Page 46 of Nikolay

That was the sensible version. The one I ought to have kept.

Then his thumb moved once, slowly, over my knuckles.

Not an accident. Not a fidget. A single deliberate pass of rough heat against the back of my hand before he released me.

The touch was so small it would have been easy to dismiss if I had wanted to. I did not dismiss it. I felt it in full. The simple, maddening intentionality of it.

His hand dropped away.

“Goodnight, Maddie.”

There was no pressure in him. No grin like he’d won something. No leaning in to crowd me with his size. He just stood there looking like a man entirely at ease with his own attention, and whether I knew what to do with it or not.

He was handsome. Easy handsome, like I’d told myself before. The kind that did not come tied in knots. The kind a woman ought to have been able to receive with uncomplicated pleasure, file away under flattering, and maybe revisit later in the dark if she felt lonely enough.

And the attention was not unwelcome. Goddess knew I was not so proud or so foolish I couldn’t admit that. After weeks of feeling looked through, looked down on, or looked at like some irritating interruption in a prince’s already difficult life, being regarded plainly by a beautiful man with no contempt in him should have felt better than this.

Instead, it landed beside something hollow in my chest and only outlined it more clearly.

Because the problem with every new thought was the same problem as the old one. It ended in the same wall. The same impossible, arrogant, infuriating man with amber eyes and too much silence and a mouth I had not kissed.

He wasn’t Nikolay.

That was the ugliest truth in me maybe, and certainly the least useful.

I kept my smile anyway, because women had survived worse things than wanting the wrong man while a better one held the door open.

“Goodnight, Sage,” I said.

Then I turned away from the warmth of the booth, the low table, the easy sprawl of bodies that belonged to one another, and headed for the stairwell with the last of pack heat still lingering against my skin like borrowed weather.

The warmth of the lounge fell off fast once I hit the employee corridor. One minute there had been amber light, old liquor, and the body-deep ease of wolf company; the next there was nothing but fluorescent hum, bare concrete, and the faint bite of industrial cleaner under Obsidian’s sandalwood, like the club had taken off its evening face and shown me the bones underneath.

The hallway ran long behind the main floor, a service artery of scuffed linoleum, metal doors, and institutional lighting that made everybody look a little more tired than they meant to. Somewhere beyond the walls, Obsidian kept breathing in low velvet pulses—bass underfoot, a muffled rise of laughter, the delicate clink of glassware getting reset for the next wave of appetite—but back here all of it came filtered thin and practical. Ventilation hummed overhead. A cart sat half-parked near a supply closet with fresh towels stacked in stern little columns. Somebody had left the smell of lemon cleaner hanging in the air like an argument against decadence.

I was halfway down the corridor before I heard footsteps catching up behind me.

Sloan fell into step beside me without fanfare, hands in the pockets of her black slacks, dark hair still sleek despite the hours. She still looked more put-together than I ever did after three hours into hanging out with friends. Wolf eyes, though. Those gave her away. Too alert. Too alive.

“Did you have a great time?” she asked.

Simple question. Simple tone. No fishing in it.

I glanced at her. “I did.”

She waited.

I huffed a small laugh. “Better than I expected, honestly.”

“You seemed to relax a little bit.”

I looked ahead again, toward the bend in the corridor where the overhead light always flickered just enough to feel haunted. “Your people are easy to be around.”

“My people would consider that high praise.”

“It is high praise.”

She smiled a little at that and kept pace with me. Our steps made soft, dull sounds on the scuffed floor, not hurried, not dragging. For one brief stretch of hallway, it almost felt ordinary. Two friends recapping their night. One asking the other how it went. No princes. No bonds. No destiny with its teeth in me.