13. Chapter 13 #2
“This is not only the Goddess,” I said quietly.
“That is the truth of it. The bond may have opened the door, but what has entered is my own. It has grown its own roots. I...” The word caught once on old habit and pride.
I despised both. “I have feelings for her. Real ones. Not catalogued, not dismissed, not negotiable. Real.”
Silence followed.
No smirk.
No elegant little cruelty dressed as brotherly teasing.
Just quiet.
When I looked back at him, whatever habitual wit he had been born with remained set carefully aside.
“Nikolay,” he said, and there was no mockery in my name, only plain regard, “there is no shame in falling in love with your mate.”
The sentence landed in me with almost physical force.
Perhaps because some hidden and deeply stupid part of me had still expected judgment.
Not from him, exactly. From the world I had built inside my own head.
From old prejudice dressed up as discernment.
From the version of myself that had spent far too long assuming refinement and suitability were moral virtues rather than preferences of breeding and fear.
Bohdan went on.
“In fact,” he said, “it is likely the best possible thing that could happen to you.”
I let out a short breath through my nose. “You make catastrophe sound medicinal.”
“I am serious.”
“I know.”
He held my gaze. “Good. Then hear the rest. You are damn lucky.”
I said nothing.
“You found her,” he said. “And after all your elaborate resistance, after all the nonsense you have inflicted on yourself and unfortunately on her, you did not merely discover a bond. You discovered the woman herself. Do you understand how rare that is? Half the supernatural world spends its life mistaking possession for devotion and instinct for intimacy. If you have managed to arrive at actual love, I suggest gratitude before self-recrimination.”
“That sounds suspiciously wise.”
“Do not spread it around.”
Despite myself, I laughed once. It was brief and not especially cheerful, but it cleared something from my chest all the same.
Bohdan reached for his glass, then rose and crossed to the sideboard where the decanters lived under their own pool of lamplight.
He refilled the amber liquor with a practiced hand and returned to his desk without offering me any.
The omission was not discourtesy. It was knowledge. I would not have taken it.
He settled back into his chair and said, “Now. Having established that you are in love with the wolf and will survive the knowledge somehow, tell me why exactly Sage Lynch has you looking like a man who expects to be stabbed at a formal dinner.”
I leaned my head back once against the chair and stared for a moment at the ceiling molding as if answers might have been carved there.
“Because he arrived too neatly,” I said.
“Because I dislike timing that aligns itself so politely with opportunity. Because Obsidian is not the kind of place his pack should want unless they want something from it. Because he joined two months ago, his sister came to work for us, and now Maddie is under his eye with a speed I do not trust.”
Bohdan listened without interruption.
“And because he watched her,” I said. “Not casually. Not as one notices a pretty woman on the floor. He watched her as if marking a perimeter around her in his own mind.”
The old, ugly heat stirred again under my ribs at the memory. Maddie moving through the room with her tray and composed smile. Sage’s gaze following. The alpha’s stillness so complete it had become its own form of touch.
“I know predators,” I said. “He was not here simply to drink.”
“No,” Bohdan said. “I do not think he was.”
That mattered more than I liked. Agreement from him meant my instincts were not merely jealousy seeking respectable language.
“He troubles you as well,” I said.
“Yes,” Bohdan rolled the base of his glass once against the desk blotter. “Not enough for a conclusion. More than enough for attention.”
“On what basis?”
“On the same one you are using, unfortunately.” His mouth flattened. “Pattern. Timing. Presentation. Men who build cults of taste around themselves are rarely content with what is already theirs.”
“That is a cutting way to describe a separatist alpha.”
“It is a generous one.”
I leaned forward, forearms on my thighs, and clasped my hands together lest they decide to break something independently of me.
“If this becomes something,” I said, “I do not know yet what shape that takes.”
Bohdan’s answer came without hesitation. “Whatever shape it takes, I have your back without question.”
I looked up.
There it was again, that particular Kozlov form of love. No performance. No sentimental excess. Only certainty, offered as simply as a blade handed hilt-first.
“Thank you,” I said.
