1. Chapter 1 #2
“I put a competent woman in a position she requested because she earned the chance in the interview and confirmed it on the floor.”
“You interviewed her.”
“I do sometimes engage in hiring before placing staff in my establishment.”
There was no purpose in glaring at him, yet I did it anyway. He met it with the serene patience of a man admiring the weather from indoors.
My brother knew what Obsidian was beyond the obvious.
He knew the dangers better than anyone. A misplaced word here could cost blood, power, debt, allegiance.
Nothing in this building was simple service, not truly.
Every glass set down at the right elbow, every delay, every look noticed and remembered, entered some ledger, whether written or not.
He knew that. Which meant if he had hired Maddie, he had not done it carelessly.
That should have reassured me.
Instead, it fed something more dangerous, because competence made her harder to dismiss.
If she had been clumsy, foolish, or in over her head, I could have clothed my objection in concern.
If she had flirted with disaster simply because the city glittered and she had been too young to know better, I might have worn the role of protector without lying too much to myself.
But she had chosen. She had asked. She had been assessed and found capable.
My objection remained, stripped now of respectable garments, standing there in the room with its throat bare.
“Send her back,” I said.
Bohdan’s expression did not change at once. That was almost worse than laughter. He merely watched me, perhaps to see whether I would soften the order into a request or a recommendation. I did not.
“I don’t care what her qualifications are,” I said. “Send her back.”
He pushed up from his desk in one smooth motion and came fully upright.
We were not as alike in build as some strangers assumed.
I carried more size, more visible strength.
Bohdan carried tension differently, banked and honed rather than broad.
But he had presence enough to fill the room when he chose, and now he chose.
He adjusted one antique cufflink with two fingers, glanced down at the intricate design as though making certain it sat straight, and said, “No.”
Nothing more. Just that.
The syllable struck the room like a bolt thrown across iron.
For a brief and ugly instant, I understood why lesser men overturned furniture. Why some used violence because language could no longer contain what they felt. I did not move, but all my muscles drew taut under my skin. My fists locked. The air in the office seemed too thin.
“No,” he repeated, almost conversationally, “is the answer.”
“You mistake me,” I said. My voice had gone lower, colder. “I was not soliciting your opinion.”
“And yet you received it.”
“This is not a game.”
“I know.” His amber eyes sharpened. “That is precisely why I am not indulging you.”
I took another step. The space between us dwindled to something dangerous and familial at once, the kind of distance in which brothers had settled disputes with blood long before they acquired sophistication enough to hide it. “You presume much.”
“I presume what is obvious.”
“It is obvious to you that placing an unmated wolf shifter with no ties to this city on the floor of Obsidian is unwise.”
“No.” He folded his arms over his chest. “It is obvious to me that you are the one behaving unwisely.”
I laughed once, without humor. “Do enlighten me.”
His head tipped slightly. His voice changed then, just enough. Softer. That particular softness he used when he wanted the blade to slide in before one felt the wound.
“You’re attracted to her, Nikki. That’s what this is.”
I did not confirm it.
I did not deny it.
I did not move at all for three full seconds.
Those seconds stretched with monstrous clarity.
I heard the low hum of ventilation in the walls.
The muffled bass from the floor below. The faint tick of an old clock hidden among the shelves.
I watched the lamplight catch along the edge of a ledger and burn dull gold there.
My own body betrayed me in cruel increments: the slam of my pulse, the dryness in my mouth, the involuntary sharpening of my senses as if her name alone had altered the chemistry of the air.
Attracted.
It was such a meager word for the ruin of it.
Attraction was what I had felt for countesses with practiced smiles and excellent breeding, for duchesses who understood discretion, for women in candlelit salons who could quote dead philosophers while sliding a foot beneath the table to press against my ankle.
Attraction was appetite, diversion, arrangement.
It could be indulged, denied, replaced. It never climbed into the marrow and declared itself sovereign.
What I felt for Madelyn Baucaum had nothing civilized in it.
The first time I looked at her, truly looked, something old and merciless in me had recognized her before my mind could form protest. Mine, it had said—not as possession exactly, but as fate.
As if the world had split down some hidden seam and revealed a design I had not consented to.
She looked up, those whiskey eyes widening for the briefest fraction, and I had known from the startled stillness in her that her wolf had recognized it too.
I had spent centuries believing the purity of our bloodline mattered.
Believing that the structures handed down to us existed for a reason, that our species remained itself by refusing dilution of body, power, and purpose.
Even when I had not lived by those principles with perfect austerity, I had believed in them.
I had believed, too, in choice. In strategic compatibility.
In alliances that served family and future alike.
Then Lucia had gone and turned a wolf to save his life, binding herself to him in a way the old world would have called impossible or obscene, and I had watched my father bow before it in the end because the bond was older than opinion.
Then my father, the King of Kings; stern, and impossible, who had carried grief like a crown of iron for twenty-five years—had fallen into something vast and irrevocable with a being not even of our order, a fallen angel who had staggered into our lives with no history and too much light.
The world I had trusted to remain fixed had begun, piece by piece, to shift under my feet.
And now this. A wolf from Texas. Five feet five inches of leather, lace, a stubborn chin, and rough speech that scraped at my refinement until I wanted to shake her and kiss her with equal force.
A woman who laughed too easily and looked at me as if my titles and education and old-world polish did not grant me one grain more authority over her than any other man.
I wanted none of it.
I wanted all of it.
Bohdan did not know the half of what he had named.
Perhaps he suspected more than he said. He had always been quick at scenting weakness where the family was concerned.
But he did not know what it had already cost me to stand near her and keep my face arranged into something neutral.
He did not know how often I had heard her voice when she was nowhere near me.
How often I had imagined the heat of her blood against my tongue and recoiled from myself afterward.
He watched me with intolerable patience.
I said at last, “You have become fanciful.”
A lie, thin as old silk.
He made a small sound in his throat that might have been amusement. “Have I?”
“Yes.”
“She is lovely.”
My silence grew harder.
“She unsettles you,” he continued. “That, perhaps, I understand. It happens.”
“You understand nothing about it.”
That came out truer than I intended, rougher too. His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, catching the fracture in my tone. I regretted the admission the instant it existed between us.
But I had no wish to recover by confessing more.
I drew a measured breath and forced my voice back under discipline. “Whether I find her appealing or not is irrelevant.”
“Mm.”
“I want her gone.”
“There it is again.” He uncrossed his arms only to set one hand flat on the desk behind him, fingers spread against the surface. “What an extraordinary phrase from a man who prides himself on reason. Gone. Not transferred, not reassigned, not protected from a poor fit. Gone.”
“This is not a debate.”
“No,” he said. “It is not. She stays.”
My restraint shuddered. “You do not decide this alone.”
“In matters of staffing for the club? I very much do.”
“In matters affecting this family—”
His head came up. Whatever amusement had lingered on his face cooled. “Do not invoke the family to disguise your personal discomfort, brother. It does not suit you.”
I took that hit because protesting it would have made it sharper.
He went on, “She was hired fairly. She is good at the job. She wishes to be here. Your unease is not a business reason, nor is it grounds for me to uproot an employee who has done nothing wrong.”
“You are speaking of her as though she were merely another employee.”
“At present, she is.”
The cruelty of that lay not in dismissal of Maddie but in the simplicity of it.
To him, whatever pull I felt did not override procedure.
Perhaps he believed that discipline should triumph.
Perhaps he simply enjoyed forcing me to stand in the consequences of my own silence. Either way, he would not yield.
“Lucia should have known better,” I muttered.
That earned me a faint, dangerous lift of his brows. “Careful.”