3. Chapter 3
Nikolay
Bodhan did not release my arm until the heat and noise of the club had thinned behind us into a muffled pulse under stone and wood, and by then I had become acutely aware of the indignity of being escorted through my brother’s executive corridor like a problem requiring private containment.
The third-floor hall stretched long and dim before us, its heavy carved doors set at measured intervals beneath iron wall sconces that threw amber pools across the obsidian-veined marble.
The light was handsome in the way expensive things often were—carefully chosen, flattering, meant to suggest old permanence rather than modern luxury.
It did nothing to soothe me. My brother’s hand remained locked around my upper arm with deceptive ease, not hurting, not even close, yet leaving no room for the fiction that I was the one guiding this exchange.
I could have shaken him off. But I knew I deserved his ire. Truth be told, I was glad to have been rescued from the shame of my own behavior toward the innocent woman who’d done nothing wrong except awaken something in me that had long been dormant.
My body was still carrying the scene at the bar like a fresh wound.
Maddie’s flushed face. Kyra’s quiet intervention.
The look on the staff’s faces—not open shock, because Obsidian trained discretion into everyone under its roof, but that narrowed alertness people wore when power began behaving badly.
Worse than any of that was the memory of my own voice, measured and cutting, each word chosen for maximum injury because I had wanted, for one vicious moment, to make her feel as exposed as I had.
I had done precisely what I despised in other men. I had taken my own disorder and placed it on a woman’s skin like blame.
The knowledge of it moved with me now, close as a second shadow.
At the end of the hall, Bodhan stopped before a black-painted door banded in aged brass—my office, though I had scarcely used it since our father’s wedding drew every orbit of family and allied chaos through Obsidian.
His hand fell away from my arm. The absence of it should have felt like freedom.
Instead, it only left me standing there with the imprint of restraint and nothing to push against but myself.
I adjusted my cuff though it required no adjustment.
For a moment, Bodhan said nothing. The silence between brothers had its own history. When we were younger, it had preceded conspiracy or violence. In adulthood, it usually preceded one of us lying with excellent manners.
Then he finally spoke. “Nikki.”
The name hit harder than if he had snapped at me.
Bohdan used it when he was baiting me, sometimes with that polished younger-brother insolence he deployed like a stiletto. But never in this tone. Never low and careful, the edges filed off, as if he were approaching something injured that might still choose to bite.
I looked at him.
The knowing amusement from earlier had vanished utterly. No smirk. No elegant cruelty. His amber eyes held steady on mine, and what I saw there unsettled me more than mockery would have.
Concern did not sit naturally on Bohdan’s face. Not undisguised.
“You wish to say something,” I said.
He exhaled once through his nose, glancing briefly toward the corridor behind us as though confirming we remained alone. “I do.”
“Then say it.”
His gaze returned to me. “I have never seen you like that.”
I could have feigned ignorance. It would have insulted us both.
Instead, I said, “It is handled.”
“No.” The word came flat and immediate. “It is not.”
I felt my jaw harden. “You removed me from the floor. I am no longer on the floor. That seems, by any reasonable measure, handled.”
He ignored the attempt at dryness. “You are the largest of us,” he said, not as a compliment but fact.
“You could tear most men apart with your hands if you chose. Everyone who has ever met you knows that inside five minutes. And still,”—his eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger but in painful precision—“you have always been the safest one in the room.”
I said nothing.
Bodhan went on. “Not because you are weak. Not because you are soft. Because you are measured. Because you think before you move. Because you find the phrase that keeps blood from being spilled and make other people believe peace was their own idea all along.”
His voice remained quiet. That made it worse. A raised voice might have allowed me to defend myself against temper. This was only observation, deliberate and exact.
“You have talked witches back from curses,” he said.
“Talked vampires out of duels. Talked our father out of actions he would have regretted and made him believe he had arrived there himself. You have walked into rooms full of enemies and left them discussing terms instead of casualties.” He held my gaze without blinking.
