18. Chapter 18
Maddie
Itook a shower hot enough to pink my skin and stood under it longer than necessary, hoping the water might wash the dream from my body.
It did not. By the time I dressed and put my face together into something like composure, I had succeeded only in making myself presentable, not in making myself less aware of my own mouth, my own throat, or the dangerous fact that my sleeping mind had apparently decided to write vampire filth without my permission.
I had checked my neck twice in the mirror, anyway.
Nothing.
No mark. No evidence. Only my own face looking back at me with a kind of tired skepticism, as if even I was not impressed by my insistence that everything was fine.
I pulled on jeans, a soft cream sweater, and boots, then braided my damp hair loosely over one shoulder because it gave my hands something to do besides touching my throat again.
I thought I’d text Nikolay just to check in. My phone was not on my nightstand. That part of the dream was accurate. Strange.
By the time I made it downstairs, the house had fully woken up.
Ironwood’s dining room had been claimed by those closest to the alpha, and the sound reached me before the doorway did—voices layered over voices, silverware against china, laughter breaking and reforming, chairs shifting over old wood floors.
Warmth and coffee rolled out to meet me like a physical thing.
The long table was nearly full.
Fifteen, maybe a little more, spread down both sides in easy occupation: plates already in use, hands reaching across one another for baskets and preserves and little dishes of butter soft enough to melt at contact. Sage sat at the head. The chair to his right remained empty.
Held.
The moment I stepped through the doorway, his gaze lifted to me, and that slight nod confirmed what the untouched place setting had already implied. For some reason, that tiny gesture landed heavier than if he had stood and announced it. Everybody else had settled naturally. My place had been kept.
I became aware of the room’s attention only because it touched me and moved on again.
Good mornings rose from every direction.
Warm, casual, unforced. Someone near the center asked if I’d survived the run.
Somebody else said of course I had. Didn’t I look offensively human for this hour?
A third voice wanted to know whether Texas women all looked this put together before coffee or if I was setting an impossible standard on purpose.
I laughed, because it was easier than freezing in the doorway under all that friendliness.
“Y’all are generous,” I said, moving toward the open chair. “This is my face on low power.”
A few of them laughed. That helped.
I slid into the seat at Sage’s right and felt the social geometry of it immediately.
Not romantic exactly. Not publicly, anyway.
But significant. To his right at his own table meant favored, honored, marked out for notice.
I told myself not to over-read. Then I over-read anyway because wolves always did.
“Good morning, Madelyn,” he inclined his head in a small nod.
He was dressed simply by his standards—dark knit sweater, sleeves pushed back once at the forearms, hair still slightly damp as if he had also come recently from a shower. He looked entirely too rested for a man who had run half the forest the night before.
“Morning.”
A mug appeared in front of me before I reached for one.
Not from the staff—though they moved in and out of the room with that eerie, polished invisibility only very expensive households ever managed—but from Sage himself.
He had already poured it. Steam lifted between us, fragrant and dark and rich enough to wake the Creator.
“Thank you,” I said, and wrapped both hands around the mug.
The heat soaked into my fingers. I took a sip.
Oh.
I looked at the coffee, then at him. “Don’t tell me, you brew your own coffee too?”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Alright then, I won’t tell you.”
That brought an involuntary smile out of me before I could help it.
A plate landed before me, stacked with pancakes and bacon, butter already dissolving itself down the golden sides in glossy streams. Beside it, a basket of biscuits sat close enough to claim without reaching.
Someone passed a dish of berry preserves.
Someone else slid a little crock of honey my way because “you look like a honey girl, no offense if that’s profiling. ”
“It absolutely is,” I said, taking it anyway.
The first bite of biscuit nearly made me close my eyes.
It was tender in the middle, browned just enough on top, and carried that perfect balance of salt and butter that made a person consider bad decisions. I swallowed and looked down at it with real respect.
“These are close to my mother’s,” I said.
The words changed the attention nearest me by half a degree. Not more intense. More interested. A compliment that specific carried weight where I came from, and apparently here too.
