Page 112 of Nikolay

The hills beyond Ironwood came at me in blurred ascents and drops, all of Pennsylvania turned to wet gray breath and shadowed pines. My wipers hissed once across a windshield gathering mist. The road narrowed where the trees closed in, then opened briefly on a bend where pasture and fence should have been visible and weren’t. Every few minutes I had the strange sensation of driving through a world reduced to whatever my lights could touch.

My knuckles went white on the wheel.

I told myself I was being ridiculous. That I had slept badly. That last night had left me raw and overreactive. That maybe I only needed to speak to Nikolay face-to-face because the bond—or whatever we had—had made distance intolerable now that I had finally stopped lying to myself about it.

Maybe.

But the pull in my chest did not ease. If anything, every mile made it sharper.

I thought of his face in fragments because that was how he lived in me lately: not as a single, clean answer but as a series of impossible details. The cut of his mouth when he was trying not to smile. Those ridiculous old-world manners slipping at the edges whenever he forgot to be offended by my existence. The brush of his thumb at the corner of my mouth. That first edition, wrapped in linen as though books still deserved ceremony. The stupid, tender tap of his finger on my nose.

My throat tightened.

And yes, I thought of Sage too, because I was not dishonest enough with myself to pretend otherwise. His hand braced by my head. His mouth on mine. The way persuasion had worn civility’s face so well I had nearly missed the violence inside it.

A shiver moved through me that had nothing to do with the cold.

He would notice I was gone. Of course he would. He might not know immediately, if the whole house slept another hour or two, but somebody would realize at breakfast. Sloan, maybe. Some staff member. Then him.

The thought brought a quick spear of guilt I resented on contact. I did not like disappointing people who had shown me kindness. I liked even less that part of me still wanted to categorize Sage’s behavior under misunderstanding rather than threat, because the alternative demanded uglier conclusions than I was ready to hold barehanded at sunrise.

I tightened my grip on the wheel until my fingers ached.

He would notice. He would be disappointed. He might be angry.

I kept driving anyway.

The fog thinned by degrees as dawn gathered itself somewhere beyond the hills, but the road still looked long and uncertain ahead of me. I followed it with my whole attention, heart unsteady, body tired, mind fixed on a vampire prince an hour away and the need to put my eyes on him with such force it had become the only honest thing in me.

By the time I tore through the front door of the estate, dawn had only just begun silvering the high glass of the foyer. I had barely gotten the door shut behind me when a dark shape crossed hard from the inner hall, coat still on, movements too fast and sharp for calm. Then he came fully into view, and the look on Nikolay’s face stopped me where I stood.

Relief.

Not polite surprise. Not aristocratic control. Relief so naked it stripped him of every polished defense I had ever hated in him. He looked like a man who had been holding his breath for hours and had only just now discovered air still existed.

“Maddie—”

I crossed the foyer before he could say anything else and walked straight into his arms.

He caught me with a sound low in his throat that might have been my name or prayer or both. One arm banded around my back hard enough to tell me exactly how frightened he had been. The other came up behind my head. For one second I pressed my face into his coat and breathed him in—cold air, city night, some dark, clean cologne already half overtaken by the scent of him underneath—and all the wild, frantic edges in me broke at once.

He pulled back fast, too fast for tenderness to have much dignity in it, and gripped my shoulders.

“Did they do something to you?” His eyes raked over my face, my throat, the line of my jacket, as if he expected damage to reveal itself if he looked hard enough. “Are you hurt?”

I shook my head, but the motion caught on a sob I had not authorized. “No.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“I am.” My voice came out rough and thin. “No. They didn’t—” I swallowed hard. “I’m not hurt.”

His hands tightened once, then eased as though he had remembered I was flesh and not some fragile thing fear entitled him to bruise. His gaze kept moving anyway, searching me.

“I just had to see you,” I said.

That got him to still.

The foyer seemed too large suddenly. Too bright in the first rise of morning. The old house held itself around us in pale stone and carved wood and expensive quiet, and none of it mattered a bit compared to the fact that Nikolay stood in front of me looking half-wild.