17. Chapter 17
Maddie
Icame awake, hard, like somebody had put a hand around my heart and squeezed.
The room lay black and unfamiliar for one blind second, sheets twisted hot around my calves, breath tearing in and out of me too fast to be useful.
Then Ironwood returned all at once—the carved headboard, the heavy curtains, the faint smell of extinguished fire—and with it the same certainty that had sent me to sleep uneasy: something was wrong, and whatever it was had my name in its mouth.
I pushed myself upright and sat there listening.
Nothing.
No footsteps in the hall. No voices below. No wind loud enough to trouble the windows. Just the old house holding its pre-dawn silence around me while my pulse kicked itself ragged in my throat.
But it was not silence inside me.
Something pulled.
I did not have a better language for it in that moment.
It was not pain, exactly. Not even fear, not in the clean, simple sense.
It felt closer to being tugged by a thread sunk somewhere behind my ribs, a low, insistent draw that made stillness impossible.
My palms flattened on the mattress without my deciding to put them there.
The sheets were damp beneath my hands. I was too warm. My skin felt wrong on me.
Nikolay.
The name came up whole and immediate.
I swung my legs out of bed so fast I nearly tangled myself in the blankets and hit the floor half standing, half stumbling. Cold bit into the soles of my feet. I didn’t care. I grabbed for the phone I always kept on the nightstand.
Empty wood.
I frowned, reached again, patted wider as if it might somehow appear under my hand by force of need. Nothing. I dropped to a crouch and looked under the bed, then checked the other side table, then pawed through the sheets with less dignity than sense.
“Come on,” I muttered.
No phone.
I stripped back the comforter, found only pillow, blanket, my bra from last night, and my own rising irritation.
I checked the bathroom counter. The armchair by the window.
My overnight bag. The floor beneath the dresser.
Not there. The absence landed strangely.
I was not careless with my phone. I slept with the damn thing close enough to hear if Bronc called from Texas or work texted or any number of disasters found me after midnight.
My keys sat on the dresser exactly where I had left them, the metal catching the thin gray hint of approaching dawn around the curtains.
That was enough.
I snatched them up and yanked open my bag.
Jeans. Thermal top. Underwear. Socks. Bra.
My fingers fumbled every clasp and button like they belonged to someone else.
I cursed under my breath when I put the shirt on backward, tore it off, fixed it, dragged jeans over legs that still felt half asleep.
The room swayed once when I bent to pull on socks, and I braced a hand against the bedpost until it passed.
Get to him.
I did not stop to interrogate that urgency.
Maybe it was instinct. Maybe guilt. Maybe some belated courage finally outrunning my pride.
I only knew the need to see him had become larger than embarrassment, larger than the memory of every cruel thing between us, larger even than my discomfort over how badly I had let Sage get under my skin last night.
The lock clicked back under my hand. I opened the door slowly.
The hallway beyond lay in soft blue darkness, the kind that came right before true morning but still belonged to night.
Lamps had been turned low. The rugs muffled everything.
Closed doors lined both sides of the corridor, and from behind them came only the deep, complete quiet of a house full of wolves who had run hard and would sleep late for it.
Faint wood smoke clung to the walls. So did last night’s warmth, though it had thinned enough for the old timber air underneath to show through.
I stepped out and closed the door without a sound.
Shoes in one hand, keys in the other, I moved in socked feet down the hall and toward the stairs.
Every board I avoided still seemed ready to announce me.
I kept expecting a door to open, for Sloan’s voice to drift out, teasing and suspicious, or for some older matriarch to catch me sneaking away and tell me breakfast was in an hour and where exactly did I think I was going.
But the house remained asleep around me, or near enough.
On the landing, I paused and listened again.
Nothing.
My own breath. My own pulse. The low, restless drag inside my chest whenever I thought Nikolay’s name.
Downstairs, the great room had gone to embers.
The fireplace still held a dim red heart beneath collapsed logs, and the air carried the ghost of wine and sugar and smoke from the night before.
A glass had been left on a side table beside a folded blanket, evidence that somebody else had stayed up later than they intended.
