Page 33 of Nikolay

I let out one short, broken laugh and pressed the back of my wrist to the corner of my eye before the tear could fully give me away. “Well, fuck if that isn’t embarrassing.”

Her grip didn’t loosen.

“Only if you’re human,” she said.

That got another sound out of me, one that landed somewhere between a laugh and a half-strangled breath. It shouldn’t have helped as much as it did. But there was something about another wolf saying the obvious out loud with no judgment in it that took a little of the pressure off my lungs.

I swiped the tear away properly this time and blew out a breath. “I’m fine.”

Sloan’s brows lifted in a look so dry it might as well have had subtitles.

“Okay,” she said.

That okay held exactly zero belief in it.

I would have laughed if my chest hadn’t felt flayed.

Her hand finally shifted from my forearm to my elbow, still anchoring me there. Not crowding. Just making it plain she wasn’t about to let me brush her off with some cheap little lie and stomp away to unravel by myself in the ladies’ room like a fool.

“My shift just ended,” she said. “And my brother would have my ass if I let the only other wolf in this building cry alone in a hallway.”

My head came up at that.

She shrugged one shoulder, but there was affection beneath it. “Sage always says wolves aren’t meant to be alone.”

The words hit somewhere lower than logic.

Because, Goddess, I was tired of being the only wolf in the room.

Tired in a way I had not let myself name. Tired of all the beautiful dead people and all their perfect manners and all the ways this city kept making space for me while still not smelling like home. Tired of standing in rooms full of immortals where everybody knew exactly who and what they were, while I kept adjusting my edges and pretending it didn’t scrape. Lucia and Doc had helped. They helped more than either of them probably knew. But they had each other. The Kozlovs had each other. Even Obsidian staff had their own rhythms and loyalties, and species-born shorthand.

And me?

I had Texas in my bones and nobody to scent-check my grief until right now.

“Who’s Sage?” I asked.

The answer was obvious before she gave it, at least in shape. Alpha. Brother. The man whose rules she still measured herself against even after clocking out. But I wanted to hear it anyway.

Sloan’s mouth softened around the name. “My alpha. My big brother.” Then, after the smallest pause: “He’s here tonight. Upstairs in the VIP lounge. Couple of our people with him.”

I stared at her.

Not because I didn’t understand the words. Because I understood them too well.

Upstairs, somewhere above the pulse and velvet and blood-scented decadence, there was a pack gathered around a table. Wolves. Real wolves. Not Doc caught halfway between worlds. Not Lucia by bond and blood and love. Wolves who would smell like earth and skin and heat and home in the shape of a species, if not my home exactly then at least something close enough to answer the ache.

The longing that moved through me at the thought was so quick and so deep it made me wary on instinct.

Sloan must have seen that flicker in my face, because she didn’t press.

She only tipped her head toward the stairwell at the end of the corridor. “You can come up if you want.”

If you want.

Not you should. Not come on. Not a single ounce of demand in it. Just an open door in the shape of a sentence.

I shifted my weight. “I don’t want to intrude.”