15. Chapter 15 #4
“I heard how he humiliated you,” he said. “In public. More than once, from what reached my ears. That is what I mean when I say it is not natural. A true bond should not degrade the female meant for it.”
The bastard thing of it was that he was not entirely wrong.
Nikolay had hurt me. Deeply. Publicly. More than once. There were nights I had gone to bed in that big old vampire house with my pride skinned raw from him and my wolf aching under it.
And yet.
And yet.
He had also looked at me in the foyer like I were something fragile and treasured. He had sent a book no one else in my life would have understood enough to choose. He was trying, however badly, however late.
“We don’t choose our mates,” I said.
Something flickered over Sage’s face then. Quick. Sharp. Gone almost before I had it.
“No,” he said, and for one strange heartbeat it sounded as though he had nearly said something else entirely. “But some things can be corrected.”
Corrected?
I stared at him.
He seemed to hear his own words a second after they existed, because his expression altered, smoothing over too fast.
Then his voice lowered.
“You’re not mated yet, Maddie.”
The way he said my name made warning bells go off somewhere far away, muffled by wine and weariness and the heat of him.
Before I could answer, his mouth brushed mine.
Barely.
Just a pass of lips over lips. So light it could have been dismissed if my entire body had not shivered under it.
My fingers curled involuntarily in his shirt.
He felt it.
Of course, he felt it.
And then he kissed me properly.
Not rough. Not hesitant either. His hands came in at my waist and drew me against him with controlled certainty, his body boxing mine against the wall while his mouth took mine in a way that was practiced and warm and devastatingly skilled.
I made a sound I did not mean to make. My traitorous body went soft in all the wrong places. Goddess help me, I kissed him back.
I did.
My hands left the barrier of his chest and caught in the fabric at his sides instead.
The kiss deepened only slightly, enough to turn my knees uncertain.
He tasted like dark wine and clean night air and some private masculine spice that belonged to him alone.
Nothing about it felt fumbling. It felt like being persuaded by force, so polished it barely registered as force until you were already yielding.
That was what frightened me most.
Not that I wanted it.
That it felt for one horrible second like wanting had become irrelevant.
When he pulled back, my mouth felt warm and over-aware, and my pulse was beating in every soft place I had.
His eyes were dark. Certain.
“Think about how wonderful life could be by my side,” he said.
Not with me.
By my side.
A phrasing so small another woman might not have marked it.
I did.
He let me go then as smoothly as he had taken hold, stepped back, and walked to the door before my body had fully caught up to my mind. His hand closed around the knob. He looked at me once more, unreadable now in the softened lamplight.
“Sleep well, Madelyn.”
Then he stepped out and closed the door behind him.
I stood in the middle of the room without moving.
My back still held the heat of the wall. My mouth still held the warmth of his. My fingers remained curled uselessly from where they had gripped his shirt.
For one disorienting instant I could still feel the run in my body—the openness, the joy, the deep animal relief of pack under moonlight. And beneath that, under all of it now, something cold began settling into my gut.
Wrong.
Not because I had kissed him back. That would have been simpler. Easier to condemn. Easier to understand.
Wrong because I had told him about Nikolay, and he had not looked surprised, only confirmed.
Wrong because of the word unnatural. Wrong because of that half-made sentence about things being corrected.
Wrong because the kiss had felt too good and too inevitable, and I did not know where my own wanting had ended and his gravity had begun. I had wanted it, hadn’t I?
I lifted trembling fingers to my mouth.
Then I looked toward the dark window as if I might somehow see all the way back to the Kozlov estate through the Pennsylvania night.
I needed to leave first thing in the morning.
No delay. No lingering brunch. No polite goodbyes that stretched into another day.
I needed to go back.
And more than that, I needed to talk to Nikolay.
Not later. Not after another shift. Not after another misunderstanding thickened around us and hardened into something worse.
I needed the truth from him with no ballroom manners around it.
No corridor games. No old-world evasions. Truth or the ruin of it.
The room remained silent.
My body, traitorous thing, was already beginning to feel the drag of sleep again under the adrenaline crash.
So I locked the door.
Then I stood there a second longer with my palm flat to the wood, like I could keep the night out by force, and wished with a sudden, aching ferocity that the vampire prince who had booped my nose and wrapped a first edition in linen were the man I could speak to right this minute instead of tomorrow.