Page 98 of Nikolay

Loralee offered me the plate of little tarts. “Then you have to come back.”

I took one. “You say that now. Wait till you realize I’m annoying.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, smiling into her own glass, “we all realized that at dinner and invited you to stay, anyway.”

That got a laugh out of me and Sloan both.

Tristen wanted to know how Iron Valor handled full moon runs back home, and that opened the floor again. I told them about Bronc’s short pre-run speeches and the way somebody always ruined the solemnity on purpose. About open Texas land and stars so mean and bright they made you feel watched by God Himself. About cousins who never stopped trying to tackle each other in wolf form even after they were too grown to claim it was innocent. About the way food after a run in Dairyville usually involved enough smoked meat to put a cardiologist in the ground.

“Now that,” Moriah said, cutting into the chocolate cake with neat precision, “sounds like real civilization.”

I pointed at her with my fork. “See? Finally, a woman of breeding.”

“I have many hidden depths.”

“Most of them judgmental,” Sloan muttered from the rug.

Moriah lifted one shoulder. “Judgment is a service when performed accurately.”

I laughed again, softer this time, and reached for my wine.

The warmth of it spread through me quickly now. My body had spent itself hard in the forest and seemed intent on absorbing every comfort offered after. Fire at my front. Cushions under me. Sugar on my tongue. Wolves around me. The kind of ease I had wanted so badly I could have cried over it if the night had tilted one inch more sentimental than it already had.

And under all of that, something small and strange kept moving.

Not big enough to name. Not sharp enough to call alarm. More like a low hum beneath the warmth of the room. A note slightly off in a song too pleasant to stop listening to. Every time I almost caught it, somebody spoke, or laughter rose, or the wine softened my focus again.

Nikolay came back to me then, not in one clean image but in fragments.

Cream linen under my palms.

That first edition on my desk.

His thumb at the corner of my mouth taking lemon icing.

The absurd, tender insult of him tapping my nose like I was something that made him helpless enough to get silly in a foyer.

My chest tightened unexpectedly.

I lifted my glass and drank.

Across the table, Sage was still looking at me.

I smiled because not smiling would have meant explaining too much to myself, and the smile cost less in the moment.

Conversation rolled on. Somebody asked if the Kozlov estate really looked as old-world as rumor made it sound. I said yes and no, because rumor never quite captured how it felt to be inside a place built by a man who had expected permanence and largely gotten it. Someone else asked whether Obsidian truly had a basement casino where witches gambled spell-years, and I just looked at them over the rim of my glass and said, “What kind of employee would I be if I answered that directly?”

“An interesting one,” Moriah said.

“A brief one,” I replied.

The room liked that.

Then exhaustion hit me.

Not gradually. Not kindly. One second I was reaching for half a strawberry tart and the next it was as if some hidden lever inside me had been pulled all the way down. The drive, the social effort, the wine, the run—everything arrived in my muscles at once. My limbs went heavy. My eyelids suddenly seemed weighted. Even my teeth felt tired.

I blinked hard.