23. Chapter 23 #2
Bronc, his great black-and-silver wolf slamming into an Ironwood male hard enough to send both of them rolling through torch-lit leaves.
Wrecker hit another with a force that looked personal.
Arsenal moved like military violence made flesh, precise and efficient even as fur rippled over him.
Gunner came in low and brutal, all auburn-haired power and righteous rage.
Big Papa’s tan wolf looked almost holy for the half second before he tore a snarling gray wolf off one of the altar guards.
Doc was there too, bigger than any man had a right to be, the hybrid strength in him monstrous and exact.
The brawl was brief because it was never truly a battle.
Sage’s death had gutted the courage out of half his wolves.
Some scattered immediately, breaking for the trees with panic on them.
Others tried to fight and found out, quickly and at cost, that Iron Valor and the Kozlov line had not come to negotiate.
One dropped flat to the ground in submission the instant Arsenal’s wolf pinned him.
Another turned and ran straight into Wrecker, which was less a choice than a fatal misunderstanding of geography.
Around and behind it all, I caught glimpses of more impossible things.
Lucia in motion with a blade bright in her hand.
Amelia near the northern edge of the clearing, face set and pale, one palm still outstretched as if she had personally strangled the ritual to death.
Aspen beside her, dark hair whipped loose, mouth moving around words I couldn’t hear. And Devon...
I blinked hard because for one half-hysterical second I thought the drug was making me see nonsense.
There was Devon in her angelic battle armor, face smeared with dirt and blood, moving along the edge of the clearing with an armful of joggers.
Just... joggers.
Dry. Ready. Like some fallen-angel quartermaster of indecency-prevention had taken one look at the inevitable wolf shifting and said, absolutely not! Nobody is standing around bare-assed on my watch.
The sight of it hit me so wrong and so right in the middle of everything that an ugly, wet laugh caught in my throat and turned into a sob.
Then Bronc was there, pulling on a pair of those damn joggers and wielding a dagger I assume he'd gotten from Devon as well.
Before I could say a word, leather was ripping. One wrist. The other. My ankles. His hands were big and shaking only a little as he got me loose.
The second I could move, I folded into him.
My brother caught me hard against his chest, one arm around my back, one hand cradling the back of my head with a tenderness that undid me more efficiently than panic ever had. I clutched his shoulders and cried into him like I were about five instead of grown enough to know better.
His beard scraped my temple as he bent his head.
His voice came rough and dry against my hair. “You just had to leave Texas because it wasn’t exciting enough?”
A broken laugh escaped me around the crying. “Shut up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I held on harder.
For one small, savage moment, I let myself stay there. In my brother’s arms. In the aftermath. In the proof that I had not died on that stone under a blackened moon while strangers argued theology over my body.
Then I looked up.
Nikolay was walking toward me through the torchlight.
Blood marked him in scattered dark streaks—at his throat, across one cheek, on his hands.
Not all of it his. Probably very little.
His coat hung open, black on black, and the eclipse light had begun the slow work of releasing the moon back toward silver above him.
Maksym, Taras, and Kazimir joined him all smeared with blood and dirt.
Around us, men were breathing hard, dragging bodies, watching treelines, taking stock. But he looked only at me.
Alive. Upright. Victorious.
My heart lurched so hard it hurt.
I slipped out of Bronc’s arms and ran.
I ran in a gown ruined by ritual and leaves and blood, and he met me like he had been built for exactly that impact, as if all the long terrible hours between us ended not in words but in the hard sure catch of his arms around me.
I jumped.
He caught me without hesitation.
My legs wrapped around his waist on pure instinct, and his arms locked under me, one bracing my back, the other sliding up to cradle the back of my head with such care it nearly made me cry all over again.
Blood streaked his hands. His breath was steady.
His body felt like strength given shape and heat, and purpose.
“Nikolay,” I whispered, and my voice broke on his name.
“My brilliant wolf.” The words came out like prayer and injury all at once.
I pulled back just enough to look at him.
Up close, the wreckage of the last few minutes lived all over him.
Blood on his cheek. A smear along his jaw.
One dark line near his temple. His amber eyes burned with the aftermath of violence not yet fully put away, but when they moved over my face they changed.
