Page 74 of Nikolay

A smear of white lemon icing sat at the corner of her mouth.

My entire body made the situation worse immediately. I wanted—Goddess; I wanted—to bend and lick it off her lip like a man with no ancestry, no title, and no self-preservation.

Instead, I reached out.

The pad of my thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, catching the icing in one smooth pass. Her breath caught so softly I might not have heard it if I had been anything but what I was. My own pulse answered with one hard beat.

I brought my thumb to my mouth.

Lemon. Sugar. Butter. The faintest trace of her skin.

“Mmm,” I said, because apparently degradation still had further floors available to it. “Got a delivery from Aspen?”

Maddie swallowed.

The movement of her throat did unspeakable things to my concentration.

She nodded once, slowly, then lifted her free hand to tug one earbud out. The other followed and came to rest around her neck, the thin wire crossing the front of that obscene hoodie. Tinny music still whispered from them between us, too faint to identify but bright enough to sound young and alive in the graveyard dignity of the foyer.

“Yeah,” she said.

Her voice had gone a little huskier than usual.

So had mine, I suspected.

For a moment, neither of us moved. Late sunlight stood around us in golden pillars. The marble beneath our feet held the cooling day. The entire house seemed to pause and listen with vulgar interest.

I looked at her properly then.

Not at the icing. Not at the words across her chest, though those were difficult to ignore. At her face. At the wary softness there. At the possibility she had not yet armored because I had surprised her before she could.

The run.

I had come downstairs prepared to leave for Obsidian and spend the journey there composing a speech I likely would never deliver. Some elegant thing about being careful, about not letting men like Sage mistake attention for entitlement, about wolves and distance and trust. Standing in front of her now, with lemon on my tongue and the ridiculous sweetness of her domestic little interruption still all over the air, every clever phrase died the death it deserved.

So I told the truth in the simplest form available to me.

“Be safe,” I said quietly. “And have fun at the run.”

The words seemed to alter her expression by degrees I could not fully catalogue before they were gone. Surprise first. Then caution. Then something softer and sadder and more hopeful than I had earned. She searched my face as if expecting the cruelty to arrive belatedly and discovering, perhaps, that it did not.

“Okay,” she said.

A pause.

“Thank you.”

There are sentences that sound small and are not. That was one.

I should have left then. Any wise man would have. The moment had already approached dangerous levels of tenderness for a foyer where portraits of my dead ancestors could practically lean from the walls and judge. But wisdom had not been leading my interactions with Maddie for some time, and what happened next proved that in terms I may never entirely recover from.

I lifted one finger.

And booped her on the nose.

Lightly. Once. The gentlest absurd touch to the tip of it.

Her eyes widened.