Page 139 of Nikolay

“Yes,” I said.

His hand spread slightly at my back, warm through the lace and silk. “This is what we are when we remember.”

The words slid through me with alarming ease. Because part of me understood them. Part of me, the wolf part, maybe, or the homesick part, or simply the part that had grown up in a pack and knew instinctively what collective ritual could do to the body, to the blood, to loneliness. We were not made only for bills and schedules and fluorescent-lit workdays. We were made for moonrise and chorus and the heat of our own kind around us. Even I knew that.

He turned me again. Fairy lights wheeled overhead.

“Our kind has survived because we remember the sacred weight of what we are,” he murmured. “The gift of it. The duty.”

Duty. Gift. Sacred. They were loaded words, but he spoke them with such grave ease that they seemed less like rhetoric than inherited truth.

I lifted my face enough to look at him. “That’s a lot to hang on one party.”

His mouth touched near a smile. “This isn’t a party.”

No, it wasn’t.

The warmth in my chest had deepened by then into something almost luxurious, a bodily softness that should have made me feel safer than I did. Underneath it, however, something continued to resist.

“The Black Harvest Moon honors what outlasts any single pack,” he said as he guided me through another turn. “What the Goddess set in motion before our family names meant anything.”

The mention of the Goddess caught on that resisting knot at once.

I thought of Nikolay, then in spite of everything. Of the bond between us, unwanted and undeniable both. Of how impossible it had seemed and how right it still felt somewhere I could not reason away. The thought came with pain in it, but even hurt had a clarifying edge if held honestly enough.

Sage’s gaze stayed on my face as if he could read the direction of my thoughts and intended to shepherd them elsewhere before they became inconvenient.

“Being a wolf is not lesser,” he said, so quietly I nearly thought I had imagined the specific emphasis. “Not something to apologize for. Not something another species should tolerate in us like a charming defect.”

I stiffened by a degree he absolutely felt.

His expression did not change.

There it was, then. Beneath the music and the lights, and the sanctity. Not an outright attack. Not yet. But the shape of it. The argument curling inside the celebration like smoke inside incense.

Before I could decide whether to push back or retreat into silence, he guided me toward the edge of the dance floor and then beyond it, still moving with me in time to the music, into a tighter circle of wolves gathered near one of the long linen-draped tables.

Moriah stood among them.

She wore deep burgundy, the color rich enough to seem almost black where shadow touched it, and the gown did nothing to soften the fact that she looked made of old bone-deep confidence and sharp appraisals. Her face was striking rather than gentle; her beauty carved on cleaner, harder lines than Sloan’s. She watched me the way some women assessed weather coming in off distant hills—interested, experienced, not easily impressed.

Beside her stood several elders, their elegance touched by age rather than diminished by it. Silver hair. Lined faces. Jewelry old enough to matter. The sort of people who had likely spent years being listened to and had therefore learned to speak softly.

Sage did not introduce me with flourish. He simply brought me into the circle as though I already belonged there and rested his hand lightly on my back.

“Maddie,” Moriah said.

There was no warmth in it, but neither was there overt hostility. Merely recognition, sharpened by judgment not yet stated aloud.

“Moriah.” I tried for composure and hoped it looked enough like grace.

A server appeared from nowhere with fresh wine. Of course, they did. Crystal touched crystal. Somebody exchanged a low remark about the eclipse timing. Another woman admired my gown in a tone that may have been sincere or may have been social strategy dressed prettily enough to pass. My empty hand acquired another glass before I quite recalled surrendering the first.

I took a swallow because refusing at that point would have made me conspicuous.

The dark wine moved through me like heat looking for weak places.

Conversation circled the festival at first. Harmlessly, if one did not listen too hard. The rarity of the eclipse. The age of the observance. The way the Black Harvest Moon occurred only every fifty years, and what that meant for those lucky or burdened enough to witness it. An older man with a grave face remarked that the Goddess gathered unfinished destinies on nights like this. A woman in emerald added that some paths were clarified beneath a darkened moon because ordinary daylight lied too often to the heart.