The sight of it hit me strangely—a domestic trace of pack life, easy and communal and warm.
I almost felt disloyal walking past it.
That thought sharpened something mean in me. Disloyal to whom? To a man who had cornered me against a wall and talked about correction? To a pack that had welcomed me while their alpha looked at me as if he could improve my fate by removing my choices from it?
Whatever softness last night’s run had opened in me did not vanish, but it changed shape. The house was lovely. The people in it had been kind. Neither fact obligated me to stay where my gut was screaming to leave.
I crossed the kitchen, found the side mudroom, and eased the exterior door open.
Cold morning air struck me full in the face.
I sucked in a breath that tasted of wet gravel, pine, and the iron edge of dawn.
Fog had settled low over the grounds, not thick enough to hide the main drive entirely but enough to blur its edges and soften the farther buildings into pale smudges.
The world looked unmade. Behind me, Ironwood rose vast and dark, its windows mostly blind.
I stepped outside and pulled the door shut carefully behind me.
The gravel lot crunched under my socks until I stopped beside my SUV, swore under my breath, and crouched long enough to jam my shoes properly onto my feet. My hands shook trying to tie the laces. I gave up on neatness, tucked loops into themselves, and stood again.
The unlock beep sounded obscenely loud.
I froze and looked back at the house.
No lights came on.
No one shouted.
I slid into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and sat with both hands on the wheel for one suspended second while my breathing tried to remember a useful rhythm.
The interior smelled faintly like old coffee, leather, and the vanilla air freshener I kept forgetting to replace.
Ordinary. Mine. Human enough to feel almost foreign after a night saturated in wolf.
The key shook against the ignition before it caught.
The engine turned over with a rumble that made my shoulders climb.
I winced and backed out slow, not daring to use the headlights yet.
The predawn gray gave me just enough to see the curve of the lot, the gate ahead, the dark sweep of trees hemming the drive.
Please don’t let anybody be watching.
I didn’t know who I meant. Sage from a window. Some sentry I had never noticed. My own conscience.
The gate stood open from last night’s traffic in and out. I rolled through it, turned onto the road, and only then clicked the headlights on.
They carved two hard yellow lanes through fog and nothing else.
The hills beyond Ironwood came at me in blurred ascents and drops, all of Pennsylvania turned to wet gray breath and shadowed pines.
My wipers hissed once across a windshield gathering mist. The road narrowed where the trees closed in, then opened briefly on a bend where pasture and fence should have been visible and weren’t.
Every few minutes I had the strange sensation of driving through a world reduced to whatever my lights could touch.
My knuckles went white on the wheel.
I told myself I was being ridiculous. That I had slept badly. That last night had left me raw and overreactive. That maybe I only needed to speak to Nikolay face-to-face because the bond—or whatever we had—had made distance intolerable now that I had finally stopped lying to myself about it.
Maybe.
But the pull in my chest did not ease. If anything, every mile made it sharper.
I thought of his face in fragments because that was how he lived in me lately: not as a single, clean answer but as a series of impossible details.
The cut of his mouth when he was trying not to smile.
Those ridiculous old-world manners slipping at the edges whenever he forgot to be offended by my existence.
The brush of his thumb at the corner of my mouth.
That first edition, wrapped in linen as though books still deserved ceremony.
The stupid, tender tap of his finger on my nose.
My throat tightened.
And yes, I thought of Sage too, because I was not dishonest enough with myself to pretend otherwise. His hand braced by my head. His mouth on mine. The way persuasion had worn civility’s face so well I had nearly missed the violence inside it.
A shiver moved through me that had nothing to do with the cold.
He would notice I was gone. Of course he would. He might not know immediately, if the whole house slept another hour or two, but somebody would realize at breakfast. Sloan, maybe. Some staff member. Then him.
The thought brought a quick spear of guilt I resented on contact.
I did not like disappointing people who had shown me kindness.
I liked even less that part of me still wanted to categorize Sage’s behavior under misunderstanding rather than threat, because the alternative demanded uglier conclusions than I was ready to hold barehanded at sunrise.
I tightened my grip on the wheel until my fingers ached.