Page 138 of Nikolay

Not glancing. Not noticing. Looking directly, steadily, with the kind of focus that made space itself feel briefly selected.

The men around him must have still been speaking, but I could not have said what about. My attention narrowed. His expression changed by only a degree—some private recognition passing over it, satisfaction or admiration or simple certainty—and then he extended his hand across the distance between us.

I stopped walking.

Sloan’s arm remained linked through mine for one more step before she felt me pause and followed my line of sight. Her mouth curved. “Well,” she murmured, not without mischief, “there’s your evening.”

I should have bristled.

Instead, I stood there with a glass of dark wine in my hand and that old bruise from Nikolay’s message throbbing somewhere under all the lace and gold. I thought of the blank little neutrality of I hope you have a good time. I thought of all the reaching I had done toward a man who made tenderness feel like a scarce export commodity. I thought of how tired I was of feeling ridiculous for wanting openly what someone else kept handling like a diplomatic problem.

If Nikolay didn’t care, then I had no reason to refuse a dance.

That was what I told myself.

It was a clean thought. Rational. Defensive.

Not, perhaps, wholly true.

I slid my arm free from Sloan’s and handed off my wine to the tray of a passing server. The crystal left my fingers reluctantly. The warmth it had poured into me remained.

“You’re smiling,” Sloan said.

“Mind your business.”

She laughed under her breath and gave me the slightest push between the shoulder blades.

I gathered a little of my skirt and walked toward him.

The crowd seemed to part without making a spectacle of doing so. A path opened. Music swelled. Fairy lights burned overhead like patient stars trapped under leaves. By the time I reached him, Sage’s hand was still extended, palm upward, waiting without demand.

I placed my hand in his.

His fingers closed around mine—warm, steady, precise.

“You look,” he said, and for the first time since I had known him, his polish appeared to fail him by half a breath, “extraordinary.”

That should have felt rehearsed. Perhaps it was. It landed anyway.

“Careful,” I said, because I needed some version of myself left standing inside all this. “I’m not equipped for compliments in this much fabric.”

“Then I’ll help.” His thumb brushed once over my knuckles. “Dance with me.”

I ought to have answered. Instead, he drew me gently forward, and somehow the absence of argument became assent.

He took me into his arms with easy confidence, one hand settling at my waist, the other holding mine as though we had done this before. We had not. Yet his body knew exactly how to guide mine, where to place me, how much pressure to use. The first step nearly caught me by surprise. The second found me following. By the third, he had me moving with him across the open stretch of flagstone as if the gown, the lights, the old music, and the warm dark wine had all conspired to make resistance look foolish.

The quartet’s song wound around us.

At the time, I was too busy trying not to be affected by how easily my body answered his.

He drew me through the measured turns of the music with one hand firm at my waist and the other holding mine at a distance that let the gown breathe between us. Then, as the quartet shifted into a lower, slower passage, he brought me closer.

“Do you feel it?” he asked.

I should have asked what he meant. Instead, I knew.

The grounds. The lights. The gathered pack. The age of the thing. The way the evening had been built to remind every wolf present that they belonged not merely to themselves but to something older and more feral and more devout than ordinary life permitted.