Page 152 of Nikolay

The whole night seemed to pause around that sentence.

Not because it was the loudest thing said. Because it was the truest. Because it reduced everything else—ceremony, ideology, rank, territory, custom—to what had actually happened. A man had struck a woman. A coward had harmed what was not his. A predator had mistaken possession for right.

Nikolay’s jaw flexed once.

“You touched another man’s mate,” he said. “There is no argument left after that.”

Sage lost whatever remained of his self-command.

The shift hit him like an explosion under the skin. One second he stood there in black and gold, handsome and hateful and certain of his own inevitability. The next, bone broke, muscle tore and reformed, cloth shredded, and a massive black wolf lunged across the clearing in a blur of snapping teeth and fury.

He never reached the altar.

Nikolay moved too fast for my drug-dulled eyes to fully hold.

Shadow seemed to rise around him and then collapse inward. A streak of black over black. The brutal flash of white fangs. A sound wet and final and horribly intimate. For one stunned heartbeat the two of them were one violent shape in the failing torchlight.

Then Sage’s body hit the ground.

The wolf form convulsed once. Twice.

Its throat was open.

Blood spread across the leaf-strewn earth in a dark rush, steaming faintly in the cold air. The black wolf’s jaws worked once around nothing, a ruined reflex, and then stilled.

It had happened so quickly that the clearing needed a second to understand its own new reality.

Sage Lynch was dead.

Then the treeline exploded.

Wolves crashed through from every side at once, and this time I knew them by scent, by shape, by the furious, terrible familiarity of home coming teeth-first through the dark.

Bronc, his great black-and-silver wolf slamming into an Ironwood male hard enough to send both of them rolling through torch-lit leaves. Wrecker hit another with a force that looked personal. Arsenal moved like military violence made flesh, precise and efficient even as fur rippled over him. Gunner came in low and brutal, all auburn-haired power and righteous rage. Big Papa’s tan wolf looked almost holy for the half second before he tore a snarling gray wolf off one of the altar guards. Doc was there too, bigger than any man had a right to be, the hybrid strength in him monstrous and exact.

The brawl was brief because it was never truly a battle.

Sage’s death had gutted the courage out of half his wolves. Some scattered immediately, breaking for the trees with panic on them. Others tried to fight and found out, quickly and at cost, that Iron Valor and the Kozlov line had not come to negotiate. One dropped flat to the ground in submission the instant Arsenal’s wolf pinned him. Another turned and ran straight into Wrecker, which was less a choice than a fatal misunderstanding of geography.

Around and behind it all, I caught glimpses of more impossible things. Lucia in motion with a blade bright in her hand. Amelia near the northern edge of the clearing, face set and pale, one palm still outstretched as if she had personally strangled the ritual to death. Aspen beside her, dark hair whipped loose, mouth moving around words I couldn’t hear. And Devon...

I blinked hard because for one half-hysterical second I thought the drug was making me see nonsense.

There was Devon in her angelic battle armor, face smeared with dirt and blood, moving along the edge of the clearing with an armful of joggers.

Just... joggers.

Dry. Ready. Like some fallen-angel quartermaster of indecency-prevention had taken one look at the inevitable wolf shifting and said, absolutely not! Nobody is standing around bare-assed on my watch.

The sight of it hit me so wrong and so right in the middle of everything that an ugly, wet laugh caught in my throat and turned into a sob.

Then Bronc was there, pulling on a pair of those damn joggers and wielding a dagger I assume he'd gotten from Devon as well.

Before I could say a word, leather was ripping. One wrist. The other. My ankles. His hands were big and shaking only a little as he got me loose.

The second I could move, I folded into him.

My brother caught me hard against his chest, one arm around my back, one hand cradling the back of my head with a tenderness that undid me more efficiently than panic ever had. I clutched his shoulders and cried into him like I were about five instead of grown enough to know better.