Page 26 of Nikolay

Clearly, Lucia had heard it all. And yes. She had done precisely that. Calmly. Without theatrics. She had not called me names. She had not resorted to pack temper or wounded pleading or any of the foolish scenes my prejudice had perhaps half expected. She had made an argument. Worse, she had made the right one.

I bowed my head over my clasped hands and stared at the carpet between my shoes. Burgundy and gold. Intricate pattern. Irrelevant.

Lucia let the silence sit until it had nowhere left to go.

Then she said, with brutal plainness, “Your buttoned-up, bloodline-obsessed ass is exactly why the Goddess, if she has indeed chosen Maddie as your mate, chose her.”

I looked up at that.

Lucia’s face was entirely serious.

“You need every single quality you have spent weeks treating as deficiency,” she said. “You need warmth. You need laughter. You need somebody who sees people before position. You need somebody who will not bow to your pedigree and call it virtue. You need to be pulled out of yourself, Nikolay, before you calcify into one more elegant relic carrying our family name like a coffin.”

Nothing in me rose to defend myself. That frightened me more than if I had argued.

The fire gave a low pop and settled.

I stared into it because I could not bear the full clarity of my sister’s eyes another moment. In the moving orange beneath the grate, I found again the inventory I had refused to keep honestly. Maddie on the club floor, competent and alive in a room designed to devour the uncertain. Maddie’s books spread around her like a map of hidden countries. Maddie answering insult with precision. Maddie making the estate staff smile. Maddie needling me because she saw, perhaps, even before I did, that I had made her the receptacle for everything in me now cracking under strain.

And beneath all of it, the older, more terrible truth: I had wanted her before I respected her, and in some foul chamber of my own pride had considered that the greater injury. As though desire were the indignity and not my refusal to see the woman who inspired it.

Lucia rose.

The soft whisper of her skirt against the chair sounded extraordinarily final.

I looked up. She smoothed one hand down the front of the garment, restoring lines that had never truly been disordered, and regarded me with something less severe than before but no more comforting.

She did not offer absolution. Lucia was too honest for that.

Instead, she said only, “Sit with it.”

Then she turned and crossed the room. The burgundy walls swallowed the movement of her black-clad form almost as soon as she reached the door. She left without another glance, and the latch closed behind her with the discretion of old money and ancient houses.

I remained where I was, elbows on my knees, hands clasped, and stared into the low fire until the flames blurred.

For once in my life, there was no one to negotiate with. No temper to defuse, no treaty to draft, no opposing will to charm into reason. Only myself, and the increasingly unbearable evidence that I had behaved like a fool of the most polished and unforgivable sort.

By the time I returned to Obsidian, the night had thickened into the sort of velvet corruption my brother sold with such exquisite discipline, and I sat in my third-floor office like a man pretending architecture might impose order on blood. A glass of Bordeaux breathed untouched beside my hand. Beyond the one-way wall, the club unfurled beneath me in purple shadow and amber warmth, all appetite under rules, while my own remained neither sated nor governable.

The office was dim except for the green-shaded lamp on my desk and the low architectural lighting that left the bookshelves in stately half-shadow. Leather, walnut, old paper, wine. Under it all, the subtler current of Obsidian rose through the walls themselves: sandalwood, amber, clean skin, sex held in containment, blood somewhere below stairs and carefully sanctioned. The bass from the main floor traveled up through steel and stone until it lived in the soles of my shoes, a low pulse I could not quite forget.

I had been pretending to read a report for twenty minutes.

Perhaps thirty.

The page before me had not changed in content once during that interval. My eyes moved. My mind did not. It remained in a bedchamber at the estate with books on the floor and a wolf from Texas telling me exactly what kind of man I had been.

I reached for the wine, then stopped with my fingers just brushing the stem.

No, I did not want dulled edges. I wanted them gone entirely, and wine had never solved hunger of this sort.

I leaned back in my chair and looked through the glass instead.

Obsidian was in full motion tonight. The main floor shimmered under its twilight-purple lighting, black leather seating arranged in intimate crescents, crystal catching light at the bar in hard little flashes. Supernaturals drifted through the space with the layered elegance of predators at leisure. A pair of witches occupied a low table near the east wall, both in severe black, one gesturing with a hand jeweled enough to finance a small republic. Near the stage, a vampire patron leaned over the back of a banquette, speaking too closely into the ear of a willing donor whose obsidian pendant rested bright against her throat. On the far side, one of Kyra’s bartenders poured a stream of champagne that frothed pale gold in the dim.

Desire moved through the room as currency.

Normally I could sit above it and read the currents with detached clarity. Tonight each pulse of the floor seemed only to remind me of my own unsatisfied state.