Page 120 of Nikolay

My head turned toward him too fast.

He did not flinch from the sharpness of it. If anything, he seemed to have expected exactly that.

“Yes, I suppose they can.”

His fingers rested loose around the stem of his glass. “They are the windows to our souls.”

I stared at him.

The line was almost absurdly loaded, and maybe that was why irritation rose quickly enough to steady me. “Please don’t presume that you know me,” I said. “Or know what’s best for me.”

He absorbed that without visible offense.

“I don’t presume to know all of you. No one could after so short an acquaintance.” His tone remained infuriatingly calm. “But I know stress. I know instinct. And I know that longing is not always wisdom merely because it feels profound.”

I folded my arms. “That sounded rehearsed.”

“It has had occasion to be useful.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “It’s perspective.”

The reasonable cadence of his was the problem. Had he raised his voice, pressed too hard, let ego or temper show, I could have shoved back cleanly. Instead, he sat there in firelight and early fall sun, composed as a priest with excellent tailoring, and gave every appearance of a man speaking from thoughtful concern rather than ambition.

“Sometimes,” he said, “dreams show us what we want most. Sometimes they show us what we are afraid to want. And sometimes—especially when we are already hurting—they show us the shape of a desire we know, somewhere underneath ourselves, would wound us further if indulged.”

I hated how much sense that made at first blush.

He watched me while I didn’t answer.

“There is pain already attached to this,” he said more quietly. “Whatever lies between you and him has not brought you peace.”

My jaw tightened. “That’s not all his fault.”

“Perhaps not.”

“And you don’t get to stand there,”—I corrected myself with a glance around the cabin—“sit there and explain my own heart to me.”

“No,” he said again, maddeningly unruffled. “But I may ask whether your heart has served you particularly well in this matter.”

The question landed harder because he framed it as one.

I looked away to the fire.

Nikolay had humiliated me. More than once. He had made me feel small, unwanted, ridiculous for hoping. He had also made French toast. Sent pastries. Chosen a book nobody else would have known enough to choose. Looked at me lately with a softness that made me feel dangerous things all over again.

And then there was the dream.

Goddess, the dream.

My face must have betrayed something because Sage’s voice gentled by a fraction. “I am not asking you to confess anything to me.”

“That’s generous.”

“It is practical.” He took a sip of wine. “A person often hears their own mind more clearly when they are not being pressed.”

There it was again. That maddening veneer of patience and respect that left me arguing not with force but with a man’s version of mercy. I did not trust it. I trusted even less that part of me which kept searching it for sincerity and occasionally finding some.