8. Chapter 8 #2
There was no pressure in him. No grin like he’d won something. No leaning in to crowd me with his size. He just stood there looking like a man entirely at ease with his own attention, and whether I knew what to do with it or not.
He was handsome. Easy handsome, like I’d told myself before. The kind that did not come tied in knots. The kind a woman ought to have been able to receive with uncomplicated pleasure, file away under flattering, and maybe revisit later in the dark if she felt lonely enough.
And the attention was not unwelcome. Goddess knew I was not so proud or so foolish I couldn’t admit that.
After weeks of feeling looked through, looked down on, or looked at like some irritating interruption in a prince’s already difficult life, being regarded plainly by a beautiful man with no contempt in him should have felt better than this.
Instead, it landed beside something hollow in my chest and only outlined it more clearly.
Because the problem with every new thought was the same problem as the old one. It ended in the same wall. The same impossible, arrogant, infuriating man with amber eyes and too much silence and a mouth I had not kissed.
He wasn’t Nikolay.
That was the ugliest truth in me maybe, and certainly the least useful.
I kept my smile anyway, because women had survived worse things than wanting the wrong man while a better one held the door open.
“Goodnight, Sage,” I said.
Then I turned away from the warmth of the booth, the low table, the easy sprawl of bodies that belonged to one another, and headed for the stairwell with the last of pack heat still lingering against my skin like borrowed weather.
The warmth of the lounge fell off fast once I hit the employee corridor.
One minute there had been amber light, old liquor, and the body-deep ease of wolf company; the next there was nothing but fluorescent hum, bare concrete, and the faint bite of industrial cleaner under Obsidian’s sandalwood, like the club had taken off its evening face and shown me the bones underneath.
The hallway ran long behind the main floor, a service artery of scuffed linoleum, metal doors, and institutional lighting that made everybody look a little more tired than they meant to.
Somewhere beyond the walls, Obsidian kept breathing in low velvet pulses—bass underfoot, a muffled rise of laughter, the delicate clink of glassware getting reset for the next wave of appetite—but back here all of it came filtered thin and practical.
Ventilation hummed overhead. A cart sat half-parked near a supply closet with fresh towels stacked in stern little columns.
Somebody had left the smell of lemon cleaner hanging in the air like an argument against decadence.
I was halfway down the corridor before I heard footsteps catching up behind me.
Sloan fell into step beside me without fanfare, hands in the pockets of her black slacks, dark hair still sleek despite the hours. She still looked more put-together than I ever did after three hours into hanging out with friends. Wolf eyes, though. Those gave her away. Too alert. Too alive.
“Did you have a great time?” she asked.
Simple question. Simple tone. No fishing in it.
I glanced at her. “I did.”
She waited.
I huffed a small laugh. “Better than I expected, honestly.”
“You seemed to relax a little bit.”
I looked ahead again, toward the bend in the corridor where the overhead light always flickered just enough to feel haunted. “Your people are easy to be around.”
“My people would consider that high praise.”
“It is high praise.”
She smiled a little at that and kept pace with me.
Our steps made soft, dull sounds on the scuffed floor, not hurried, not dragging.
For one brief stretch of hallway, it almost felt ordinary.
Two friends recapping their night. One asking the other how it went.
No princes. No bonds. No destiny with its teeth in me.
Then Sloan cut me a sideways look.
“You look a hell of a lot better than you did earlier.”
My mouth twitched. “That bad, huh?”
“You smelled like heartbreak and adrenaline and were one wrong sentence away from climbing inside an air duct to avoid the world.”
“Well,” I tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “That’s a vivid picture.”
“I’m a vivid person.”
“Clearly.”
She let that sit for half a beat before adding, “You’d clearly been crying over something.”
There was no point pretending otherwise to a wolf. Humans could sometimes be lied to by posture and bright lipstick, and a strategically timed joke. Wolves had noses. It was frankly insulting how little privacy a body got among its own species.
“Yeah,” I said.
Sloan’s face stayed easy. Not pitying. Just open. “And now you don’t look like you want to set the building on fire.”
“Character growth.”
“Mm-hmm.”
We passed a service door propped open with a rubber wedge.
Inside, stainless steel shelves gleamed under even harsher light, cases of bottled water stacked in military rows.
