Page 47 of Nikolay

Then Sloan cut me a sideways look.

“You look a hell of a lot better than you did earlier.”

My mouth twitched. “That bad, huh?”

“You smelled like heartbreak and adrenaline and were one wrong sentence away from climbing inside an air duct to avoid the world.”

“Well,” I tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “That’s a vivid picture.”

“I’m a vivid person.”

“Clearly.”

She let that sit for half a beat before adding, “You’d clearly been crying over something.”

There was no point pretending otherwise to a wolf. Humans could sometimes be lied to by posture and bright lipstick, and a strategically timed joke. Wolves had noses. It was frankly insulting how little privacy a body got among its own species.

“Yeah,” I said.

Sloan’s face stayed easy. Not pitying. Just open. “And now you don’t look like you want to set the building on fire.”

“Character growth.”

“Mm-hmm.”

We passed a service door propped open with a rubber wedge. Inside, stainless steel shelves gleamed under even harsher light, cases of bottled water stacked in military rows. The sight of it all made the upper lounge feel almost imaginary. Pack warmth one minute, industrial reality the next. Maybe that was why my chest had started tightening again now that I was out here. Relief never seemed to trust itself with me for long.

Sloan bumped my elbow lightly with hers. “So. Was it man trouble?”

I gave her a look. “You ask that like there are other options.”

“There are always other options,” she said. “Sometimes it’s family. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes it’s existential despair. But tonight I’d put money on a man.”

I laughed under my breath despite myself. “Bold.”

“I’m right, though.”

We walked another few steps before I answered. Long enough for the fluorescent hum to get annoyingly loud. Long enough for me to feel the shape of the truth and decide how much of it I could bear to hand another person.

“Yeah,” I said finally. “It was man trouble.”

Sloan did not immediately pounce on that, which I appreciated more than I let show.

“Bad?” she asked.

I thought about Nikolay in the service corridor, all rigid strain and too-late explanations. Thought about him in my room among my books, silent as damage finally reached him. Thought about him with his mouth at another woman’s throat. Thought about how all of those versions of him had somehow managed to be the same man.

“Complicated,” I said.

“That usually means bad.”

“It means I have strong feelings for someone, and the whole thing’s a mess.”

There. Honest enough to count. Guarded enough to survive.

Sloan nodded slowly. “That does sound messy.”

“You have no idea.”