Page 18 of Nikolay

The statement entered me like winter.

“You may reject it,” he said. “That choice is yours and yours alone. Neither I nor your brothers nor the Goddess herself will force your mouth to the cup.”

I knew that. Of course, I knew it. But hearing it made the possibility real in a way thought had not. Real, and suddenly monstrous.

Madelyn leaving. Madelyn hurting because of me. Madelyn returning to Texas with my rejection like a wound she would carry under her smile and her sharp little jokes. Madelyn absent from rooms I had not known were arranged around her until too late.

Something moved once under my ribs and would not settle.

Father studied me as if he saw all of that or enough of it. “But if you mean to refuse what has been placed in your hands, then think very carefully first. And think honestly.”

The last word cut deepest.

“Ask yourself what you are actually protecting,” he said. “Ask yourself whether it is our name, or merely your pride. Ask whether the thing you fear is dishonor, or disruption. Ask whether you are defending principle, or only an image you built of yourself long ago and have mistaken for truth.” He let the silence open between us once more, then finished in that same dreadful calm, “And ask yourself what you are prepared to lose.”

The room held still.

I could not seem to draw a full breath. The office had not changed, and yet it felt altered beyond recognition. The woven victories on the wall no longer seemed like instructions. Only record. Men had conquered territories and failed their own hearts. Men had preserved their names and died empty. Men had obeyed kingdoms and still stood alone before cold fires.

At some point, perhaps because he had said all he intended, my father moved back behind the desk. He did not dismiss me in words. He merely looked down at the closed folio on the wood, one long pale hand resting beside it, and by doing so made it plain the audience had ended.

I bowed my head once. It was all I trusted myself to do.

Then I turned and crossed the room.

The carpet made no sound beneath my steps. The fire remained all light and no comfort. The doors opened for me and closed again behind my back with the same quiet finality as before.

I found myself in the corridor outside his office, alone.

For a moment, I did not move.

Two floors down, Maddie was still working her shift.

Serving drinks. Smiling at patrons. Standing under my family’s roof with no idea, perhaps, of the full shape of the choice now opening like a blade beneath my feet.

I stared at the closed walnut doors a moment longer, then into the corridor’s dim length beyond them, and understood with terrible clarity that my father had left me exactly where no negotiator wished to stand.

There was no one here to persuade but myself.

Chapter 4

Maddie

Three weeks had a way of turning even a mansion full of predators into something almost comfortable. Not safe exactly—Obsidian and the Kozlov estate would never feel soft in the way Texas did at dusk, when heat still clung to the porch rails—but knowable. I had learned which stairwells stayed empty in the evenings, which hallways carried voices before bodies, which doors meant family and which meant trouble, and, most useful of all, how to avoid Nikolay Kozlov before one of his cold looks could take a strip off my skin.

That had become its own little survival art.

I knew when he preferred the library downstairs and when he disappeared into his office. I knew he favored certain hours at Obsidian, certain mornings in the estate gym, certain stretches of day when he prowled the grounds like sleep had failed him again. If I heard his deep voice drifting from one of the sitting rooms, I took another corridor. If I caught that clean, dark scent of him lingering in a space, I turned around before my body could betray me by noticing too much. If fate was particularly mean, and we crossed paths anyway, I kept my face pleasant, my spine straight, and my eyes somewhere near his shoulder instead of on his mouth, his hands, or the expression that usually settled on his face when he saw me.

Disdain looked too elegant on him. That was part of the problem.

He never sneered outright. Nikolay was too well-bred for that, too controlled. His contempt came dressed for dinner: a cool glance, a pause one beat too long, a tightening around the eyes like my presence had introduced some minor inconvenience into an otherwise orderly world. It should have made me madder than it hurt.

Instead, it did both.

The estate itself had begun, against my better judgment, to open to me. Staff no longer watched me with that polite curiosity reserved for new arrivals and possible mistakes. One of the kitchen women had learned I liked my coffee strong enough to wake the dead and started leaving a fresh pot near the sideboard in the mornings. The grounds had grown familiar under my feet—oak-shadowed paths, clipped hedges, the hush of old money laid over older secrets. Even my bedchamber had lost its borrowed feeling. Dresses hung in the wardrobe. Boots lined up by the door. Hair products cluttered the vanity. Little by little, I had left evidence of myself in the room until it answered back differently when I walked into it.

Not exactly home, but close.