“What happened below was none of those things.”
My shoulders tightened further, though I made no other sign of the blow landing.
He had not exaggerated. I had built much of my life on that reputation—the patient son, the humane brother, the one who understood that force was most useful when spared.
To be reminded of it now, in the ugly glow after I had used my voice as a lash against a woman half my size because she had looked desirable in public, was almost unbearable.
“It will not happen again,” I said.
“Will it not?”
“No.”
Bodhan’s expression did not alter, yet something in it closed another degree. He was weighing my answer and finding it wanting. I could hardly blame him.
I forced more steadiness into my voice. “I lost my temper. Briefly. That is all. I have it under control.”
The phrase sounded brittle even to me.
His eyes flicked once to my hands. I had not realized they were still partially clenched. I made myself open them.
“You have never needed to tell me that before,” he said.
The corridor seemed very still then. Beneath us, two floors down, Obsidian went on breathing its velvet vice into the night. Somewhere far off a door opened and shut. The iron sconces hummed faintly with hidden power. My office door stood at my shoulder, useless as refuge.
“I said,” I replied, each word placed too carefully, “that I have it under control.”
“And I am saying I do not believe you.”
There was no irreverence in him now at all. He might as well have been one of our father’s captains delivering intelligence from hostile ground.
Anger flashed through me then, welcome only because it was simpler than shame. “You are overreaching.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.” I took a step closer, lowering my voice. “Concern yourself with running your club, Bohdan. I do not require supervision.”
He said at last, “Very well.”
The words should have ended it. They did not.
Because he did not move. Because he continued to stand there with that same intolerably level regard, as if he had one more stone in hand and was deciding exactly where to drop it.
Then he said, “Father is asking for you.”
Everything in me went still.
Not visibly, perhaps, not to an untrained eye. I did not flinch. I did not curse. But some small muscle in my jaw locked so tight I felt pain spark up toward my temple, and the stillness that took me was too deliberate to pass for calm.
Bodhan watched that happen and offered no comfort.
“In his office,” he added. “Now.”
Of course now.
There were few phrases in our family more efficient at stripping a man down to the oldest version of himself. Not prince. Not diplomat. Not grown, and blooded, and centuries old. Merely son.
I drew one measured breath, then another. When I trusted my hands, I smoothed the front of my jacket, straightened one lapel, and made certain my expression had returned to something a civilized man might wear while walking toward judgment.
“Thank you,” I said.
Bodhan’s mouth almost moved, not toward a smile but toward something more conflicted. “Nikki.”
I looked at him again.
He seemed on the edge of adding something else, some softer warning or sharper truth. In the end, he only inclined his head once, the matter now beyond his jurisdiction no matter that the building was his domain.
I turned from him and started down the corridor.
At its far end waited the double doors to our father’s office, dark walnut reinforced with hammered iron, severe enough to belong to a cathedral or a prison.
The amber light caught along the metal straps and left the wood in shadow.
Every step toward them seemed to strip another layer of heat from me, leaving only the hard architecture of consequence.
Behind me, I heard Bodhan at last move away.
Ahead of me, my father waited.
The doors opened before I touched them, and the familiar austerity of my father’s office received me like a sealed chamber built to hold verdicts rather than conversation.
I stepped inside.
The room was vast in the old way, its proportions intended not for comfort but for significance.
The ceiling rose high above in shadowed coffers dark as polished ink.
A scent of aged paper and extinguished candles lay over everything, threaded through with something older and harder to name—stone after rain, perhaps, or the mineral ghost of crypt air disturbed after centuries of stillness.
It was a smell I had known all my life without ever attaching words to it.
Home, if one were raised in power and penance.
The double doors closed behind me with quiet finality.
Across the far wall hung the immense woven history of our line, gold and crimson thread faded by time into bruised richness.
Centuries of Kozlov victories ran there in panels: cavalry driving through winter fog; banners lifted above breached walls; men in armor and fur-lined cloaks rendered in profile and blood; One king presiding over it all.