Page 106 of Nikolay

I stared down at the parchment reproduction until the ink blurred. Of course it had been dressed as restoration. Men who wished to commit abominations always preferred language that made them sound pious.

“The rite was supposedly created,” Amelia continued, “to restore the wolf to their true destiny. That is how it is framed. Correction. Purification. Realignment.” Her gaze flicked to me briefly, and there was pity in it now. “That is not what it does.”

Devon moved closer to my father. I heard rather than saw the whisper of fabric as she did.

Amelia tapped the center of the diagram.

“It severs the existing mate bond. Not symbolically. Magically. It strips every active connection between the subject and the original mate. Then it leaves the subject spiritually blank long enough to attempt an immediate replacement bond with the designated second party.”

“The soul,” Devon said very softly, as if speaking to herself.

“Yes,” Amelia said, and her voice dropped with it. “That is the problem. The mate bond is tied to the soul. You are not cutting a rope. You are amputating part of a person.”

The study seemed to contract around those words. I could feel my own heartbeat in my throat, heavy and deliberate, while the bond inside me gave a shudder like something living caught in a trap.

“What does it require?” Father asked.

Amelia turned another page.

“Something from the existing mate,” she said. “Blood, hair, or an object intimately connected enough to anchor the current bond. The text is flexible on the form but not the principle. It must carry enough personal imprint to call the original bond into the circle.”

A cold thought struck me at once. Her room. The book. The pastries. Christ.

Amelia went on before I could speak. “Blood from the replacement mate. Voluntarily given. That part matters because the rite depends on his conviction that he is restoring order rather than committing violence. According to the texts, intent shapes the pathway.”

Sage’s polished certainty rose before me so vividly I could have driven my fist through his face then and there. I heard again every report Amelia had ever given about him. Wealthy. Refined. Strategic. A man who thought prejudice became virtue if expressed in complete sentences.

“And Maddie?” I asked. I hated how my voice sounded. Quiet. Too quiet.

Amelia’s eyes lifted to mine. “At the center.”

My stomach turned.

“She would be restrained,” Amelia said. “Not because the texts call her a prisoner. They call her the vessel of correction.” Her lip curled with open contempt. “The justification is that the transformation is violent, and the body convulses under the severing. A wolf like Sage would use that language to make restraint appear merciful. Necessary. Protective, even.”

I looked down at the old diagrams and imagined Madelyn bound in a circle while a pack of self-righteous fools told themselves they were helping her. The desk creaked beneath my hand.

Amelia placed one fingertip on a block of script near the bottom of the page.

“The mortality rate,” she said.

Father’s tone remained level. “Tell me.”

Sixty percent death would have been terrible at any volume. Spoken in Amelia’s steady, almost clinical cadence, it became monstrous.

“Sixty percent death,” she said. “Cardiac arrest or catastrophic spiritual rupture as the soul tears under forced severance.”

Devon closed her eyes once.

“Twenty-five percent permanent madness,” Amelia continued. “The mind survives but cannot reintegrate after the bond is broken. Dissociation. Violence. Catatonia. Most historical accounts become evasive there, which usually means the survivors were put down.”

Something hot and black opened in me then, not rage exactly. Rage had edges. This was older and uglier. A hunger to destroy the architect of such a thing so thoroughly that nothing bearing his name remained.

“Ten percent partial success,” Amelia said. “The subject survives, but the original mate suffers severe backlash. Neurological collapse in some records. Loss of power. Extended coma. In one account, the original mate remained alive but spiritually unmoored for decades.”

My fist closed fully. I felt my nails bite into my palm and welcomed the pain for the way it simplified everything.

“And five percent?” Father asked.