6. Chapter 6 #2
He moved then, not enough to crowd me, but enough to make the corridor seem narrower than it already was.
The fluorescent light caught in his amber eyes and made them look almost molten for one dangerous instant.
If I had been less angry, less humiliated, less determined not to give an inch, I might have noticed something in his face that didn’t fit the explanation I had assigned him.
But I was all nerves and bruises by then.
“Listen carefully,” he said, every word dragged into control. “You do not know what you saw.”
I let out a laugh. “That is rich coming from you.”
“It mattered that you saw it.”
That stopped me for a moment.
Then pride stepped in where pain had opened a door. “Sure it did. Because now this is awkward.”
His entire body went still. “That is not what I meant.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
I was so tired all at once. Tired of him. Tired of wanting him to be better than he was. Tired of every stupid spark between us that had made me feel skinned alive in his presence. Tired of how much it cost to stand here and talk like I didn’t care.
So I gave us both the mercy of an ending.
“I’m going to head out,” I said. “And you are going to do whatever it is men like you do when they’ve settled something with themselves.” I tipped my chin toward the way he’d come. “Go back to your beautiful vampire. Go brood in your office. Go find another throat. I genuinely do not care.”
His mouth opened.
I lifted my hand again, not sharply this time. Just enough.
“No. We are done.”
Then I turned.
This time I did walk faster because I had said what I had to say, and if I stayed another second the composure I’d stitched together with wire and spite might split right down the center.
The corridor stretched ahead in a white hum and shadowed corners, service doors and shelves and the ugly practical guts of a place designed to look luxurious everywhere that mattered to paying guests.
Behind me, I heard nothing.
No footsteps. Not my name. Not an apology, or denial, or the sound of him following.
Just fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and the distant pulse of Obsidian bleeding through the walls while I walked away from him like I meant it and prayed to God I could keep meaning it for at least the next ten minutes.
By the time I hit the next turn in the corridor, the first tear had risen hot and furious enough to make me hate it on principle. I was reaching up to kill it before it could fall when I nearly ran face-first into another body coming the other way.
A hand caught my arm.
Fast. Sure. Warm.
I jerked to a stop with a muttered curse and found myself staring at the only other wolf on Obsidian’s floor staff.
She wore the same server black I usually did, though her apron strings had already been untied and hung loose, and her dark eyes had that alert, slightly feral brightness some wolves carried even standing still.
Not aggressive. Just alive to everything a beat before the room caught up.
“Sloan,” I said automatically, more breath than voice.
She didn’t answer right away.
Her fingers stayed wrapped around my forearm while her head tilted just a little, nostrils flaring once. The change in her face was immediate and so direct it stripped the last scrap of my pride clean off.
“You smell upset.”
I let out one short, broken laugh and pressed the back of my wrist to the corner of my eye before the tear could fully give me away. “Well, fuck if that isn’t embarrassing.”
Her grip didn’t loosen.
“Only if you’re human,” she said.
That got another sound out of me, one that landed somewhere between a laugh and a half-strangled breath. It shouldn’t have helped as much as it did. But there was something about another wolf saying the obvious out loud with no judgment in it that took a little of the pressure off my lungs.
I swiped the tear away properly this time and blew out a breath. “I’m fine.”
Sloan’s brows lifted in a look so dry it might as well have had subtitles.
“Okay,” she said.
That okay held exactly zero belief in it.
I would have laughed if my chest hadn’t felt flayed.
Her hand finally shifted from my forearm to my elbow, still anchoring me there. Not crowding. Just making it plain she wasn’t about to let me brush her off with some cheap little lie and stomp away to unravel by myself in the ladies’ room like a fool.
“My shift just ended,” she said. “And my brother would have my ass if I let the only other wolf in this building cry alone in a hallway.”
My head came up at that.
She shrugged one shoulder, but there was affection beneath it. “Sage always says wolves aren’t meant to be alone.”
The words hit somewhere lower than logic.
Because, Goddess, I was tired of being the only wolf in the room.
Tired in a way I had not let myself name.
Tired of all the beautiful dead people and all their perfect manners and all the ways this city kept making space for me while still not smelling like home.
