her, and I’m trying to understand whether the magic made this happen or whether you’ve been carrying something you never told me about. ”
He released the bag and stepped back. His hands were shaking inside the tape—a fine, controlled tremor he could feel against the weave of the canvas wrapping—and the sensation was foreign enough to register as alarm.
“You’re right,” he said. His voice came out level, but the effort behind the steadiness was larger than it had ever been, and for the first time in his adult life, he wasn’t certain the machinery would hold. “I didn’t move. I had years, and I didn’t move, and that’s mine to carry.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
Damian looked at him for a long time. The yard was brightening around them, the grey giving way to the first thin gold at the mountain’s edge. Inside the compound, a door opened and closed and the day began its accumulation of noise.
“You’re a stubborn bastard,” Damian said, and there was no heat in it, just the tired recognition of a man staring at a wall he’d run into before. “You know that?”
“I’ve been told.”
Damian picked up his coffee, drank the rest of it in one long pull, the gesture as casual as everything else about him, the performance of ease reassembled in the time it took to swallow. He clapped Viktor on the shoulder as he passed—a gesture that was warm and brief and carried.
Viktor stood alone in the yard after his brother left.
The heavy bag swung in the wind, the chain creaking, the leather dark with moisture from the night air. He pressed his taped hands flat against it, leaned his forehead against the canvas, and breathed.
The suppression was failing.
He’d felt it coming for weeks—the slow erosion of the walls he’d maintained since he was old enough to understand that wanting things made you vulnerable and vulnerability was a luxury the Beta of the Beaumont Pack could not afford.
The structure had been reliable for twenty years, had held through his father’s death, through Kahn’s ascension, through the years of border conflicts and pack politics and the quiet, grinding loneliness of a life built around service to someone else’s story.
It was not holding now.
The bond had done something to the foundations. The constant presence of her—her heartbeat threaded into his awareness, her moods brushing against his own like weather fronts meeting—had gotten into the structure the way water got into stone.
He pulled the tape from his hands, wound it into a tight coil, set it on the bench, and walked inside. The corridor was quiet, and his boots were steady on the stone, and his face was composed. The Beta’s mask fitted so precisely that no one had ever seen the seams.
But the mask was thinner than it used to be, and the thing behind it was pressing outward with a force he was running out of names for.