Page 153 of Nikolay

His beard scraped my temple as he bent his head.

His voice came rough and dry against my hair. “You just had to leave Texas because it wasn’t exciting enough?”

A broken laugh escaped me around the crying. “Shut up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I held on harder.

For one small, savage moment, I let myself stay there. In my brother’s arms. In the aftermath. In the proof that I had not died on that stone under a blackened moon while strangers argued theology over my body.

Then I looked up.

Nikolay was walking toward me through the torchlight.

Blood marked him in scattered dark streaks—at his throat, across one cheek, on his hands. Not all of it his. Probably very little. His coat hung open, black on black, and the eclipse light had begun the slow work of releasing the moon back toward silver above him. Maksym, Taras, and Kazimir joined him all smeared with blood and dirt. Around us, men were breathing hard, dragging bodies, watching treelines, taking stock. But he looked only at me.

Alive. Upright. Victorious.

My heart lurched so hard it hurt.

I slipped out of Bronc’s arms and ran.

I ran in a gown ruined by ritual and leaves and blood, and he met me like he had been built for exactly that impact, as if all the long terrible hours between us ended not in words but in the hard sure catch of his arms around me.

I jumped.

He caught me without hesitation.

My legs wrapped around his waist on pure instinct, and his arms locked under me, one bracing my back, the other sliding up to cradle the back of my head with such care it nearly made me cry all over again. Blood streaked his hands. His breath was steady. His body felt like strength given shape and heat, and purpose.

“Nikolay,” I whispered, and my voice broke on his name.

“My brilliant wolf.” The words came out like prayer and injury all at once.

I pulled back just enough to look at him.

Up close, the wreckage of the last few minutes lived all over him. Blood on his cheek. A smear along his jaw. One dark line near his temple. His amber eyes burned with the aftermath of violence not yet fully put away, but when they moved over my face they changed. Not gentled exactly. Focused into something achingly careful.

His jaw tightened.

I knew what he saw. The bruise. The split lip. But under the bond’s hot living pull, the damage was already easing. The ache in my cheek had gone from sharp to throbbing, then from throbbing to a strange tender heat, as if my body had remembered, at last, that it wanted to remain whole. I felt the skin at my mouth knit in a faint itching line.

“I’m okay,” I said quickly, because his face made it clear he was in danger of killing the moon next.

His mouth flattened into a line that did not remotely suggest belief.

I twisted enough to grab at the torn hem of my gown. The lace overlay had already been ruined beyond salvation. One hard yank, and a strip came free in my hand.

He frowned. “What are you doing?”

“You’re bleeding.”

Before he could stop me, I pressed the white fabric to the blood on his cheek. It looked obscene there, bridal white turning red in an instant.

“I’m sorry,” I said, because there were too many things bound up in it to sort cleanly apart. Sorry for leaving. Sorry for not understanding sooner. Sorry he had felt what happened to me. Sorry, the first time I heard him call me mate like that had been over an altar.

His hand closed around my wrist.