7. Chapter 7 #3
“Nikolay,” she said, and the way she said my name held no caution, no calculation, only immediate attention. “Oh.”
She eased fully off my father’s lap before I had taken two steps inside.
Father rose more slowly, unhurried as always, one hand trailing briefly along Devon’s arm as if to steady her though she clearly needed no such thing.
Then she was crossing the room toward me with that unconscious grace of hers, all fluid certainty in motion and slight disarray in effect, as though the physical world accepted her on terms it granted no one else.
I had come here prepared to speak to my father.
I was not prepared for her hands.
She took my forearm in both of hers the moment she reached me, her grip warm and surprisingly firm, and turned me toward the seating area near the darkened window as if she had every right in the world to direct me.
Under other circumstances, I might have smiled at the audacity.
Tonight I let her steer me because resisting would have required an energy I no longer possessed.
“You will sit,” she said. Then, glancing over her shoulder toward my father with all the authority of someone who had forgotten she had not been born to this household, “Call for him a drink.”
Her voice carried that curious blend she always had—a formal cadence and human softness, as though an ancient text had learned compassion and refused to choose between them.
“I am not certain alcohol improves this,” I said.
“You are not being consulted,” she replied.
Had I been less frayed, I might even have laughed.
She settled me on the sofa by the window. The leather gave under my weight with a muted sigh. Outside the glass, the city spread in a distance of light and darkness I scarcely registered. My attention had narrowed too far inward for skylines.
Father crossed from the desk and drew Devon’s chair close to his own, placing it beside his. He waited until she sat, then let one hand rest briefly along her upper arm before taking his own seat.
Then he looked at me.
That was all.
No question. No command. No impatience. Only those pale, unnervingly steady eyes fixed on mine with the full weight of nine centuries behind them and none of it crowding the room. The silence he offered was not empty. It was precise. It made evasion feel childish before it began.
Somewhere to my left, a discreet chime answered whatever internal summons had been made for the drink. I heard a door beyond the office proper open and close. Heard glass set on wood. None of it mattered.
I exhaled once through my nose and stared at the carpet between us.
“I made a fool of myself,” I said.
My father did not answer.
I laughed without humor. “That is too elegant a phrasing. I have made several fools of myself in quick succession, and I am only now discovering the extent of my talent.”
Still, he said nothing.
The drink had been left on the low table near my knee. Bourbon, by the scent. Good. Expensive. Irrelevant.
“I went into her room,” I said.
Devon shifted slightly. Not in alarm, but in closer attention.
“I had no business there. No invitation. I knocked, she told me to come in believing I was Lucia, and I entered. She was on the floor among boxes of books from Texas.” I swallowed once.
My mouth had gone dry despite the untouched glass inches from my hand.
“Books everywhere. Classics. Early editions. Paperbacks half destroyed by rereading. Notes in the margins. Her entire mind laid open in the room and I walked into it armed with my assumptions.”
The memory rose with intolerable clarity. Her hair piled loosely. The cropped shirt. The absurd bright declarations across the fabric. My own contempt arriving before my understanding.
“I saw romances first,” I said. “The sort meant to scandalize men who deserve scandal. I behaved as though that proved something about her. As though a woman who read filth for pleasure and worked with her hands could not also possess a private life of the mind substantial enough to shame me.”
Devon’s mouth moved slightly, not quite a frown. My father remained stone-still.
“She had Steinbeck, Ellison, Austen, Faulkner, Dickinson. Shelves arranged not for display but for use. There were annotations, arguments with the text, layers of thought. I did not know.” The words grew rougher. “I had never bothered to know.”
I reached for the bourbon then and did not drink. I only wrapped my hand around the glass because the weight gave my fingers something to do besides curl into useless fists.
“She stopped me from touching a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.” A humorless breath escaped me.
“Slapped my hand away like I was a child reaching for a relic, and perhaps I was. Then she told me I had not earned the right to touch it. That I was not worthy because I could not understand a novel about being judged by character rather than circumstance because I had spent weeks doing precisely the opposite to her.”
Devon’s fingers came down lightly on my sleeve then, just above the wrist. Not to hush me. Only contact. Human in its instinct, celestial in its unselfconsciousness.
“She was right,” I said.
My father’s face did not alter. The stillness in him deepened by some nearly imperceptible degree. Permission. Continue.
“So I bowed like a chastened courtier and left her there among her books.” I stared into the bourbon as if the amber depth might produce an alternate history less humiliating than my own. “Then I returned to Obsidian and attempted to prove to myself that she had no hold on me.”
I did drink then. The liquor burned richly across my tongue and down my throat, offering no relief except sensation.
“I chose a woman from the main floor. French. Elegant. Precisely the sort of woman I once imagined at my side. I took her into an alcove and put my mouth to her throat because I wanted—” I stopped, because there remained no honorable way to phrase it.
“Because I wanted evidence that my appetite remained mine.”
Devon made a soft sound under her breath. Not shock. Pity, perhaps, which I found difficult to bear.
“Maddie saw us.”
The office held very still around that sentence.
“She had just come in for reasons I am still unclear. She was not on the schedule. She turned the corner, saw me with another woman, and I watched the look on her face close like a wound sealing shut. She walked into the service corridor. I followed.” Shame by then had become almost mechanical; each confession only producing the next.
“I tried to explain. I do not know what I thought I could say. She stopped me before I had half a sentence. Told me I had made the matter very clear. Told me she was done being yanked around by whatever crisis of conscience I had made of her.”
I set the bourbon down carefully.
“She walked away from me,” I said. “Twice in the space of a week. Left me standing like an idiot both times.”
A faint pressure tightened on my arm. Devon again. Her gaze had softened into open pain for me, which should have soothed and did not. I had not wanted tenderness tonight. I had wanted strategy. Unfortunately, truth, once admitted, had made strategy look absurd.
“And now, the alpha wolf, Sage Lynch is here.” I leaned forward, forearms on my thighs, glass abandoned on the table.
“He asked after her at the door. Amara confirmed it. From the moment he entered the building, he had been looking for Maddie. I saw her in the VIP lounge seated with his pack as though they had opened a space in the world she had been missing for weeks. Which, I suspect, they had. She looked...” I stopped, because the word that came first was happy, and I found that impossible to say aloud.
“She looked at ease. And he was watching her.”
I looked up then, directly at my father for the first time since sitting.
“Like his intention was to continue watching her.”
The room absorbed that.
For a moment, nothing moved except my own breathing and the small, involuntary sweep of Father’s thumb along Devon’s wrist where her hand rested near his on the chair arm. The gesture was slow, almost absent. A private rhythm made visible.
When he finally spoke, his voice came low and measured as ever.
“The Lynches do not mingle for novelty.”
I waited.
“If Sage Lynch came to Obsidian tonight group in tow,” my father said, “it was not coincidence. Men like that do not drift toward neutral ground simply because the evening bored them elsewhere.”
The words dropped into place with the cold authority of pieces aligning on a board I had been too agitated to see clearly.
“I had no grounds to deny his membership,” Father continued.
“Whatever his private views, he has committed no sanctionable breach. His house remains in good standing. His fortune makes many institutions kinder than wisdom recommends. Had I attempted to bar him without cause, I would have created a political grievance where none officially existed.”
“Understood,” I said.
He inclined his head once, accepting that I did, in fact understand and perhaps had all along. Then his gaze sharpened by a shade.