Page 15 of Nikolay

I looked at him again.

He seemed on the edge of adding something else, some softer warning or sharper truth. In the end, he only inclined his head once, the matter now beyond his jurisdiction no matter that the building was his domain.

I turned from him and started down the corridor.

At its far end waited the double doors to our father’s office, dark walnut reinforced with hammered iron, severe enough to belong to a cathedral or a prison. The amber light caught along the metal straps and left the wood in shadow. Every step toward them seemed to strip another layer of heat from me, leaving only the hard architecture of consequence.

Behind me, I heard Bodhan at last move away.

Ahead of me, my father waited.

The doors opened before I touched them, and the familiar austerity of my father’s office received me like a sealed chamber built to hold verdicts rather than conversation.

I stepped inside.

The room was vast in the old way, its proportions intended not for comfort but for significance. The ceiling rose high above in shadowed coffers dark as polished ink. A scent of aged paper and extinguished candles lay over everything, threaded through with something older and harder to name—stone after rain, perhaps, or the mineral ghost of crypt air disturbed after centuries of stillness. It was a smell I had known all my life without ever attaching words to it. Home, if one were raised in power and penance.

The double doors closed behind me with quiet finality.

Across the far wall hung the immense woven history of our line, gold and crimson thread faded by time into bruised richness. Centuries of Kozlov victories ran there in panels: cavalry driving through winter fog; banners lifted above breached walls; men in armor and fur-lined cloaks rendered in profile and blood; One king presiding over it all.

Below it sat my father’s desk, carved black walnut broad enough to serve as a war table, its surface immaculate except for a closed leather folio, a crystal decanter, and a single silver letter opener laid exactly parallel to the desk’s edge. It was the sort of desk before which treaties might be signed or bloodlines quietly ruined.

The midnight-wool carpet swallowed my footsteps as I crossed farther in. To the right, marble pillars flanked the fireplace, pale as old bone against the darker paneling. A low fire burned there, its flames folding and rising over blackened logs. It offered warmth, but little comfort. Among our kind, heat and light did not always travel together.

One side of the office held the great panel of glass overlooking Obsidian’s main floor that had been darkened to a reflective black. Tonight it gave back only the room itself: fire, pillars, desk, and the man waiting for me within it.

My father stood rather than sat.

That told me everything before a word was spoken.

Had Devon been present, the room would have carried a different charge; however formal the business at hand. She had a way of unsettling order merely by existing inside it, all pale light and defiance and that impossible strangeness my father now wore around him like an invisible second pulse. But she was not there. This was father and son. Not a family gathering. No counsel. No audience.

He stood with one hand resting lightly on the back of his chair, his dark suit immaculate, black hair falling past his shoulders in a controlled spill. The fire caught at the faint ancient scars along his forearms where his cuffs had drawn back a fraction. His pale blue eyes fixed on me with the unnerving steadiness that had made kings, monsters, and angels alike underestimate neither his patience nor his wrath.

“Father,” I said.

“Nikolay.”

Only my name. No invitation to sit. No gesture toward the decanter. That, too, was answer enough.

I stopped three paces before the desk and folded my hands behind my back because doing so kept them from betraying anything else. “You wished to see me.”

“I did.”

His voice remained measured, almost gentle in its clarity. He could have discussed the weather in that tone.

For a breath, he only looked at me. Not searching, exactly. My father rarely needed to search. He observed, and what he observed tended to become fact, whether or not one cared for the conclusion.

Then he said, “Why have you been treating Madelyn Baucaum with such disdain?”

The directness of it struck with almost physical force, not because I had not expected the subject, but because some base and childish part of me had still hoped Bodhan’s report might have remained mercifully general. A disturbance on the floor. A lapse. Nothing so specifically named.

I kept my face still.

“She is an employee,” I said. “Tonight I had concerns regarding her performance.”

My father did not react.