13. Chapter 13
Nikolay
The monitors cast a cold blue wash over my office, flattening the old wood, silvering the edges of the desk, and making my untouched glass of blood-wine look almost black.
Below me, Obsidian breathed in its usual disciplined rhythm—music, laughter, appetite, transaction—while on the blotter before me Ironwood pack dossiers lay open like evidence I had already failed to interpret.
My phone rested face-up beside my hand. Maddie’s text remained on the screen.
The gift is beautiful.
Thank you.
I’d like to speak with you about something important when I get back. I may stay a couple of days depending on how the pack handles the run festivities, but I want to talk.
I had read those lines often enough that the back light should have burned them into my palm.
Something important.
A couple of days.
They had acquired a kind of private life inside my head.
Every time I looked at them they reorganized themselves into some fresh instrument of torment.
Something important could mean confession.
It could mean departure. It could mean she wished to leave the estate.
It could mean she intended to tell me she had found ease among wolves and did not wish to return to the exhausting half-war we had made of fate.
A couple of days could be ordinary hospitality.
It could be caution. It could be distance chosen kindly, before harder words.
I picked up the phone.
Read the message again.
Set it down.
Reached for one of the dossiers instead.
Sage Lynch stared back at me from a professionally indifferent photograph clipped to the front of the file—immaculate, composed, expensive, all the civilized surfaces behind which predators of every species preferred to conceal their teeth.
I had read through his file three times.
His corporate holdings, his recognized Council status, the rough size of his pack, the date of sanctioning, the notes regarding his separatist politics, the whispers too unsubtle to count as rumor and too unproven to count as fact.
I retained none of it in any useful sequence.
Facts slid off my mind, leaving only instinct behind.
He had watched her.
That was what remained.
He had watched Maddie cross my club’s floor with the attentive patience of a man already imagining her elsewhere.
I turned a page.
Saw words.
Understood nothing.
My gaze drifted back to the phone as if pulled by a hook under the breastbone.
I told myself to stop indulging in it. I had spent centuries mastering kingdoms, negotiations, blood law, predation, and diplomacy.
A single message from a wolf woman should not have reduced me to this idiotic orbit of rereading and inference.
And yet, there I was.
My fingers rested on the edge of the desk.
The blood-wine beside my elbow trembled.
Just once.
A small, circular ripple moved across the dark surface of it, widening to the crystal rim with delicate violence.
I went still.
The glass had not been touched.
Telekinesis answered emotion more readily than pride enjoyed admitting, and mine had slipped leash enough to disturb a drink.
It was a minor thing, laughable in another man perhaps, but I felt it as an indictment.
I closed my eyes and inhaled slowly through my nose.
Counted the breaths in. Counted them out.
The pressure inside my chest did not lessen, but it arranged itself more cleanly.
When I opened my eyes again, the surface of the wine had smoothed to perfect stillness.
I reached for my phone once more, though not for Maddie.
Amelia answered messages at all hours because she had long since accepted that the world’s indecencies rarely kept office time. I opened our thread and typed with more brevity than courtesy.
Need everything you have on Ironwood. Full report. Tonight.
I looked at the words, decided they reflected my condition accurately enough, and sent them.
Three dots did not appear. Amelia was either working already or ignoring me in the hope I might become more specific. She would do neither for long.
I set the phone down. This time I did not reach for it again.
Instead, I pushed back from the desk and stood.
Behind me the surveillance monitors cycled through their mute territories—service corridors, stair landings, the second-floor lounge, the gaming level below—each image pristine, each angle accounted for, each feed promising knowledge while giving none of what I actually wanted.
No monitor in Obsidian could show me the wolf compound outside Philadelphia.
No network of cameras could tell me whether Maddie was laughing tonight, whether she had shifted already, whether Sage Lynch stood too near her under the moon.
I left the office before imagination became a more profitable use of time than action.
Had I ventured down to the main floor tonight, I would have seen only substitutes for absence. A server carrying a tray and not Maddie. A dark-haired wolf patron and not Sage. A club functioning perfectly while the one person I wished foolishly to account for moved beyond my territory and my sight.
