Page 27 of Nikolay

I had not fed properly in weeks.

The realization had ceased to be abstract and had become anatomical. It sat behind my eyes like pressure before a storm, in the hinge of my jaw, in the shallow irritability of every sense sharpened past comfort. I had taken enough here and there to maintain function. A polite sip in a private room with a regular donor. A measured glass in one of the feeding chambers. Maintenance, not indulgence. Certainly not pleasure.

Because every time I approached a throat, some treacherous part of me compared what rose from it to the scent I could not have. Every time I tasted blood, I was struck by the absence of cedar, wildflower, warm skin, wolf.

I despised myself for that.

On the desk to my right lay the staff schedule for the evening.

I had already checked it twice.

Madelyn Baucaum was not on it tonight.

The fact should not have mattered beyond logistics. It mattered. I had told myself it mattered because it meant the floor would proceed with no risk of another confrontation. Because it afforded me a clean environment in which to regulate myself. Because one cannot assess a problem accurately while the problem is physically present and wearing leather.

All of that was very reasonable.

None of it was the entire truth.

The truth was that I had looked for her name first.

I pushed back from the desk and stood. The movement sent a small wave of stiffness through my shoulders. Hunger. Tension. Too many nights with inadequate rest and too much thought. I crossed to the liquor cabinet, opened it, stared at the array of crystal and dark glass, then shut it again untouched.

A willing donor, I thought. Perhaps something more. Not a booked room. Nothing official. No arrangement requiring follow-up or memory. Just enough blood, enough distraction, enough body and scent and pressure to remind my own treacherous system that it had not been reduced to one impossible woman.

I had done such things before. More than once. Women of excellent breeding and strategic value. Women of beauty and intelligence, whose names opened doors or soothed tensions between houses. Women who understood exactly the boundaries of a liaison and never confused appetite with claim. Attraction had always been manageable when paired with propriety.

That thought, in its bitter comedy, nearly made me laugh.

Still, logic remained preferable to paralysis. I could either continue sitting in my office like an austere fool while Obsidian breathed temptation through the walls, or I could prove to myself that blood remained blood, that a beautiful woman remained a beautiful woman, that my body had not become wholly colonized by fate.

I went to the door, then paused and returned only long enough to glance once more at the schedule.

No Maddie.

Good.

I left the office.

The descent from the third floor into the main body of the club always felt a little like entering a current one could observe from shore but not fully understand until submerged. Warmth increased by degrees. Music pressed closer. The scent-thick air of Obsidian wrapped itself around me with expert hands. By the time I reached the main floor, the crowd had already begun its usual subtle accommodation of my presence. Conversations did not stop, not exactly; they altered. Paths opened a fraction before me. Gazes dipped or held depending on rank and nerve.

I let my own travel over the room with deliberate purpose.

And found her immediately.

Not Maddie.

The woman stood near the second bar beneath a hanging lamp whose low gold light turned her silk dress almost liquid. Champagne-colored satin clung to a tall, elegant frame without vulgarity. Her hair had been drawn into a high, sleek ponytail that laid bare the clean line of her neck and the pale, aristocratic grace of her profile. She held a coupe glass by the stem with one hand and listened to the man beside her with the exquisite boredom of a person raised too well to interrupt and too honest to feign delight. Everything about her suggested old houses, old money, old rules obeyed because they had long ago become instinct.

The architectural opposite of Maddie.

No curves arranged by God and Texas appetite. No boots, no rough-edged humor, no warmth spilling past the boundaries of self-protection. This woman was all control, pale composure, a column rather than a flame.

Once, I would have called that ideal.

I crossed the floor toward her. The crowd parted around me with the accustomed fluidity of people who knew precisely who I was and what I represented under this roof. She saw me coming before I was close enough to speak. A faint shift altered her expression, interest replacing boredom. Her gaze dropped to the line of my jacket, rose to my face, and lingered there with an appraisal subtle enough to count as manners.

“Monsieur,” she said when I stopped before her.