Page 84 of Nikolay

“You want me to give you a pretty lie,” he said, “you’ll need Father. He enjoys the paternal version of reassurance. Maksym will tell you to stop looking tragic and go lift something heavy. Taras will ask six questions you do not wish to answer and then produce a solution you like even less, and Lucia—well—you’d be better off not hearing her opinion at all.”

I should have smiled. I nearly did. It faded before it formed.

Bohdan saw that too.

“Well?” he asked.

I looked at him, at the sharp line of his face gone unguarded by performance, and discovered that the difficulty of speaking had less to do with not knowing what I felt than with the humiliation of saying it aloud.

“I cannot seem to think about anything else,” I said at last.

Bohdan’s expression did not change. “Maddie.”

Not a question.

“Yes.”

He waited.

That was the infuriatingly useful thing about my brother when he was not being impossible. He knew how to leave silence where it would do the most work. No pressure. No interruption. Only room in which one either lied or continued.

I continued.

“At first, I believed I could categorize it.” My eyes dropped briefly to the grain of his desk, then lifted again. “The bond. Instinct. Species friction. Vanity wounded by circumstances. Any number of explanations that would have allowed me to keep a measure of distance between myself and what was happening.”

Bohdan said nothing.

“I no longer think distance is available to me,” I said.

He remained still, but some minute alertness entered him then, not surprise exactly, only focus sharpened by gravity.

“I know what mate-pull feels like,” I went on. “Or thought I did. Attraction with divine architecture beneath it. Hunger. Compulsion. Curiosity one cannot safely indulge and cannot altogether deny.” I let out a breath that wanted to become a laugh and failed. “This is worse.”

One eyebrow rose slightly. “Worse?”

“Yes.” I leaned back and scrubbed one hand over my beard. “Because the bond is one thing. It can be discussed like weather if one is sufficiently detached. What concerns me is that I am not detached at all. I think about whether she has eaten. Whether she is lonely in a room full of people. Whether she is laughing when I am not there to hear it. I buy her rare books because I want the look on her face more than I want the object itself. I see something absurd in a bakery window and think, immediately, of her mouth. I hear baseball mentioned and find myself wanting whole summers I do not even like merely because she does.”

The words had begun with discipline. They did not remain there.

My voice lowered of its own accord.

“And when she hurts, even by my own hand, I feel it as though something inside me has been cut open.”

Bohdan’s posture changed by increments so subtle another man might not have marked them. He set his glass aside entirely. He leaned back farther, yes, but the line of his shoulders loosened. The office seemed to lose some of its hard edges with that small movement alone.

I looked away from him toward the bookshelves because what came next sat too close to the center of me.

“This is not only the Goddess,” I said quietly. “That is the truth of it. The bond may have opened the door, but what has entered is my own. It has grown its own roots. I...” The word caught once on old habit and pride. I despised both. “I have feelings for her. Real ones. Not catalogued, not dismissed, not negotiable. Real.”

Silence followed.

No smirk.

No elegant little cruelty dressed as brotherly teasing.

Just quiet.

When I looked back at him, whatever habitual wit he had been born with remained set carefully aside.