Not gentled exactly. Focused into something achingly careful.
His jaw tightened.
I knew what he saw. The bruise. The split lip.
But under the bond’s hot living pull, the damage was already easing.
The ache in my cheek had gone from sharp to throbbing, then from throbbing to a strange tender heat, as if my body had remembered, at last, that it wanted to remain whole.
I felt the skin at my mouth knit in a faint itching line.
“I’m okay,” I said quickly, because his face made it clear he was in danger of killing the moon next.
His mouth flattened into a line that did not remotely suggest belief.
I twisted enough to grab at the torn hem of my gown. The lace overlay had already been ruined beyond salvation. One hard yank, and a strip came free in my hand.
He frowned. “What are you doing?”
“You’re bleeding.”
Before he could stop me, I pressed the white fabric to the blood on his cheek. It looked obscene there, bridal white turning red in an instant.
“I’m sorry,” I said, because there were too many things bound up in it to sort cleanly apart. Sorry for leaving. Sorry for not understanding sooner. Sorry he had felt what happened to me. Sorry, the first time I heard him call me mate like that had been over an altar.
His hand closed around my wrist.
Not hard. Firm enough to still me.
“Madelyn.” My full name in his mouth had never sounded like that before. Not formal. Reverent.
He took the bloodied strip from my fingers and let it fall.
“You have no reason to apologize to me,” he said quietly. “None.”
I swallowed.
He shifted his hold just enough to bring his forehead near mine. Around us, men moved and spoke, and torches hissed, and the world kept trying to continue, but the center of everything had narrowed to his voice and the space between our mouths.
“I was the fool,” he said. “A damn fool, and a proud one, which is a particularly ugly species of man.”
Despite everything, my mouth trembled toward a laugh.
His thumb brushed once at the nape of my neck.
“I saw your sweetness and called it softness. I saw your honesty and mistook it for roughness. I saw the bright, unvarnished wonder of you and set myself above it because I had spent too long worshipping refinement as though it were virtue.” His eyes searched mine with a steadiness that made lying impossible.
“You were never lacking. Not in breeding, not in worth, not in grace. You were perfect, and I was too blinded by my own pride to see it with the gratitude it deserved.”
My throat tightened so hard it hurt.
No one had ever spoken to me like that. Not because the words were pretty, though they were. Because every one of them cost him something.
“I have wounded you,” he went on, and now the old-world cadence in him deepened, each phrase polished by sincerity rather than performance.
“Not only by hesitation, which might have been sin enough, but by making you feel for even a moment that you were less than the treasure you are. If there is any mercy in you still for me, I ask for your forgiveness.”
Ask.
Not take. Not assume. Ask.
It undid me.
I framed his face in both my hands, blood and all, and kissed him.
He made a low sound against my mouth that was more relief than triumph, and then his lips were on mine with a care so fierce it made my whole body go weak.
The bond thrummed between us like a string finally drawn true after too long hanging slack and tormented.
Heat moved through me in waves. Not the drugged softness from before. This was clean. Living. Mine.
He kissed me like a man starving with perfect manners finally given permission to be hungry.
I kissed him back like I had almost died without it.
When we broke apart, both of us were breathing harder.
His forehead rested against mine again for one suspended second.
Then Bronc’s voice cut through the clearing, flat with long-suffering and threaded through with relief.
“Could we maybe put the kibosh on this scene until we get back to the estate? I’ve had about all I can take for one day.”
I laughed into Nikolay’s mouth before I could help it.
He closed his eyes briefly, as if mastering either amusement or murder. “Your brother’s timing remains abominable.”
“Yeah,” I said, breathless. “That’s kind of his gift.”
He finally set me down, though his hand stayed at my waist like he no longer trusted the universe to keep me upright unaided.
The clearing looked different now that I was no longer staring at it from stone.
Smaller, somehow. Sadder. The torches were guttering low, their flames no longer fed by ritual intent and now merely burning themselves toward exhaustion.
Above us, the eclipse had begun its slow retreat.
A thin edge of silver returned to the moon, cold and clean against the black bite still taking its shape.
Sage’s body lay where it had fallen, already becoming less a man and more a consequence.
Nikolay’s fingers threaded through mine.
“Come,” he said softly.