Page 157 of Nikolay

No one interrupted.

Bronc let the silence stretch one beat longer than necessary. Maybe two. Then he nodded once, reached for his glass, and took a drink.

It was not sentiment. It was not absolution.

It was acceptance of the terms as currently stated.

For Bronc, that was enormous.

The room exhaled around us.

Wrecker muttered, “Well, hell,” under his breath, and that, somehow, was enough to break the tension without insulting it.

Through it all, Nikolay remained a steady heat at my side.

When the meal finally loosened into smaller islands of talk rather than one shared table, he leaned toward me.

His voice dropped low enough that it became mine alone.

“I’d like to have that important discussion now,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

Important discussion.

The book.

The room.

Us.

My pulse skipped once.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

Together we left the dining room and climbed the stairs through the mansion’s hush. The upper hall was dimmer than below, lit by pools of amber along the walls, the old runner muffling our steps. My room waited at the end of the corridor with the door half-open and lamplight warm against the threshold.

I led him inside.

Then I closed the door behind us.

Chapter 24

Nikolay

The latch clicked behind us with a softness that did not match the violence of the day, and for one suspended moment I could only stand there and look at the room that had held so many traces of her before it ever held me.

Her books lined the shelves in uneven loyalties—some upright, some stacked, some opened and face-down in ways that would have offended me in anyone else and charmed me beyond reason in her. The desk sat near the lamp with its warm pool of amber light, and there lay the linen-wrapped first edition I had given her. To Kill a Mockingbird. A peace offering once. A confession, though I had not been honest enough then to call it one.

Now honesty stood between us with nowhere left to hide.

Maddie turned from the door and looked at me. Her hair had been loosed at some point after dinner, chestnut waves falling around her shoulders in lived-in disarray. The bruise on her cheek had faded to the last shadow of what it had been. Her mouth had healed thanks to her wolf healing. Her eyes were not bruised at all. Those were clear. Warm. Frightened, perhaps, in the way anyone might be frightened by joy after nearly being denied it. But clear.

Mine, said the bond with a possessive tenderness that no longer felt like a threat.

I breathed her in and felt my restraint tighten to a painful thing. Warm whiskey. Woman. Wolf. Something wild and sweet beneath it all that belonged only to her body and now lived inside my blood as intimately as my own breath. I had smelled fear on her, ritual smoke on her, another man’s violence on her. Standing in her room now and finding only her again very nearly unmanned me.

She took one step closer, then another.

“I dreamed of this,” she said.