Page 143 of Nikolay

“It will be alright,” he said.

Not like this, I wanted to say cleanly. What came out was, “No. I don’t want thish.”

I tried to step back.

Before I could manage more than the thought of retreat, he bent, lifted me clean off my feet, and laid me on the stone.

The shock of it ripped a sound from me. The altar was cold even through the gown. My skirt spilled around me in useless white excess. I shoved at his chest with both hands and tried to twist sideways, to kick, to do anything that resembled the body I knew how to use. Nothing answered properly. My arms had strength enough only to protest, not to fight. My legs felt delayed, sluggish, treacherous. Panic poured through the gaps where coordination ought to have been.

“Stop—”

Hands appeared from beyond the torchlight. Not faces. Hands. More than one set. They caught my wrists and my ankles. Leather bit skin.

“No, no, stop—”

I thrashed as best I could, which was hardly at all. The bindings were fast, practiced. By the time I tried to wrench my right hand free, it had already been strapped down. Then the left. Then my ankles were pulled apart and secured.

The realization hit in sick stages. This had been planned. Not merely by him. By others. The circle of elders. The wine. The path. The timing. The whole beautiful evening narrowing to this stone beneath my spine.

“Please,” I said, and heard my voice crack and slur. “Please don’t do thish.”

Sage stood over me, one hand braced on the altar beside my hip, his expression still agonizingly calm.

The torchlight made everything look ceremonial enough to lie.

I dragged in air and screamed because politeness had clearly become irrelevant.

“Nikolay!”

His name tore out of me and flew up into the torch-lit dark like a flare.

Sage’s open hand connected with my cheek so sharply that for one white instant the world disappeared into the impact.

My head snapped sideways against the stone. Heat flooded my skin where he had struck me. My ear rang. I tasted metal.

“Do not,” he said, every syllable clipped with sudden fury, “call that bloodsucker’s name in this sacred wolf space.”

I went very still.

Not because I had surrendered. Because shock pinned me there more effectively than the leather for one stunned heartbeat. My cheek burned. My eyes watered from the sheer force of the blow. Above me, the torch flames moved in wavering orange spears. Around me, I sensed bodies more than saw them, shadows arranged at the perimeter of the ritual like witnesses who had decided not to be human tonight.

And somewhere through the fear and the pain and the hard, dead cold of the stone under my back, another realization settled over me with genuine horror.

I was inside Ironwood territory.

Warded.

Whatever protections Sage had put around this place, whatever anti-vampire, anti-compulsion, anti-intrusion work had been sunk into its bones, Nikolay could not simply feel where I was and come. Not cleanly. Not quickly. Not through this.

The thought opened a hollow in me so deep I nearly choked on it.

Then something yanked hard in the center of my chest.

Not physically. Not on the body bound to stone. Deeper. Inside the place where the mate bond lived strained and aching and wounded. It snapped taut with violent force, like a rope drawn all at once between two drowning people.

My breath caught.

He felt that.