Page 31 of Curvy Sold Mate

Olivia’s chin tilted up, the angle she used when she was genuinely surprised, the open version of her face rather than the controlled one, and the realization that Damian could produce the open version without effort when Viktor had spent weeks earning the controlled one landed somewhere behind his ribs with a weight that made breathing an administrative task.

He stood where he stood because standing was the one skill that never failed him. His boots were placed correctly, his weight distributed, his hands at his sides in the arrangement that fourteen years of ceremony had carved into his muscle memory. He looked like the Beta of the Beaumont Pack observing a social interaction with appropriate detachment, and the gap between what he looked like and what was happening inside him was the widest it had been in his adult life.

The corrosion was specific. Viktor could have named it jealousy, if naming it wouldn’t have required admitting it existed, and admitting it existed would have meant confronting the fact that Viktor Hale—who had never in two decades asked for a single thing that wasn’t operational, who had made himself into a tool so perfectly calibrated to another man’s purpose that the tool and the purpose had become indistinguishable—was standing in a great hall watching his brother hold the woman he wanted and feeling something so possessive and so consuming that his wolf had pressed forward hard enough to blur his vision at the edges.

Damian set her down. His hands stayed on her shoulders a beat longer than the greeting required. In that beat, Viktor tracked the path of his brother’s gaze—across Olivia’s face, down the line of her throat, the quick appreciative sweep that took in the whole of her with the easy warmth of a man who saw a woman’s body the way he saw a landscape: beautiful, enjoyable, something to be appreciated in passing. Damian had always looked at women that way. He’d looked at Olivia that way for three months, and the looking had been genuine and shallow and exactly as deep as Damian was capable of going at the time. Viktor had watched from the periphery of every room they’d occupied together and said nothing, because saying something would have meant explaining why it mattered, and explaining why it mattered would have cracked the sealed room open. The sealed room was the only thing standing between Viktor and the admission that he’d been in love with Kahn’s sister since before his brother ever touched her.

The history between them was older than Olivia and wider than her. Viktor was the son who stayed. Damian was the son who could leave—who had the lightness for it, the ease, the ability to set down the weight of family and pack and walk into the world unburdened by the things Viktor carried as naturally as breathing. Their father had been a hard man, precise and demanding, and Viktor had met the demands because meeting demands was what the eldest did, and Damian had charmed his way around them because charming was what the youngest did, and the division had calcified over decades into something that felt permanent: Viktor the useful one, Damian the free one, and the resentment between them buried so deep that neither had ever dug down far enough to look at it directly.

Until now. Until Damian walked into a compound Viktor had held together for four years of his brother’s absence and greeted the woman Viktor had married three weeks ago with the casual warmth of a man returning to a room he’d left the lights on in, expecting everything to be where he’d put it.

“You look amazing,” Damian said, and Viktor’s molars ground together hard enough that his jaw ached for an hour afterward.

He watched Olivia laugh—the sound bright, surprised, unguarded in a way she was never unguarded with him—and the stone that landed in his chest sat there for the rest of the evening, heavy and specific and aimed at a wound he’d spent a decade pretending wasn’t there.

Damian set her down. Held her at arm’s length, his hands on her shoulders, and looked at her with the easy affection of someone who had cared for her once and let her go and found the letting go easier than the loving.

“You look amazing,” he said.

“You look like you’ve been sleeping in your truck.”

“Only half the time.” He grinned, and the grin was the same one Viktor remembered from childhood—the one that had gotten them both out of trouble more times than he could count. “The other half, I was sleeping in other people’s trucks.”

Olivia laughed again, and the sound of it—genuine, unguarded—landed in Viktor’s chest like a stone. She hadn’t laughed that way with him. Not once.

Chapter 19 - Olivia

He found her the next morning in the garden, which meant he’d been looking.

Olivia was crouching beside the raised beds where the early herbs had started pushing through—thyme, rosemary, a stubborn row of chives that came back every spring regardless of whether anyone asked them to. She’d come out to clear her head, or that was the story she was telling herself, and the dirt under her fingernails and the cold air in her lungs were doing a better job of it than the three hours she’d spent lying awake after Viktor closed the bathroom door.

“Liv.”

The nickname arrived before he did. Olivia straightened, wiped her hands on her thighs, and turned to find Damian walking across the courtyard with two.

“I asked Elena which one was yours.” He held out a mug. “She told me chamomile, no honey, and then she looked at me like I’d asked for state secrets.”

“Elena takes beverages seriously.”

“Elena takes everything seriously. She nearly searched me on the way in last night.” He settled onto the stone bench beside the herb beds, one leg stretched out, the other bent, his body arranging itself into comfort the way water found its level. “You’re up early.”

“I’m always up early.”

“No, you’re not. You used to sleep until nine and then complain about mornings for an hour before becoming functional.” He grinned over the rim of his mug. “I remember you throwing a shoe at a clock.”

“I was twenty-two. People change.”

“Some people.” His eyes moved over her face with a warmth she recognized—the quality of attention Damian paid when he was genuinely pleased to see someone, which was most of the time, because Damian was pleased by the world in a way that had always made her feel both envious and slightly exhausted. “You look good, Olivia. I mean it. There’s something different about you.”

“I’ve been kidnapped, de-wolfed, politically married, and I haven’t slept properly in a month. It’s called radiance.”

He laughed. The sound carried across the garden, and two wolves crossing the courtyard glanced over. Damian had always laughed like that—as though the sound was too big for indoor use and he’d never seen a reason to contain it.

She sat on the far end of the bench. The chamomile was good. Elena had made it strong, the way Olivia preferred. The heat of it seeped through the ceramic into her palms, grounding her against the strangeness of this—Damian, here, three feet away, occupying the same space he’d occupied four years ago.

“So,” he said, leaning back, arms spread along the bench’s backrest. “You and Viktor.”

“Me and Viktor.”