Chapter 24 - Viktor
She was angry, and he knew it.
The bond carried the texture of it—a tight, hot frequency that sat behind his sternum the way a pulled muscle sat in a joint, present with every movement, impossible to ignore.
He could tell when she’d poured her coffee because the frequency spiked, which meant someone had said something to her, or she’d thought about something that cut, or she’d looked at the chair where he usually sat and found it empty because he’d been in the briefing room since four, doing what he’d always done when the inside of his own head became uninhabitable: working.
He had not slept.
Three nights since the infirmary, and he had not slept.
He’d lain in the dark and felt her through the bond from across the compound—her breathing, her moods, the slow cycle of her sleep that he could track the way he tracked patrol rotations, by rhythm and deviation—and the intimacy of it was so far beyond anything he’d experienced that his body treated it as a threat.
He could feel her now, moving through the kitchen with the precise, contained energy that meant she was performing normalcy for the benefit of whoever was watching.
Elena, probably, who watched everything and commented on nothing, which made her the ideal audience for the show Olivia was running: I am fine, nothing has changed, I did not sleep with my husband three days ago, and then wake up alone and spend the following seventy-two hours pretending neither of us remembers.
Viktor pressed his thumb against the edge of the desk. The patrol reports blurred.
The problem was that he remembered everything.
Every sound she’d made, every place she’d touched him, the way her eyes had opened and found his in the dark, and the bond had flared between them with an intensity that had left him raw, exposed, his chest cracked open like a house with the walls torn out.
He remembered the weight of her against him after, the silence that had held them both, the warmth of her breath on his collarbone, and the bone-deep terror of realizing that he had given someone something he could not take back and had no idea how to protect.
So he’d left before she woke. Had dressed in the dark with the care of a man disarming a tripwire, had eased himself from the bed without disturbing the sheets more than necessary, had walked to the briefing room and sat at this desk attempting to begin the process of putting himself back together.
Three days, and the process was not going well.
The walls wouldn’t stay. He’d build a section—discipline here, routine there—and then Olivia would walk past the briefing room, or he’d catch her scent in the corridor, or the bond would carry a flash of her irritation or her laughter or the quiet ache she felt when she thought about the, and the section would crumble, and he’d have to start again.
He was running out of material.
Damian found him at noon.
His brother appeared in the doorway with two plates, evidently having chosen to be useful, and he made it clear that he was not going to be turned away.
“Elena says you haven’t eaten,” Damian said, setting a plate on the desk beside the patrol reports. “She also says you’re an idiot, though she used a longer word that I think was German.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re never hungry. You eat because the body requires fuel, and not eating would impair your operational efficiency.” Damian sat in the chair across from him and bit into a piece of bread. “That’s not the same thing as not being hungry. It’s just a sadder version of eating.”
Viktor moved the plate to the edge of the desk without picking up the fork.
Damian watched him with the kind of attention that was harder to bear than his usual lightness.
“You look like hell,” Damian said at last.
“Thank you.”
“I’m serious. You look like a man who’s been fighting himself for three days and losing.” He set the bread down. “What happened after the shard came out?”
Viktor’s hand stilled on the desk.
“The whole compound felt it, Viktor. The bond flared. Elena dropped a vase. Gideon came out of his quarters looking like the second coming had arrived and he’d forgotten to dress for it.
” Damian leaned forward, elbows on knees.
“And then you and Olivia disappeared for four hours, and you haven’t been in the same room together since.
You’ve been in here since before dawn every morning reading the same page of the same report. ”
“It’s a different report.”
“It’s the same page. I can see the fold from here.”
Viktor looked down. He had, in fact, been staring at the same page for twenty minutes. The fold mark where he’d gripped it too hard was visible in the overhead light.
“Talk to me,” Damian said, and the words came out stripped of their usual buoyancy, the charm set aside the way a man set aside a tool that wasn’t right for the job.
“I’m your brother. I know I haven’t always earned that, and I know I left when I should have stayed, and I know there are things between us that we’re going to have to deal with eventually.
But right now, you look like you’re coming apart.
I’m not going to sit here and watch you eat yourself alive over a woman who is clearly, obviously, demonstrably in love with you and waiting for you to stop being terrified long enough to notice. ”
The words landed in the quiet room with a weight that pressed the air flat.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said, and the sentence came out rough, scraped raw, the most honest thing he’d said to his brother in four years.
“I don’t know how to want something this much and still function.
I’ve only ever been Kahn’s Beta. As long as I care to remember, I’ve known exactly who I am and what I’m for, and that certainty is the foundation I built everything on, and she—” He stopped, breathed. “She makes the foundation move.”
Damian was quiet for a long time.
“Yeah,” Damian said finally. “That’s what it’s supposed to do.”
Viktor looked at his brother.
“The foundation is supposed to move,” Damian said.
“That’s how you know it’s real. If it didn’t shake you, it wouldn’t be worth having.
” He picked up the bread again, took a bite, chewed with the deliberate casualness of a man who had just said the truest thing he’d ever said and was now going to pretend it was ordinary.
“Eat your lunch. Go find your wife. Stop reading the same page.”
He left the plate and walked out, and Viktor sat in the briefing room with the patrol report he’d been pretending to read and the untouched food and the bond humming with Olivia’s presence from across the compound, and for the first time in three days, he didn’t try to wall it off.