Page 44 of Nikolay

The admission came out quieter than anything I had yet said in the room.

“She may not,” my father replied.

No comfort. No false assurance. Merely fact.

Devon’s hand returned to my forearm. Her touch was feather-light and impossible to ignore.

“But truth is cleaner than fear,” she said. “Even when it hurts.”

I looked at her and found no naïveté there, only that stark, unornamented sincerity she carried like a blade too pure for most people’s handling. She had fallen from heaven without cause and still believed honesty mattered. I, who had spent centuries among courts and predators, found myself ashamed all over again.

The office fell quiet after that.

And I sat there in the middle of their silence, understanding with a clarity that felt very near terror, that every elegant delay available to me had run out.

Chapter 8

Maddie

By the time I was working my way around the curved booth saying goodnight, the back corner of the VIP lounge felt less like enemy territory and more like some expensive, wolf-shaped version of home. One of the women had already pulled me in close once and was doing it again because apparently one hug had not been sufficient, and I let her, laughing into the soft leather scent of her jacket while amber light slid across half-finished drinks and the bass from downstairs lived under our feet like a distant second heartbeat.

“Text Sloan next time you’re coming up,” she said, drawing back just enough to look at me. Her glossy dark hair had gone a little looser over the course of the night, one silver hoop catching the light when she tipped her head. “I like to know when I’m getting decent company.”

I snorted. “That is a real generous spin on a woman who nearly cried on your carpet two hours ago.”

Her mouth curved. “You didn’t cry on the carpet. You rallied. Important distinction.”

“Thank you for your scholarship on the matter.”

She squeezed my shoulders once and let me go.

The table behind us looked exactly the way a table looks when people had stopped performing for a room and simply occupied it. Half-finished drinks sat in little, uneven constellations across the lacquered surface—bourbon in heavy crystal, something clear over melting ice, one lipstick-marked coupe abandoned near a dish of spiced nuts nobody had touched in a while. A woman’s black leather jacket hung over the back of the booth like she had shrugged it off hours ago and trusted the world not to steal from her. One of the men had his suit jacket folded beside him because apparently even rich wolves got tired of tailored misery after enough whiskey. There was none of Obsidian’s careful erotic staging to this corner anymore. No polished seduction. No sense of appetite curated for spectators.

The rest of the club still breathed around us in that elegant, restrained way it had—purple-tinted light, velvet shadows, crystal and skin and expensive vice under rules—but back here the edges had softened. Bodies sprawled the way only familiar bodies did. One man had his ankle hooked over his opposite knee in a posture Bronc would’ve called disrespectful in any boardroom and completely acceptable among pack. The pale-eyed woman leaned half into the shoulder of the man nearest her when she laughed, and nobody treated it like a thing worth noticing. Their wealth sat on them differently than mine ever had growing up around Iron Valor money. Bronc and his officers had wealth, sure, but they wore it with denim, boots, old trucks, and motorcycles rebuilt by hand in shop bays that smelled of oil and summer heat. Ironwood wore theirs in the cut of a suit, the watch under a cuff, the ease of people accustomed to private lounges and bottle service and compounds outside Philadelphia.

Bronc would have made fun of every one of them within ten minutes.

I think he also would have liked them.

That had been the strangest comfort of the night, maybe, realizing how much of pack survived polish. The shorthand was the same. The instinct to shove food or drink toward whoever sat nearest was the same. The way conversation moved with overlapping ease and nobody seemed precious about being interrupted was the same. Even the shape of authority was the same. Sage could sit quiet for a full five minutes and somehow still be the center gravity of the whole table, same as Bronc could in a meeting at the shop or around a fire out behind the clubhouse. An alpha’s silence had its own architecture. Good ones never needed to raise it into display.

And, Lord, I had laughed.

Not politely. Not the little social huff women learned to make when a room expected brightness from them. I had laughed from my ribs. Laughed hard enough once to press a hand to my stomach. Hard enough another time that the bearded wolf across from me had looked downright smug with himself for earning it. My shoulders had gone loose without asking my permission. Somewhere in the second drink, and the third story, and the fourth smartass remark, my body had stopped bracing against the night.

I had not realized how exhausted I was by vigilance until it eased.

The second woman stood as I turned toward her. She was taller than me by a good half foot and smelled faintly of dark liquor and some expensive floral note threaded through wolf. She drew me in close without hesitation, one hand landing between my shoulder blades in a warm, solid pat that made the gesture feel more sisterly than delicate.

“You come upstairs again, all right?” She said against my hair. “Sloan has decent instincts. If she likes you, you’re probably not terrible.”

I let out a laugh. “That may be the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all week.”

“Then your week sucked.”

“You have no idea.”

She pulled back with a look that said she suspected she had at least some idea, then gave my hand a squeeze and reclaimed her seat.