Page 146 of Nikolay

My voice did not sound like mine. Or perhaps it sounded more like mine than it ever had.

Every Kozlov went motionless for one exact breath.

Maksym’s eyes met mine.

"Apparently, we're fucking done waiting."

Taras rose. My father’s expression did not shift, but something old and lethal settled more visibly into his stillness. Lucia’s fingers tightened around the hilt at her hip. Bronc’s nostrils flared once, wolf-scenting truth in my face or perhaps in the air torn open by the bond. Doc’s fangs descended. Wrecker’s mouth snarled. Even Devon seemed to draw inward around some bright interior axis I could not name.

Then Maksym lifted two fingers and cut them sharply east.

The assault began.

The first ward did not break so much as surrender under insult. Taras slid the iron stylus into the seam Amelia marked, tipped the hissing contents of his vial along the buried line, and the ground answered with a thin, metallic note that shivered up through root and stone like some invisible instrument being struck in the dark.

Amelia and Aspen crouched, palms to the earth, guiding him with short, cutting instructions.

Amelia shouted, “Two inches left!”

He adjusted.

“Now south. There. Push.”

The sound sharpened, then thinned. I felt the pressure against my teeth flicker. Taras moved to the second seam without wasting a breath, iron and glass flashing once in the eclipse light.

The boundary fought him. I sensed that much in the brief resistance underfoot, in the way the trees seemed to tighten around the line. Then the outer ring gave way in a rapid series of failing notes, one after another, until the whole keyed structure dissolved into absence with a fading hum like a struck tuning fork carried too far away to hear cleanly.

The instant it dropped, the property changed.

Not visually. Not in any way a human would have noticed. But every artificial listening line threaded through Ironwood seemed to blink and bare its throat at once.

Wrecker touched two fingers to the small computer in his hands and murmured something I did not catch. He’d been on a small headset with Parker. Somewhere deeper in the dark, their work took hold. I felt it more than heard it: the abrupt deadening of signal. The faint electronic tension that usually haunted estates like this vanished. So too did the sharper magical prickle of beacon wards prepared to cry out when crossed. The entire place went abruptly, unnaturally mute—as if someone had thrown a suffocating blanket over every device, charm, alert rune, and security pulse Lynch had buried in his precious ground.

“Communications are blind,” Wrecker said.

Bronc did not answer him. He was already moving.

That was Bronc’s gift in a fight, perhaps among many others. When he chose to become the most urgent thing in a landscape, the landscape obeyed. His wolves spread in a rolling line, not wild, not sloppy, but coordinated enough that the chaos they made had structure under it. One pair drove directly at a gate team. Another broke for the side path leading toward the service buildings. I saw one black-coated guard raise a weapon and lose it an instant later when a gray wolf hit him high in the chest and sent him down backward into the brush.

The noise rose, scattered, and reformed. Shouts turned into commands. Commands turned to confusion.

Good.

North of the clearing line, beyond the first visible run of torch glow through the trees, something stranger happened to the light.

Doc moved there with Aspen, her familiar, and Big Papa, all of them low and fast beneath the cover of fir and bare-limbed oak. I did not know Aspen well. I knew only that her hands were already working and that the air around them had developed the taut, electric drag particular to magic forced against magic. Ahead of them, on the path to where the ritual clearing must have lain, the torch flames changed direction.

Not from wind.

They guttered and leaned sideways as if some unseen current had reached into the clearing and begun pulling the fire out of shape. One torch dimmed abruptly, recovered, then bowed again against no natural force. Another spat sparks sideways into the dark. The line of ritual light that ought to have stood upright and obedient resisted, compromised.

The counter-working had its teeth in the rite already.

I did not wait to see how deeply.

Men around me still moved according to plan—Taras rising from the ward line, someone signaling farther back, perhaps Maksym repositioning, perhaps my father advancing with the rest of the covert team. I did not look. I did not need either of them to kill the ground between myself and Maddie, and anything that slowed me at that point had begun to resemble sacrilege.

I stepped through the dead ward and pulled shadows around me.