Page 19 of Curvy Sold Mate

He was attentive to her body. He liked the weight of her in his lap, the give of her hips under his hands, the way she looked in the morning with the sheets pooled around her waist. He told her so, frequently, with the easy confidence of a man who said what he meant and didn’t think much beyond it.

The problem was the beyond. She’d start a sentence about something that mattered—the pack, her brother, the small persistent ache of being seen as an extension of someone else’s power—and watch his eyes glaze at the edges, his attention thinning the way a stream thinned as it spread over flat ground. He’d nod. He’d say the right words. And then he’d pull her closer for a kiss, and the conversation would dissolve into his hands on her skin, and she’d let it because being wanted felt close enough to being known.

When it ended—three months, mutual, quiet—she felt less like she’d lost someone and more like she’d confirmed a hypothesis she’d been testing without admitting it. That her body was either a problem or a fascination, that the space between those two things was narrow, and that neither one had room for the rest of her.

Viktor poured his coffee. The pause was gone—his hand steady on the pot, the moment of hesitation already folded back into the blank competence of his morning. He said nothing. She said nothing. The kitchen held them both in the thin, careful quiet of two people who knew too much about each other’s hands.

She drank her tea and watched him leave.

Chapter 12 - Viktor

The patrol debrief ran forty minutes over schedule because Brennan couldn’t read a topographic map without turning it sideways. Viktor had decided, sometime around the third misidentified contour line, that patience was a finite resource and his reserves for the morning were spent.

“The ridgeline,” he said, pointing. “Here. Where the elevation marker says twelve hundred, which is what elevation markers are for.”

Brennan squinted at the map, rotated it fifteen degrees, and nodded with the enthusiastic confidence of a man who had just decided to agree rather than understand. Viktor swallowed dryly. He moved on.

Eight wolves in the briefing room, arranged around the table in the loose hierarchy that field teams settled into without being told—senior leads closest to the map, junior wolves at the edges, Brennan unfortunately between both and contributing to neither. Viktor stood at the head because he always stood, and the room oriented around him the way rooms had been orienting around him for fifteen years, with the same unquestioned gravity that iron filings granted a magnet.

“Marcus’s camp was dismantled within six hours of the exchange,” he said. “Standard displacement—fire pit buried, tent stakes pulled, ground raked. He’s mobile and underfunded, which makes him unpredictable, which makes him dangerous in a way that a stronger enemy wouldn’t be.” He traced the northeastern corridor on the map with his index finger. “A desperate man doesn’t hold territory. He moves through it. So we stop thinking about where he is and start thinking about where he’s useful.”

Across the table, Jonas—the longest-tenured patrol lead under Viktor’s command, a man built like a fence post who said four words an hour and meant all of them—tapped the river crossing at the northern boundary.

“Supply line.”

“Supply line,” Viktor confirmed. “The northern crossing is the only point within thirty miles where a vehicle can ford the river during spring melt. If Marcus is resupplying—and he is, because the rations we saw at his camp came from outside the region—he’s using that crossing, or he’s burning fuel on a sixty-mile detour.”

“We could post a unit there,” said Kiera, the newest senior lead, who’d earned the promotion by being the only wolf in last autumn’s border exercise to identify the decoy assault before the real one hit the flank. “Observation only. Four wolves, rotating shifts.”

“Terrain won’t hold it. The crossing sits in a floodplain—no cover for two hundred meters in any direction. A static unit is visible from three angles and exposed from all of them.” Viktor pulled a transparent overlay from the stack beside the map and laid it down. The overlay showed sight lines, wind patterns, and the acoustic range of a shifted wolf’s howl from six anchor points. He’d drawn it at three that morning while the coffee brewed and the compound slept around him. “What I want is a moving screen. Two pairs, running offset loops on either side of the crossing, four-hour rotations. They never stop, they never converge, and from any fixed position they look like a standard border run.”

Jonas studied the overlay and nodded once. From Jonas, that was a standing ovation.

Kiera leaned forward. “The offset pattern means neither pair has line-of-sight to the crossing at all times. There’s a window—” she counted under her breath, tracing the loops with her finger—” ninety seconds, maybe two minutes, where the eastern pair is in the tree cover, and the western pair is on the return arc.”

“Correct.”

“So if someone hits the crossing during that window—”

“They’d need to know the pattern exists, identify the gap, and time their movement to a two-minute margin on a route they can’t observe in advance.” Viktor met her eyes. “If Marcus has that capability, we have larger problems than a river crossing.”

Kiera held his gaze for a beat, then sat back. She was testing the plan, and he was letting her, because the wolves who tested his decisions were the wolves he trusted with them. The ones who nodded without question were the ones he watched at night.

He assigned the pairs. Built the rotation from the roster with the fluency of a man who knew every wolf’s stamina ceiling, every partnership’s friction points, every schedule conflict that would surface at two in the morning when the cold set in and the body started making arguments the mind couldn’t win. He knew that Hollis ran hot on the left flank and compensated by drifting wide, which made her effective as a solo scout and a liability in a close pair. He knew that Mercer’s knee hadn’t healed properly from the autumn engagement, whatever Mercer claimed, because the stride pattern on his last three border reports showed a half-inch shortening on the right leg that Mercer was hiding through willpower alone. He assigned Mercer to the western loop, where the terrain was forgiving. He paired him with Dahl, who was steady enough to cover the deficit without making it visible.

He gave the orders. The room cleared in stages until Viktor stood alone in the briefing room.

He gathered the materials. Rolled the overlay with care—the ink was still soft at the edges where the pen had pressed too hard at three in the morning, when his hand had cramped, and he’d kept drawing because stopping meant going back to the quarters.

He brought the rotation schedule to Kahn’s study for sign-off. Kahn read it at the desk, initialed the margins, and handed it back.

“The crossing screen is clean work,” Kahn said.

“It’s adequate.”

“It’s clean work, Viktor. Take the compliment.”

He took it the way he took most things from Kahn—with a nod that was acknowledgment and a silence that was gratitude, the vocabulary between them so compressed that single gestures carried the load of full conversations. Fifteen years of shared ground. He had never needed to ask Kahn whether his work was valued, because the asking would have implied a doubt that didn’t exist. The absence of doubt itself was a kind of trust both of them relied on without examining.