He inclined his head once, accepting gratitude as if it were unnecessary.
“If it escalates,” he continued, “we pull Maksym and Taras in.”
The prospect settled over the room with immediate weight. Maksym meant strategy sharpened to command. Taras meant logistics, intelligence, and the efficient closing of every avenue one had failed to notice oneself. Between them, problems ceased being local.
I said, “I would rather not.”
“So would I,” Bohdan replied dryly. “I love our brothers, but I hope it does not come to that. We have all had enough war to last the better part of the next decade.”
That was true enough to darken us both for a second.
Sariel. Obsidian blood. Our father standing against heaven itself for the woman fate had given him. The Creator’s intervention. The whole impossible violence of it. We had only just come through one catastrophe stitched with divine intent. None of us were eager for another.
Before I could say so, a brisk knock should have announced itself.
It did not.
The door opened.
Amelia Voss never entered a room as though she were arriving in it for the first time.
She came through Bohdan’s door like somebody stepping into the next logical sentence of a problem she had already been solving elsewhere—copper hair pulled back, green eyes sharp, a worn leather satchel slung over one shoulder, a ward-sigil token turning between her fingers in quick, restless revolutions.
“Charming,” she said by way of greeting. “You’re both here. That saves me from repeating myself in two separate atmospheres of masculine concern.”
Bohdan tipped his glass toward the empty chair. “Do sit, Mel. Insult us efficiently.”
“I always do.”
She dropped into the remaining chair without waiting to be invited a second time, set the satchel at her boots, and continued spinning the token over her knuckles.
It was a flat silver disc etched with layered ward-lines, worn smooth at the edges by habitual handling.
Another person might have fidgeted with a pen.
Amelia worried sigils the way soldiers checked knives.
“I pulled on every string that might hold a secret,” she said. “Most of them snapped back unhelpfully. A few didn’t. Here’s the part you’ll dislike.”
“Sounds not super helpful,” Bohdan said.
She ignored him and looked at me first, perhaps because I had requested the information and perhaps because she had read enough of my face already to know where the pressure sat.
“My sources confirm Ironwood has contacted two of the oldest and most insular witch covens in the country,” she said. “Verdant Hollow and Astral Spire.”
I felt my body go still in a different register than composure required.
Bohdan’s eyes narrowed by a shade.
Amelia went on.
“Wolves and witches do not mix. Not socially, not politically, not ritually, if anyone can help it. That isn’t just custom.
It’s near-law in supernatural circles for a reason.
Their magic does not play cleanly with wolf hierarchy, blood inheritance, or territorial compulsion.
It tangles. It leaves residue. It starts feuds that last generations. So the outreach itself is notable.”
Her thumb pressed once against the sigil token, halting its turn.
“What makes it worse,” she said, “is that neither coven has disclosed what Ironwood wanted and that they aren’t the only covens approached, just the only ones I know for certain.”
The room seemed to contract around that sentence.
Verdant Hollow and Astral Spire. I knew the names, of course.
Any man raised where I had been raised knew them.
Old witch power did not shout, but neither did it vanish.
It endured in secrecy, land, ritual memory, and the kind of collective discipline that made ordinary intelligence work feel like fishing in black water.
If Ironwood had gone to them, it had not been for decoration.
“Nothing at all?” I asked.
“Nothing useful,” Amelia said. “Astral Spire gave one of my sources a line about ‘private consultative matters’ and then closed ranks so hard it might as well have been a warded tomb. Verdant Hollow did better, which is to say worse. They said absolutely nothing. Not denial, not confirmation beyond what I had already gleaned, not the courtesy of pretending innocence. Just silence.”
“Verdant Hollow has always enjoyed theater through omission,” Bohdan murmured.
“Yes, well, I don’t.” Amelia leaned back in the chair, one ankle crossing over the other. “Because now we are left with possibilities instead of answers, and I despise possibilities when witches are involved.”
I heard the quickened edge beneath her clipped tone and knew she was more alarmed than she wished to advertise.
“What possibilities?” I asked.
She ticked them off with the same hand that held the token.