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I take a sip of coffee. I wait.
“The mate bond doesn’t create feelings from nothing. It can’t. The biology doesn’t work that way. The bond is an amplifier, not a generator. It takes what exists and increases the signal. If there’s nothing there, the bond produces discomfort, not attraction. A wolf who tries to bond with someone who isn’t a genuine match experiences rejection at the biological level. Nausea, pain, revulsion. The bond doesn’t let you force a connection that isn’t real.”
“So what you’re saying is that what I feel for Dominic is real.”
“What I’m saying is that the feelings underneath it are real. The intensity was amplified. But the thing being amplified, the attraction, the connection, the love, if that’s what it is, those were yours. They were always yours. The bond just turned up the volume.”
I stare at my coffee. The steam is rising in thin curls and the warmth of the cup against my palms grounds me for the first time since I left the penthouse.
“He should have told me,” I say. “About the bond. About my father. About all of it.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t he?”
Katya is quiet for a moment. She sets her coffee down and looks at me.
“I can’t answer that. But for what it’s worth, he did give you a choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“He let you leave.”
“It’s the bare minimum.”
“For a human man, yes. For a mated alpha whose mate is walking away from him in distress, it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done. The bond would have been screaming at him to come after you. Every instinct he has was telling him to close the distance, to calm you down. He overrode all of it because you asked him to.” She pauses. “That’s not an excuse either. But it’s data. And I know you like data.”
Something dangerously close to a smile pulls at my lips before I stop it. The expression flickers and dies, but Katya sees it and her face softens.
She stands. She finishes her coffee. “I can’t tell you whether you should forgive him. But I can tell you the bond is real, his feelings are real, and yours are yours. What you do with that is your decision.”
She walks to the door.
“Katya.”
She turns.
“Thank you.”
She leaves. I sit on my bed in my cold apartment with an empty coffee cup and a notebook full of my dead father’s secrets and I think about what she said.
The volume was wrong. The feeling was right.
I think about my father’s notebook. About the final entries, the ones where he described the Voronovs not as monsters but as guardians. Protectors. A family whose violence was structural rather than sadistic, who held their territory and their people with a fierceness that he found admirable even as it terrified him. My father didn’t hate them. Even at the end, even knowing what they were and suspecting what Viktor would do, he didn’t hate them. He loved them the way you love something dangerous that has shown you its best self. With open eyes and an acceptance of risk.
I’m my father’s daughter. He taught me to notice everything. He taught me to see what doesn’t fit. But he also taught me something else, something I’ve been overlooking in the midst of all this data collection and pattern recognition.
My father saw them clearly. That’s what I’ve been missing.
He knew they were dangerous. He knew they were violent. Eventually, he knew they weren’t even human. And none of that erased the loyalty, protection, friendship, and love he’d witnessed for fifteen years.
He didn’t stay because he thought they were good. He stayed because people can be more than one thing.
So can Dominic.
I touch the silver scar on my neck. The warmth pulses. Somewhere across the city, I feel his heartbeat skip.
I’m not ready to go back. Not yet. But the anger is cooling, degree by degree, and underneath it the love is still there, steady and patient, waiting for me to decide whether it’s enough.
