14. Chapter 14 #2
The wine was poured at some point without my seeing exactly who did it.
Darker than any red I’d had before, nearly black in the bowl of the glass when the firelight didn’t catch it, and richer on the tongue than I expected.
Not sweet. Not dry either. Something earthier than ordinary vineyard wine, with a depth that sat warm and heavy at the back of my mouth and then opened into fruit and oak and some other darker note I couldn’t quite name.
“This is different. Delicious.”
Sage gave me a wry smile. “It’s our own vintage. You won’t find it anywhere else but here.”
I took a second sip.
Then a third.
By the time I finished the first glass, my shoulders had dropped without asking permission. The knot I’d been carrying behind my sternum since I drove through those gates loosened. Not vanished. Just eased enough that breathing felt simpler.
The room softened around the edges after that, not in a sloppy way, just enough to make me stop bracing for hidden tests in every sentence.
Wolves kept talking. Plates emptied. More meat was carved.
Someone told a story about a disastrous charity gala involving a donor too drunk to understand that one did not, under any circumstances, ask a female wolf if she was “still changing on moon nights.” That one got me laughing before the punchline had even finished landing.
Moriah, I discovered, was funny in a dangerous, elegant way.
Not loud. Never reaching for the room. Just dropping observations with surgical timing.
When one of the younger men asked if Texans were really obsessed with high school football, she lifted her glass and said, “That depends. Are you calling something an obsession or a religion? Because the way I understand it, in Texas, high school football is interchangeable.”
I laughed hard enough to surprise myself, telling them she wasn’t half wrong.
The sound came out clean and real and a little louder than I intended, and for one strange second I just sat in it. Me. Laughing in a wolf castle outside Philadelphia with people I had barely met, a plate of prime rib half gone and expensive wine in my hand.
It felt good.
That was the dangerous part.
Sage turned his head then, and I found him already looking at me. Not at the joke. At me laughing at the joke. Something in his expression shifted, satisfaction too controlled to call smugness, but there all the same.
His leg brushed mine under the table.
Once.
A casual thing, maybe. The sort of accidental contact that happened when chairs were close and bodies moved naturally around a meal.
Then it happened again.
This time slower.
Not a press. Just the line of his thigh against the outside of my leg for a brief, deliberate second before easing away.
I did not move.
I should probably be ashamed of how quickly I decided not to.
A question from Tristen brought the room’s energy around in a way that taught me more about Ironwood than any speech could have.
He had left his post by then and taken a place two seats down, plate mostly finished, beer untouched in front of him.
He asked Sage something about rotation coverage on the north boundary and a supply issue tied to one of the outbuildings.
The details themselves didn’t matter much to me. The response did.
The whole table leaned without leaning.
Nobody shushed. Nobody formalized the moment. But attention gathered.
Sage answered without raising his voice.
Calm. Precise. No chest beating. No alpha theatrics.
He asked one clarifying question, listened to the answer, made a quick decision, and folded two other people into it by name and responsibility so smoothly it sounded less like ordering and more like placing stones exactly where a wall needed them.
That did something inconvenient inside my chest.
Not the bond-pull I felt with Nikolay. Nothing like that deep, soul-level wrongness and rightness tied together until I could barely tell one from the other.
This was different. Easier. Warmer. My wolf responding to competence, to structure, to a male around whom others naturally arranged themselves.
Bronc had that too, and every pack-raised part of me had been shaped by it.
Safety in leadership was an old language. My body still spoke it fluently.
Sage finished answering. Tristen nodded once. Done.
No performance. Just order restored.
I lifted my wineglass and drank before that response in me could grow teeth.
Nikolay flickered through my mind, anyway.
Not the infuriating version of him. Not the cruel one.
The one in the foyer with lemon on his thumb and that impossible softness in his voice when he told me to be safe.
The one who had wrapped a first edition in cream linen and tied the world’s most suspicious pink bow around it with hands better suited to violence than ribbons.
I took another swallow of wine and pushed the thought down.
Not because I wanted to forget him.
Because I couldn’t do anything useful with him here.
By the time plates had been cleared and fresh glasses poured, the room had shifted into a deeper ease.
The kind that came after good food when wolves had enough heat in their bellies to stop guarding themselves so hard.
Laughter rose in pockets. Fire cracked behind us.
The watchers at the walls no longer looked merely assigned there. They looked settled.
Then Sage pushed his chair back and stood.
The effect on the room was immediate.
Not silence. Nothing so dramatic. But attention sharpened as if a current had passed through everybody at once. Wolves straightened.
Sage set one hand lightly on the back of his chair and looked around the room.
“It’s time to run.”
That was all.
He didn’t need more.
The room came alive.
Chairs scraped back. Wineglasses were set down half-finished.
A grin split Tristen’s face for the first time all evening, brief and wolfish as sin.
Loralee rose with quick excitement and reached for the hand of the woman beside her.
Somewhere near the fireplace, someone gave a low whoop that kicked off two more.
Energy surged through the room so fast I felt it under my skin like static.
And just like that, whatever this night had been before became something else entirely.
A run.
A real one.
My pulse answered before my thoughts did.