Page 142 of Nikolay

My legs felt wrong beneath me now. Heavy. Unreliable. Like somebody had quietly replaced my bones with wet sand while I stood there distracted by arguments. I tried to steady myself.

“No,” I said again, jaw setting around the word even as the ground seemed to tilt by a cruel little degree.

A pack member approached from the edge of the gathering and bent toward Sage’s shoulder. I didn’t catch the face. Only the murmur.

“Only about twenty minutes until dusk.”

Sage’s hand settled more firmly at the small of my back.

Relief hit me so suddenly it was almost dizzying. Good. Fine. Conversation over. Whatever bizarre philosophical ambush this had been, perhaps even they understood it had gone far enough.

He looked down at me with that same composed care he had used all weekend and said, “Come with me.”

I should have refused.

Instead, I let him guide me away because my body was lagging behind my judgment and because some desperate part of me wanted distance from Moriah’s eyes and the elders’ voices and the pressure in my skull. I thought he was taking me to sit down. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere I might get water or cold air or enough space to remember how my own thoughts sounded when nobody else was arranging them.

He led me off the main lawn and onto a narrower path that branched away from the fairy lights.

The difference was immediate.

Behind us, the quartet continued, but the music began to thin with distance. Laughter turned faint. The glow overhead diminished. Here the path was lined not with strings of golden bulbs but with iron torch stands burning orange-gold, their flames bending and lifting in the evening air. The trees pressed closer together on either side, the undergrowth darker, the earth beneath my slippers softer than the flagstone and packed gravel nearer the house.

“I care for you,” Sage said as we walked.

I kept my eyes on the path. It seemed wiser.

“I want to be with you.”

His voice was low and intimate, as if he were offering rather than declaring.

I tried to pull my arm free enough to create space between us. He did not tighten his grip noticeably, but I also did not get free.

“I know,” he said, “truly know, that you want to be with me as well.”

My mouth went dry. “No.”

“You do.”

“No.”

“I have a way to make that happen.”

Those words reached me through the fog like a bell struck underwater.

The clearing appeared ahead.

Torchlight ringed it in a rough circle, tall iron stands driven into the earth, flames lifting and shuddering so that the whole place seemed to breathe in orange and gold. At its center sat a large, flat stone altar waist-high and broad enough for a body. Symbols had been carved into its surface and sides—deep-cut lines I did not recognize, old and deliberate and wrong enough that my wolf recoiled before my mind caught up.

I stopped walking.

Every instinct I had left rose all at once, too late and fierce enough to hurt.

“No.”

The word came out thicker than I intended, dragged through the heaviness in my tongue.

Sage turned to me fully then. His face in torchlight looked not demonic, not wild, but worse: sane. Convinced. Tender in the way fanatics often were when they had decided harm counted as mercy.