So I kept moving forward.
My shoes made almost no sound on the runner.
The air held the scent of sandalwood, polished wood, cooled electronics, and the faint metallic trace of old magic braided into the walls.
Obsidian’s wards hummed low if one listened with more than ears.
I felt them tonight like fingers pressed lightly to the back of my neck, reminding me this place remained under our control even if my own thoughts did not.
Bohdan’s office sat at the far end of the administrative wing, separate enough from mine to suggest independence and near enough to imply family oversight. The door stood closed, but warm light burned beneath it in a thin gold line that cut across the dark carpet.
Good, he was still up here and hadn’t ventured down to find what indulgences he allowed himself on a nightly basis.
My hand settled on the knob. For one brief second I remained there, head bowed slightly, listening to the bass beneath the floor, the dim electrical breath of the corridor, the distant life of the club I usually understood so well.
Then I opened the door and went in.
Bohdan sat behind his desk with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the forearms, a cut-crystal glass of amber liquor at his elbow and two monitors open before him. He looked up once, took my measure in a glance only family could make that quickly, and said, “You look like hell.”
“I had hoped for a more flattering assessment.”
“You came to the wrong sibling for that.”
I crossed the room and dropped into the chair opposite him without bothering to preserve dignity through pacing. The leather gave under my weight. Bohdan leaned back slightly, one hand still resting on the mouse, the other around his glass.
“You want me to give you a pretty lie,” he said, “you’ll need Father.
He enjoys the paternal version of reassurance.
Maksym will tell you to stop looking tragic and go lift something heavy.
Taras will ask six questions you do not wish to answer and then produce a solution you like even less, and Lucia—well—you’d be better off not hearing her opinion at all. ”
I should have smiled. I nearly did. It faded before it formed.
Bohdan saw that too.
“Well?” he asked.
I looked at him, at the sharp line of his face gone unguarded by performance, and discovered that the difficulty of speaking had less to do with not knowing what I felt than with the humiliation of saying it aloud.
“I cannot seem to think about anything else,” I said at last.
Bohdan’s expression did not change. “Maddie.”
Not a question.
“Yes.”
He waited.
That was the infuriatingly useful thing about my brother when he was not being impossible. He knew how to leave silence where it would do the most work. No pressure. No interruption. Only room in which one either lied or continued.
I continued.
“At first, I believed I could categorize it.” My eyes dropped briefly to the grain of his desk, then lifted again.
“The bond. Instinct. Species friction. Vanity wounded by circumstances. Any number of explanations that would have allowed me to keep a measure of distance between myself and what was happening.”
Bohdan said nothing.
“I no longer think distance is available to me,” I said.
He remained still, but some minute alertness entered him then, not surprise exactly, only focus sharpened by gravity.
“I know what mate-pull feels like,” I went on. “Or thought I did. Attraction with divine architecture beneath it. Hunger. Compulsion. Curiosity one cannot safely indulge and cannot altogether deny.” I let out a breath that wanted to become a laugh and failed. “This is worse.”
One eyebrow rose slightly. “Worse?”
“Yes.” I leaned back and scrubbed one hand over my beard.
“Because the bond is one thing. It can be discussed like weather if one is sufficiently detached. What concerns me is that I am not detached at all. I think about whether she has eaten. Whether she is lonely in a room full of people. Whether she is laughing when I am not there to hear it. I buy her rare books because I want the look on her face more than I want the object itself. I see something absurd in a bakery window and think, immediately, of her mouth. I hear baseball mentioned and find myself wanting whole summers I do not even like merely because she does.”
The words had begun with discipline. They did not remain there.
My voice lowered of its own accord.
“And when she hurts, even by my own hand, I feel it as though something inside me has been cut open.”
Bohdan’s posture changed by increments so subtle another man might not have marked them. He set his glass aside entirely. He leaned back farther, yes, but the line of his shoulders loosened. The office seemed to lose some of its hard edges with that small movement alone.
I looked away from him toward the bookshelves because what came next sat too close to the center of me.