Page 50 of Nikolay

Instead, the thought that rose in me was immediate and fierce enough to feel almost violent.

I don’t want that.

The certainty of it startled me.

I did not want to end the pull. I did not want to ease the ache.

What I wanted was so much worse.

I wanted Nikolay to want me.

Not a workaround. Not a mercy. Not some magical arrangement that would make it easier to live near him without my insides dragging on the floor. Him. I wanted him to look at me and stop resisting whatever truth sat between us. I wanted to be chosen in daylight, in language, in front of the Goddess and anybody else stupid enough to have opinions. I wanted his wanting without apology in it.

And there it was. The ugliest need in me stripped down to the bone.

I wanted to be chosen.

Not tolerated. Not managed. Not soothed into acceptance. Chosen.

The realization hit my chest like something dropped from a great height, hard enough to ring through me. For one brief second, I could almost feel the shape of the bruise it would leave.

Sloan was still talking, gently now, maybe explaining who performed the ritual, or how uncommon it was, or that she only mentioned it because some people found comfort in having options. I could not have repeated the words if my life depended on it. They slid around the louder truth inside me and never found purchase.

Because all at once the corridor felt too bright.

The warmth of the pack lounge had already begun fading from my skin, leaving behind the memory of it rather than the thing itself. Amber light replaced by fluorescent wash. Easy laughter replaced by ventilation and scuffed floors. A body could get comfort in intervals, apparently. Could borrow belonging for two hours and still end the night right back where she started—holding a truth she had not wanted named.

Sloan finally fell quiet.

I looked at her and found kindness there. Real kindness. No agenda. No smugness over having offered me some practical answer to an impractical wound. If anything, she looked sorry she’d had to say it.

“Thank you,” I said, and heard at once how strange my voice sounded. Too even. Too careful. The voice of a woman balancing a glass thing in both hands and pretending she wasn’t afraid of dropping it.

She searched my face. “You okay?”

No.

“I’m fine,” I said, because women had been lying with that sentence since language began, and I saw no reason to abandon tradition now.

Sloan did not call bullshit this time. Maybe because she could smell how useless it would be. Maybe because wolves knew there were some truths a body had to turn over alone before it could survive anybody else touching them.

She only nodded once.

“All right.”

We stood there a second longer in the ugly white light, two wolves in the back veins of a vampire club, with the music of other people’s pleasures moving through the walls and no help in any of it.

Then Sloan touched my arm, brief and solid, and moved on down the corridor toward the staff exit.

I stayed where I was.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The industrial cleaner bit at the air beneath the club’s sweeter scents. Somewhere beyond the concrete and steel, Obsidian kept selling pleasure to creatures with more money than peace.

And I stood in the middle of that bare corridor with the warmth of the pack lounge fading from my skin and the truth sitting heavy in my chest like a cost I had only just understood.

I did not want relief.

I wanted him.