Page 49 of Nikolay

The corridor went quiet around the sentence.

Not truly quiet, of course. The ventilation still hummed. The club still throbbed somewhere beyond the walls. But there are moments when truth leaves your mouth and the world seems to pause long enough to hear whether you mean it.

I meant it.

Maybe because I came from Iron Valor where fate had quit behaving in tidy species lines a while back. Maybe because I had seen too much now to pretend bonds were accidents or social conveniences. Maybe because if I stopped believing that much, then what was left for me besides humiliation and appetite and a prince who could not make himself want me out loud?

Sloan’s face changed a little as she absorbed it. Not defensive. Not resistant. Just thoughtful.

Then she nodded.

“You’re right,” she said quietly. “The Goddess’s plans aren’t mine to question.”

Some of the tension left my shoulders on a breath I had not realized I was holding. Just enough to register.

She took one slow step closer, not invading, only re-entering the conversation with more care than before.

“I didn’t mean fate can’t be real,” she said. “I meant people make a mess of it.”

“Well,” I let out a dry little laugh with no humor in it. “There’s a groundbreaking observation.”

That got the smallest smile out of her.

“I know.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I just... I’ve seen bonds go badly when one party fights them. That’s all.”

Something in the way she said it made my stomach tighten.

“What do you mean?”

Sloan studied me for a second, as if deciding whether to continue. Then, because wolves as a species had apparently never found a door they didn’t at least test, she did.

“There’s a ritual,” she said. “A mate-bond ritual. If a rejected mate wants to have a mate bond with another. It can be done so they can still have that connection with another.”

I went still.

The light overhead hummed on.

I had never heard those words in that order before. Ritual. Mate-bond. Rejected.

Sloan must have seen something come over my face because her voice softened another degree. “It just gives a rejected mate the chance at finding happiness after. It ends the pull of the mate that rejected them and allows a new bond to form with a new mate.”

She said it kindly. As mercy. As a thing offered to women who had been left holding too much pain in an empty heart.

I heard every word.

Eases it.

Ends the pull.

New mate.

My jaw tightened before I could stop it. Then came the blink I could not quite control, the breath held half a second too long before I let it out.

A ritual.

I should have felt relief.

Goddess knew I had complained enough, internally and otherwise, about how this bond sat in me like barbed wire warmed over a fire. The pull, the ache, the terrible, humiliating certainty of him. The way my body knew before my pride could intervene. The way every room changed shape when he entered it. A reasonable woman should have heard Sloan and thought thank the Goddess, there’s a way to blunt this thing before it guts me.