Page 19 of Nikolay

It was easier this week because Lucia and Doc were here.

The two of them moved through the house with the kind of gravity mated people seemed to carry, like the air had quietly agreed to make room for them. Lucia could still cut a room in half with one look if she needed to, but around Doc there was a softness in her I found almost holy, maybe because it never made her less dangerous. And Doc—steady, blue-eyed, impossible not to trust after about ten minutes—had a way of bringing ordinary humanity into extraordinary places. He’d stand in a Carpathian mansion full of immortal power and ask if anybody had seen his coffee mug like he was in a county hospital break room.

That helped more than I could say.

When they were home, the estate loosened. Laughter happened easier. Meals stretched longer. The big old rooms didn’t feel so much like they were remembering all the people who’d died in them. Lucia had always made me feel like I belonged wherever she put me, and Doc was my Texas connection. My Iron Valor brother and wolf partner, even if he shared his wolf with a vampire half. Between the two of them, my rough edges quit scraping quite so loudly against everything here.

That afternoon, they had come back in from Texas with several boxes for me.

Books, Lucia had said, one dark brow lifting as if she knew exactly how dangerous that word was to a woman starved for familiar things. Parker packed them.

I had stood there in my room with my hands on the first box and something hot rising into my throat so fast it nearly embarrassed me. Parker knew me too well. She knew books weren’t decoration to me. They were consolation, memory, appetite, escape, and proof all at once. A person could lose almost everything and still remain herself if she had language enough left to stand in.

Parker and I had become best friends under circumstances that should’ve left one or both of us dead.

Last year, the Greenbriar pack had kidnapped me and tossed me back at Iron Valor’s gate like garbage they expected would roll where they wanted. They figured I’d run for the old pack house. I didn’t. We were prepping for the annual Christmas run and had moved the operation to the Dairyville Civic Center, thanks to the kind of providence a person didn’t argue with too hard if she wanted to keep her mind intact. But Parker didn’t know I wouldn’t go to the pack house when she’d intercepted the Greenbriar intel. That sweet little hacker had gone to the pack house to make sure I wasn’t trapped inside.

She’d been searching the basement when the bomb went off.

Even now, with an ocean of miles and supernatural absurdity between then and now, the thought of it still hollowed me out. Parker, all sharp mouth and dark humor and secret softness, buried under debris because she’d gone looking for me. Because she loved hard enough to run toward danger before she had the full facts. Archon Seraphael’s touch had been the only thing keeping her among the living after. An angel’s hand. A mercy too bright for ordinary language.

How was I supposed not to love a woman forever after that?

Parker and I shared books the way some people shared prayer. She liked the classics and the nasty stuff too, saw no reason in the world those appetites ought to cancel each other out. Neither did I. There was something deeply democratic about loving both Faulkner and filthy stalker romances with equal conviction. Human beings were contradictory; our books ought to be allowed the same grace.

She was also the only person back home besides me who knew the whole truth about my academic life.

Not the cleaned-up version. Not the polite, small-town line about how I had “got a degree in Restaurant Management to help my mama out.” Parker knew I had done much more than that. I had made it all the way to PhD candidacy in English Literature. She knew I had survived seminars full of men who mistook condescension for rigor and women who sharpened themselves into theory until they forgot flesh. She knew I had completed everything except the dissertation defense. ABD, the phrase went. All But Dissertation. A cruel little acronym, if ever there was one.

My dissertation sat unfinished on an old laptop somewhere in Texas, likely under a layer of dust and abandoned certainty.

Seven hundred years of literary criticism would continue surviving without my contribution. I had told myself that often enough it ought to have stopped hurting. I had figured, eventually, what was the point? Dairyville had seemed like the whole map of my life for so long. Family. Pack. Pearl’s. The shop. The same roads, the same dust, the same horizon pretending to be freedom while circling back on itself every time.

I had never truly imagined getting out.

Not in a way that stuck.

And yet here I was, in a vampire king’s mansion in Philadelphia, with boxes of books from my best friend stacked inside my room and the strangest future of my life waiting in the next breath.

It would’ve been easier if Nikolay Kozlov had not been part of that future’s weather.

But he was, whether or not I liked it.

By the time the light had shifted thin and honey-colored across my windows, I was on the floor in the middle of a private disaster only another reader would’ve called beautiful. Books lay everywhere—stacked in uneven towers, fanned open where I’d checked an inscription or a note in the margins, wrapped in linen paper Parker had folded with the same care some people used on baby clothes. Several shelves in my room stood half-emptied behind me, waiting to be filled according to a logic that made perfect sense to me and probably none at all to anybody else.

My bedchamber was grand in that old-world way the Kozlovs did everything. Tall ceilings. Dark wood. A rug thick enough to swallow a person’s footsteps. Leaded windows that made afternoon light come in softened, as if even sunshine had to mind its manners here. One whole wall held built-in shelves, already filled when I moved in with handsome old hardcovers that looked chosen by a decorator or a dead aristocrat—beautiful things, mostly unread if I had to guess, arranged by height and gravity and the desire to impress.

I had moved statuettes, shifted first editions that I figured Kazimir likely purchased new, and shifted books from lower shelves to higher. I wanted my books on the lower shelves where I could reach them without effort. The urge to read a certain book could hit me at a moment’s notice, and I didn’t want distance to hinder my efforts to grab it quickly.

The Kozlov collection housed here was an eclectic collection, ranging from older classics to newer bestsellers. A few I planned to steal for my own reading eventually, if no one arrested me over it. But I wanted room for mine. Mine with the bent corners and penciled notes and water-warped paperbacks from college and secondhand-shop finds with other women’s names written inside the front cover. Mine with perfume still trapped in the pages, or coffee stains near chapter eight, because apparently chapter eight was where life interrupted somebody hard enough to leave a mark. And the precious, near-first editions that I cherished. Some books I was sure to purchase additional copies of so I could read and annotate as much as I liked while keeping the other edition as clean as the day I purchased it.

Those books knew me better than the room did.

Parker had packed the boxes like she were building a small religion. Smutty romances had come wrapped in graphic t-shirts that made me laugh out loud alone in the room. One was folded over a stack of paperbacks and read PRETTY GIRLS READ SMUT in assertive pink letters. Another had MORALLY GRAY MEN DO IT BETTER stretched across the front like a personal challenge to propriety. I’d found that one and snorted so hard I nearly dropped it.

The shirt I’d pulled on after showering was another of her offerings: BOOKS, COFFEE, & MORALLY GRAY MEN.

That one felt less like a joke and more like an accusation.