Page 108 of Nikolay

His tone had changed. Whatever else he thought of me, whatever species-based disgust or justified suspicion he might carry, those had been pushed aside by the much more primal fact that someone meant harm to his sister.

“Who is the existing mate?” he asked.

There was no clean way to say it. No strategic phrasing that made the truth less volatile.

“I am.”

Nothing.

Then a measured inhale, so faint another man might have missed it.

When he finally spoke, every word came clipped and hard enough to draw blood. “You are telling me my baby sister is mated to a vampire prince.”

“Yes.”

“While she is trapped on the territory of some wolf bastard who wants to carve that bond out of her soul.”

“Yes.”

Another silence. This one shorter, hotter. I could nearly see him standing somewhere in Texas with one hand braced on a wall, blue eyes gone glacial, every protective instinct in him sharpening to a point.

“When,” he said at last, “were you planning to share that information with me, Prince? Before or after hell froze over?”

Under any other circumstances, I might have deserved the full force of his contempt. As it was, I merely absorbed it.

“As soon as I stopped being a coward,” I said.

Devon looked at me then. Father did not, which was perhaps his version of mercy.

Bronc gave a short sound with no humor in it. “Well, hell. At least you can diagnose the condition.”

I closed my eyes briefly. “I know how this sounds.”

“It sounds like I ought to break your jaw the moment I see you.”

“That can be arranged,” I said. “Preferably after we get her back.”

That bought me a breath of silence, and in it, I sensed the shape of his decision. He did not like me. He did not like this. He very likely disliked half the world on principle in that moment. But he loved Maddie more than his own comfort, more than his outrage, more than whatever neat order he might have preferred his family history to keep.

“What do you know about the ritual?” he asked.

I gave him the compressed version. Soul severance. Restraints. Mortality. Black Harvest Moon. Ancient coven involvement. As I spoke, his breathing grew quieter rather than louder. The most dangerous men I had ever known did not shout when the stakes became personal. They became very still and very precise.

By the end, when I said the death rate aloud, the line went silent again.

Then Bronc said, in a voice stripped clean of everything but command, “Who else knows?”

“My father. Devon. Amelia. Bohdan will know within minutes if he doesn’t already. I am certain Lucia will sense that something is wrong the moment she looks at me.”

“Good.” A beat. “I’m waking my people now. We’ll be on the Iron Valor jet within thirty minutes.”

Relief and terror hit me together hard enough to leave me briefly hollow. “How long?”

“Under two hours to Philly if the pilot values his life.”

That sounded very much like Bronc.

“You’ll have full access to the estate,” I said. “And to anything we have.”