Tired of standing in rooms full of immortals where everybody knew exactly who and what they were, while I kept adjusting my edges and pretending it didn’t scrape.
Lucia and Doc had helped. They helped more than either of them probably knew.
But they had each other. The Kozlovs had each other.
Even Obsidian staff had their own rhythms and loyalties, and species-born shorthand.
And me?
I had Texas in my bones and nobody to scent-check my grief until right now.
“Who’s Sage?” I asked.
The answer was obvious before she gave it, at least in shape. Alpha. Brother. The man whose rules she still measured herself against even after clocking out. But I wanted to hear it anyway.
Sloan’s mouth softened around the name. “My alpha. My big brother.” Then, after the smallest pause: “He’s here tonight. Upstairs in the VIP lounge. Couple of our people with him.”
I stared at her.
Not because I didn’t understand the words. Because I understood them too well.
Upstairs, somewhere above the pulse and velvet and blood-scented decadence, there was a pack gathered around a table.
Wolves. Real wolves. Not Doc caught halfway between worlds.
Not Lucia by bond and blood and love. Wolves who would smell like earth and skin and heat and home in the shape of a species, if not my home exactly then at least something close enough to answer the ache.
The longing that moved through me at the thought was so quick and so deep it made me wary on instinct.
Sloan must have seen that flicker in my face, because she didn’t press.
She only tipped her head toward the stairwell at the end of the corridor. “You can come up if you want.”
If you want.
Not you should. Not come on. Not a single ounce of demand in it. Just an open door in the shape of a sentence.
I shifted my weight. “I don’t want to intrude.”
“You won’t.”
“How do you know?”
She smiled then, small and crooked and very wolf. “Because you smell like us.”
That did something stupid and immediate to my throat.
I looked down the corridor behind me, toward the turn where I’d left Nikolay standing under the lights. Nothing moved there now. No dark shape filled the space. No sound of him coming after me. Just blank white glare and walls that did not care.
Good.
Let him stay there with his explanations.
I looked back at Sloan. “Your brother’s really okay with random upset wolves showing up at his table?”
“He’ll survive the shock.”
I huffed a breath that almost qualified as a laugh.
She reached and squeezed my hand. “Go wash your face if you want. Or don’t. Nobody upstairs’s gonna be weird about it.”
“That is a bold promise in this building.”
Her laugh was light. “Suit yourself.”
The answer came easy, and maybe that was what made me finally move. Not certainty. Just the first suggestion of relief I’d felt since purple light flashed over champagne silk and everything inside me dropped out.
I followed a half step behind, wary still, but pulled harder by the thought of pack than by any caution left in me.
Wolves aren’t meant to be alone.
The sentence moved through me as we went, not soft enough to soothe exactly, but true in that old body-deep way truth sometimes was. Like hunger. Like instinct. Like knowing where north lay even under cloud cover.
I had spent weeks among vampires, witches, and even an angel, teaching myself not to mind the loneliness. And while I didn’t mind being alone, sometimes I longed for the company of wolves.
Now that another wolf had named it, I wasn’t sure I could bear it one minute longer.
The stairwell carried us out of Obsidian’s throat and into one of its quieter lungs.
By the time Sloan led me through the guarded entrance to the upper lounge, the music from below had thinned to a pulse under the floorboards, and the air no longer felt sharp with spectacle.
It felt expensive still—amber light, velvet, polished lacquer, old liquor—but less like being watched and more like being permitted to breathe.
The VIP lounge spread wide beneath low golden lamps and dark architectural lines, all deep seating and carefully rationed intimacy.
Here the power in the room did not announce itself by trying to prove anything.
It simply sat where it pleased and expected the world to adjust. A private bar glowed along one wall.
Glassware flashed in discreet little signals.
Beyond the railing, the main floor lay below in softened shadow, its purple seduction made distant enough to survive.
I followed Sloan past a pair of seated immortals I recognized on sight as the sort who never waited for anybody and a small cluster of witches speaking in murmurs over dark drinks. Nobody stopped us. Nobody looked at me twice once they caught Sloan’s scent on me and saw where she was leading.
The pack sat in the far back corner.