The sight of it all made the upper lounge feel almost imaginary.
Pack warmth one minute, industrial reality the next.
Maybe that was why my chest had started tightening again now that I was out here.
Relief never seemed to trust itself with me for long.
Sloan bumped my elbow lightly with hers. “So. Was it man trouble?”
I gave her a look. “You ask that like there are other options.”
“There are always other options,” she said. “Sometimes it’s family. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes it’s existential despair. But tonight I’d put money on a man.”
I laughed under my breath despite myself. “Bold.”
“I’m right, though.”
We walked another few steps before I answered. Long enough for the fluorescent hum to get annoyingly loud. Long enough for me to feel the shape of the truth and decide how much of it I could bear to hand another person.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “It was man trouble.”
Sloan did not immediately pounce on that, which I appreciated more than I let show.
“Bad?” she asked.
I thought about Nikolay in the service corridor, all rigid strain and too-late explanations.
Thought about him in my room among my books, silent as damage finally reached him.
Thought about him with his mouth at another woman’s throat.
Thought about how all of those versions of him had somehow managed to be the same man.
“Complicated,” I said.
“That usually means bad.”
“It means I have strong feelings for someone, and the whole thing’s a mess.”
There. Honest enough to count. Guarded enough to survive.
Sloan nodded slowly. “That does sound messy.”
“You have no idea.”
She was quiet for a few more steps. Then, with the unnerving directness wolves sometimes preferred over all human forms of varnish, she asked, “Is it Nikolay?”
My head turned so fast I probably looked ridiculous.
Sloan kept walking.
I stared at her profile. “Jesus.”
Her brows lifted. “It’s kinda obvious.”
I schooled my face by sheer force of offended dignity and looked forward again. “I didn’t say yes.”
“No,” she said mildly. “You just reacted like I put my hand in a live socket.”
I muttered a curse under my breath.
The corner of her mouth moved. She had me and knew it.
“I only asked because it fits,” she said after a moment, her tone gentler now. “The timing. The way you looked earlier. The way he’s looked at you on the floor when he thinks nobody’s noticing.”
That pulled my attention back to her again. “He’s looked at me?”
Sloan made a low sound that was almost a laugh. “Honey. Half the staff have eyes.”
I wanted to be offended by that. Instead, what I felt was something uglier and softer at once, because if other people had seen whatever this thing was between us, then I had not imagined all of it. Only maybe the part that meant anything’s survivable.
I folded my arms loosely over my middle. “Well. Good for the staff.”
Sloan’s gaze stayed ahead, giving me the dignity of not watching me too hard while I stood there internally flaying.
Then she said, carefully now, “Can I give you an opinion you didn’t ask for?”
“Considering we’re already halfway there, sure.”
“Interspecies relationships tend to be harder than they’re worth.”
I stopped walking.
The words were not cruel. That was what made them hit cleaner. No smugness. No superiority. Just a statement offered by somebody who thought maybe she was saving me pain.
Sloan went two steps farther before she realized I had halted. She turned back, expression open and a little wary, like she knew she’d stepped onto loaded ground.
The fluorescent light above us flickered once and steadied. Flat light whitewashed everything thin.
I faced her fully.
“My alpha’s closest circle includes a wolf mated to a witch-angel hybrid,” I said.
Sloan said nothing.
I went on, voice measured, because if I let too much feeling into it, I’d sound defensive, and I did not want to be defensive. I wanted to be clear.
“Lucia Kozlov is a princess whose father owns this club. You know that. She mated Doc Lowrey, Iron Valor’s physician.
He died. She brought him back with her blood, and now he’s the first wolf-vampire hybrid in over a hundred years.
” My chin lifted a fraction. “So, no, I don’t put much stock in people saying worlds can’t bend toward each other. I’ve seen them do it.”
Sloan listened without interrupting, which earned her points immediately.
I took one breath and gave her the thing at the center of it: the belief I had not questioned even when everything else in me felt skinned raw.
“The Goddess doesn’t make mistakes.”
The corridor went quiet around the sentence.
Not truly quiet, of course. The ventilation still hummed. The club still throbbed somewhere beyond the walls. But there are moments when truth leaves your mouth and the world seems to pause long enough to hear whether you mean it.
I meant it.