Page 144 of Nikolay

Somewhere far away and impossibly near at once, Nikolay had felt exactly what I felt.

Chapter 22

Nikolay

The treeline held itself in that unnatural stillness which came just before bloodshed, when even wind seemed to understand it would soon be required to carry the smell away. Above Ironwood, the harvest moon barely visible in the dusk had barely begun to darken under the eclipse, silver being eaten slowly into red, and the world beneath it looked less like Pennsylvania than some older, harsher country where rites were paid for in bone and obedience.

I stood at the outer edge of the grounds with Maksym on one side of me and Taras on the other, all three of us facing down slope toward the hidden order of Sage Lynch’s estate. Ironwood did not advertise itself from this angle. The old trees thickened along the property border, their trunks placed with the sort of practical naturalism rich men loved because it looked accidental to lesser eyes. Beyond them, glimpses of stone and formal landscaping appeared and vanished between black branches. A low decorative garden wall ran along part of the border where the woods gave way to more cultivated ground, limestone carved with stylized knotwork and age-softened edges. Wards crawled over it like a second skin. I could not see them, not precisely, but my body knew they were there. My teeth hurt with them. The back of my tongue tasted metal.

Just behind us, my father waited in stillness so complete that it gave the impression of something carved rather than living. Devon stood beside him in a dark coat that did little to contain the strange pallor of her face beneath the eclipse light. There was no fear in her expression, only the calm of her angel countenance.

Amelia crouched near the roots of a gnarled oak with one hand pressed flat to the frozen earth and the other braced against her bent knee. Aspen kneeled beside her. The southern beauty was a powerful witch in her own right, and I was grateful her love of Maddie drove her to help unravel the wards. Our resident witch immediately trusted her enough to let her help, and that in and of itself let me know she was an asset.

Amelia had gone still. “Layered,” she said at last, voice low enough that all of us leaned toward it rather than the other way around. “Old-craft structure with newer reinforcement. Wolf-made, but not wolf-only. Somebody blended in witch work generations back and kept feeding it after.”

Taras crouched beside her without disturbing her line to the earth. “Blood key?”

“Yes.” She shut her eyes harder, as if pressing through resistance. “Outermost ring is keyed specifically to vampire blood signatures. Repel or alert, maybe both. It won’t stop wolves the same way. It will absolutely announce you.”

Maksym’s jaw tightened. “Can you isolate the seams?”

“We already are.”

Ten yards off to my left, Bronc stood with his wolves in a loose line that would have looked casual to an untrained eye and deeply threatening to anyone born with sense. Wrecker was beside him, massive and silent, his attention on a small electronic device. Arsenal looked as though he had been poured into stillness and then left to harden there. Gunner’s hands flexed once at his sides before going quiet again. Big Papa stood broad and grounded, like a church someone had taught to kill. Doc held one hand against his sternum, fingers spread there unconsciously, his face drawn tighter with each passing minute.

Lucia stood at his shoulder in a fitted black coat, her hand resting near the blade at her hip with the absent familiarity of long habit. Her eyes moved between Doc’s profile and my back, tracking both pain and consequence. I did not look at her directly. I knew what I would see there—concern, yes, but also judgment I had earned.

The bond had not gone silent. That would have been simpler. Silence could be mourned. What I felt instead had been intermittent all the way from the estate to this cursed line of trees: tension, wrongness, then distance, then a sickening pulse of fear too brief to locate. It was like trying to navigate by lightning glimpsed through shut eyelids.

Bronc looked at Amelia only long enough to measure whether she had anything usable left to give, then turned to Maksym.

“We don’t have any more time.”

Maksym kept his gaze on the estate. “If Taras finishes the seam map, the breach is cleaner.”

“Cleaner don’t matter if he’s already laying hands on her.”

“It matters if the first step trips every buried defense on the property.”

“It matters less than my sister on a deadline.”

The words did not rise. They did not need to. Men like Bronc and my brother did not shout their authority across a field. They set it down between them and let others decide whether they meant to step on it.

Taras spoke without looking up. “Another ten minutes will give us greater certainty.”

Bronc’s expression did not alter. “And if he starts in five?”

No one answered immediately, because that was the arithmetic gnawing the marrow out of all of us. Every minute we waited might save lives on entry. Every minute we waited might also be one more thread tied around Maddie’s throat.

Aspen’s hand pressed harder against her chest. “It’s buildin’.”

Lucia’s head turned sharply toward her. “How strong?”

She swallowed once before answering. “Like a millstone. Slow grind. Pressure under the skin.” Her voice went lower. “Wrong kind of magic. Feels like somethin’ winding itself tighter.”

Amelia looked up then, and there was no comfort in her face. “She’s not wrong. There’s movement under the ward structure. Preparatory work. The whole damn line’s humming.”

Wrecker’s mouth flattened into something ugly and humorless. “Then we quit fuckin’ around and start breakin’.”