Page 168 of Nikolay

“That bullshit again, as though Lucia and Doc weren't enough,” I muttered.

Taras’s eyes sharpened. “It never dies. It only changes vocabulary.”

“Yes.” I leaned back farther in the chair, looking past him at the marked western map while my temper cooled itself into something more useful. “Men like Lynch never believe themselves barbaric. That is what makes them dangerous. He dressed rot in theory and expected everybody to applaud the tailoring.”

“He was not unique.”

“No,” I said. “Which is why the hearings will be intolerable.”

That got his full attention, not because he disagreed, but because Taras liked his disasters itemized before they arrived. “You are certain the Supernatural Council will convene formally?”

“I would if I were them.” I picked up my glass again, though I did not drink. “A sanctioned wolf alpha dies under his own moon while attempting a forced ritual bond. Iron Valor is yet again on scene? My brother removed the man’s throat. My father’s interests are adjacent. Fortunately, the Midwest Wolf King is Menace, basically still Iron Valor, and the East King is Griffin his brother-in-law. It won’t stop the inquiry, however.”

“Posturing,” Taras repeated in a tone suggesting he considered the word charitable.

“It’s what they do.”

He moved to the guest chair opposite my desk but did not sit. He rarely sat unless the conversation intended to remain civilized. “Iron Valor will not simplify anything.”

“Iron Valor,” I said, “has a reliable talent for being at the center of every mess, as if the Goddess herself grew bored and threw wolves at the problem.”

That drew a short laugh from me before I could stop it.

Taras noticed at once. He always did. “You sound almost fond.”

“Do I?”

“You do.”

I considered the accusation and found it, unfortunately, not without merit. “Bronc is competent. His people are effective. Their timing is often appalling, and their lives resemble military reports written by drunk prophets, but they are proficient.”

“I could swear you like them.”

“Do not repeat it.”

His mouth shifted again. With Taras, that was practically mirth.

I took another sip and let the warmth of it settle. “Nikolay is going to have his hands absolutely full.”

This time Taras did sit. He lowered himself into the chair with unhurried precision, linked his fingers over one knee, and regarded me across the dark gleam of the desk. “With Madelyn Baucaum?”

“With no one else.” I let the sentence stand a moment. “She is loud, bright, stubborn, unafraid to bite at his heels, and entirely unimpressed by every civilized wall he spent three centuries constructing around himself.”

“Yes.”

The agreement came too quickly to argue. We both went quiet for a beat, because some truths did not improve with embellishment.

I thought of my brother before and after. Of Nikolay in the years between campaigns and courts, reading late into the night, collecting everyone else’s hurts with that infuriating gentleness of his, taking strategic lovers and leaving none of himself behind with them. He had not been unhappy, exactly. Men like us learned to make functionality look like fulfillment. But he had been solitary in a way that had become structural. One more old room in the Kozlov house that no one entered because no one had the key.

Then a wolf from Texas arrived with rough edges and soft hands and managed, by a combination of courage and exasperation, to set fire to the lock.

“He needed the disruption,” I said at last.

Taras inclined his head. “He needed the joy.”

It would have been easy to sneer at that word if it had come from anyone else. From Taras, it landed with the weight of measured truth. My brother did not romanticize. If he called something joy, he had audited the evidence.

I exhaled once through my nose. “Three centuries. It is a humiliating amount of time to spend being wrong about one’s own requirements.”