Page 107 of Nikolay

Amelia did not soften it. “Full success. Subject survives. Original bond destroyed. Replacement bond takes.”

The bond in my chest twisted again, and this time I knew with cold certainty that what I was feeling was not mere distance, not ordinary distress, not a lover’s fear inflating coincidence into omen. Something had already begun to shift around Maddie. Preparation, perhaps. Proximity. Ritual materials assembled. The world leaning toward a crime.

“When?” I said.

Amelia looked at the final sheet, where the moon had been charted through phases in precise black arcs.

“The rite must be performed on the Black Harvest Moon,” she said. “Once every fifty years, the year’s second Harvest Moon coincides with a total lunar eclipse. Silver to red to black and back again. The severance must be completed while the moon is black.”

Father’s eyes went glacial. “When?”

“In one day.”

There it was. The shape of the urgency. The reason for the silence. The covens. The pressure. Sage Lynch had not merely developed an interest in my mate. He had found a clock and intended to lay her body across its mechanism.

“That is why his urgency has been building,” Amelia said. “He found a witch willing to perform a rite no decent coven would touch now, one so old most people have forgotten it exists. The mortality rate was catastrophic. That is why it was outlawed.”

Devon’s hand found Father’s arm again. He covered it with his own, but his stare remained fixed on the documents spread before us. His expression did not change. Only his eyes did, bleaching toward the color of a winter sky before a storm broke loose over dead fields.

I straightened slowly, every muscle in my body drawing taut enough to sing.

“What,” I asked, my voice low and flat enough to frighten even myself, “are we going to do?”

Father answered my question the way he answered most meaningful ones—not with reassurance, but with movement. He reached for the secure line on the corner of his desk and slid it toward me across old wood scarred by a century of decisions, his gaze never leaving my face.

“You call Bronc,” he said. “Now.”

I took the phone at once. There were moments in life where dread and relief became indistinguishable from each other. This was one. I had no wish to explain myself to Liam Baucaum under ideal circumstances. Telling a Texas alpha that his younger sister had become fate-bound to a vampire prince was not an exercise I would have chosen sober, rested, and unafraid. Doing it now, while convinced she stood in the path of ritual murder, felt almost merciful by comparison. At least everything ugly would be visible at once.

I keyed in the number from memory.

It rang twice.

Then, “Baucaum.”

No greeting. No warmth. His deep voice carried the rough edge of interrupted sleep and the immediate attention of a man who expected bad news whenever a call came before sunrise.

“Bronc, it’s Nikolay.”

A beat.

“All right,” he said, more alert now. “What’s wrong?”

I looked down once at the copied parchments spread over my father’s desk and made myself proceed in the order he needed, not the order my panic preferred.

“Maddie is in Ironwood Pack territory,” I said. “Her phone is unreachable. My efforts to contact the alpha Sage Lynch or anyone within the territory have gone unanswered. We have just received credible intelligence that Lynch intends to perform an outlawed ritual on the Black Harvest Moon in less than 24 hours.”

Silence.

Not disbelief. Calculation. The disciplined silence of a commander assembling facts into threat.

I went on. “The ritual is designed to sever an existing mate bond and force a new one. It carries catastrophic mortality. We believe Maddie is the intended subject.”

The line remained quiet long enough that I checked the screen to ensure the connection had not dropped.

“Bronc?”

“I’m here,” he said.