Sage glanced at me. “That seems like a high standard.”
“Impossibly high,” I was serious. “I don’t tease about biscuits.”
“Then we will alert the kitchen that they have ascended.”
A laugh ran down my side of the table. I shook my head and reached for another piece of biscuit before good sense returned.
It should have been easy after that. In plenty of ways, it was.
The food was spectacular. The coffee was even better.
The company was kind. But fifteen people before I was fully awake was still fifteen people, and I was enough wolf to enjoy communal heat while still being enough myself to feel the edges of it pressing in after a while.
Voices layered. Plates moved. Somebody on the opposite end told a story with their whole body.
Two conversations braided just behind my right shoulder.
Laughter rose and bumped the chandelier.
I felt my social battery draining in real time.
The contradiction made me want to laugh at myself. I could handle a nightclub full of predators if somebody paid me and the lighting was low. Put me at a breakfast table with affectionate wolves and endless coffee, and suddenly my soul started looking for a back door.
I kept my face pleasant and concentrated on syrup.
Sage noticed anyway.
Of course he did.
He leaned slightly toward me under the cover of somebody else asking for more bacon, his voice dropping low enough not to carry past my shoulder.
“Would you like to take the horses out after breakfast?”
The question landed with such unexpected precision I turned to look at him fully.
Not because the offer was strange. Because it was exactly right.
Space. Motion. One other person instead of fifteen. Woods instead of chatter. Enough companionship to keep the morning from feeling awkwardly avoidant, enough solitude to let me breathe.
It was odd. I had intended to tell him I was leaving after breakfast. Something in my chest compelled me to stay.
“Yes,” I said before caution could overcomplicate it. “I’d like that.”
His gaze held mine for one brief beat. Satisfaction touched his mouth, though whether it came from reading me correctly or simply getting what he wanted, I could not have said.
“Good,” he said.
Then he straightened, reached for the coffeepot, and asked someone three seats down whether they intended to keep hoarding the strawberry preserves all morning like a tyrant.
The table laughed. I took another sip of coffee and tried not to think too hard about how easily he had gotten what he wanted.
He had met me in the front hall after breakfast with two pairs of gloves draped over one hand and a stable girl’s efficiency in the way he assessed what I was wearing.
“You’ll freeze in that,” he had said of my own jacket.
I had looked down at it. “You say that like I showed up in a lace shawl.”
He had taken my sarcasm without offense. “I say it like I know these trails better than you do.”
Fair.
He equipped me for an expedition I was clearly meant to enjoy. By the time we stepped out into the late morning cold, I wore borrowed riding boots that actually fit, gloves lined soft at the palm, and a dark leather jacket with fur at the collar that made me feel like I was ready for a fox hunt.
The horses waiting in the stable aisle were already saddled.
Mine was a blue roan with a patient eye and the kind of solid, no-nonsense build that said she would tolerate foolishness only up to a point.
Sage’s gelding stood taller, dark bay and elegant through the neck, as if even his horse understood presentation.
“She likes honesty and apples,” Sage grinned, laying a hand on the mare’s shoulder. “In that order.”
“I can work with that.”
He glanced at me. “Can you?”
“Usually.”
Mounting pulled me into my body in a useful way—the swing of the leg, the settle of the saddle, the quiet contract between animal and rider. By the time we cleared the stable yard and turned toward the lower trails, some of the jangling energy in me had begun to smooth out.
The woods took us in quickly.
For a while, we rode without much talk.
That suited me. Sage seemed to understand the difference between silence that needed filling and silence that offered itself as kindness. He kept his horse half a length back when the trail narrowed, then brought him up beside me when it widened again.
The path dipped through a stand of fir where the ground darkened with shade, then rose along a ridge from which the hills opened in pale blue folds beyond the trees. Fog had long since burned off.
“Do you ride often at home?” Sage asked, eventually.
“Often enough,” I said. “Not as much as when I was younger. Work got in the way of pretending I belonged in a western.”
His mouth moved slightly. “You wear it well enough.”
“I assume that was a compliment.”
“It was.”