Page 116 of Nikolay

Curtains.

My own ragged breathing loud in the predawn hush.

I lay twisted in the bed, sheets damp and shoved down around my hips, one hand already at my throat before I had fully caught up to consciousness. My fingers found only skin.

No blood. No marks. No ache beyond the phantom one.

I stared at the ceiling, chest heaving, and pressed my fingertips harder to the exact spot where his mouth had been.

Only a dream.

The knowledge settled into me slowly and badly, bringing no relief with it at all.

Chapter 18

Maddie

Itook a shower hot enough to pink my skin and stood under it longer than necessary, hoping the water might wash the dream from my body. It did not. By the time I dressed and put my face together into something like composure, I had succeeded only in making myself presentable, not in making myself less aware of my own mouth, my own throat, or the dangerous fact that my sleeping mind had apparently decided to write vampire filth without my permission.

I had checked my neck twice in the mirror, anyway.

Nothing.

No mark. No evidence. Only my own face looking back at me with a kind of tired skepticism, as if even I was not impressed by my insistence that everything was fine. I pulled on jeans, a soft cream sweater, and boots, then braided my damp hair loosely over one shoulder because it gave my hands something to do besides touching my throat again.

I thought I’d text Nikolay just to check in. My phone was not on my nightstand. That part of the dream was accurate. Strange.

By the time I made it downstairs, the house had fully woken up.

Ironwood’s dining room had been claimed by those closest to the alpha, and the sound reached me before the doorway did—voices layered over voices, silverware against china, laughter breaking and reforming, chairs shifting over old wood floors. Warmth and coffee rolled out to meet me like a physical thing.

The long table was nearly full.

Fifteen, maybe a little more, spread down both sides in easy occupation: plates already in use, hands reaching across one another for baskets and preserves and little dishes of butter soft enough to melt at contact. Sage sat at the head. The chair to his right remained empty.

Held.

The moment I stepped through the doorway, his gaze lifted to me, and that slight nod confirmed what the untouched place setting had already implied. For some reason, that tiny gesture landed heavier than if he had stood and announced it. Everybody else had settled naturally. My place had been kept.

I became aware of the room’s attention only because it touched me and moved on again. Good mornings rose from every direction. Warm, casual, unforced. Someone near the center asked if I’d survived the run. Somebody else said of course I had. Didn’t I look offensively human for this hour? A third voice wanted to know whether Texas women all looked this put together before coffee or if I was setting an impossible standard on purpose.

I laughed, because it was easier than freezing in the doorway under all that friendliness.

“Y’all are generous,” I said, moving toward the open chair. “This is my face on low power.”

A few of them laughed. That helped.

I slid into the seat at Sage’s right and felt the social geometry of it immediately. Not romantic exactly. Not publicly, anyway. But significant. To his right at his own table meant favored, honored, marked out for notice. I told myself not to over-read. Then I over-read anyway because wolves always did.

“Good morning, Madelyn,” he inclined his head in a small nod.

He was dressed simply by his standards—dark knit sweater, sleeves pushed back once at the forearms, hair still slightly damp as if he had also come recently from a shower. He looked entirely too rested for a man who had run half the forest the night before.

“Morning.”

A mug appeared in front of me before I reached for one. Not from the staff—though they moved in and out of the room with that eerie, polished invisibility only very expensive households ever managed—but from Sage himself. He had already poured it. Steam lifted between us, fragrant and dark and rich enough to wake the Creator.

“Thank you,” I said, and wrapped both hands around the mug.