Page 69 of Nikolay

A pristine first edition. Flawless. Untouched.

Maddie would hate that, I suspected, or at least mistrust it on principle. Her own copy had been handled to death, protected by affection rather than capital. Read in bed, read in kitchens, read under weather and feeling enough to make its body wear the life it had lived. Mine—if I could call this one mine even temporarily—had been entombed in value.

I set the crumpled black lace beside the wrapped parcel and stared at them both.

The contrast was almost comical in its cruelty. On one side, immaculate linen over literary perfection. On the other, a pair of black lace boy shorts wrinkled from my fist, scent-soaked, absurd, vulgar in the most intimate way possible. Reverence beside appetite. Restitution beside theft. A gift I meant to give and a trophy I had no right to keep, though I already knew I would not be surrendering it willingly.

Three hundred years, and I had become a man who stood in the dark contemplating a rare first edition and a wolf woman’s underwear as if they were equally sacred objects.

No. Not equally.

The book represented intention. The cotton represented surrender to instinct.

And somewhere between the two sat the truth I could no longer evade.

I lowered myself into the chair behind the desk, but did not rest. My elbows found the blotter. My gaze remained fixed on the parcel and the panties as if prolonged examination might render me less pathetic. It did not.

In three centuries I had wanted a great many things. Territory. Stability. Influence without spectacle. Useful alliances. Beautiful women who understood the terms of temporary attachment and preferred them. Knowledge for its own sake. Peace for my family when peace could be got, and violence when only violence would serve. I knew appetite in its many forms. I knew protectiveness, loyalty, lust, pride, even tenderness in its diluted and strategic varieties.

This was not those things.

Or not merely those things.

I had never before felt this particular pull: the sickening, extraordinary desire to make another person happy with no anticipated return beyond the existence of their happiness itself. Not because it would advantage me politically. Not because it would smooth relations between houses. Not because it would secure affection, gratitude, or access. Simply because I had seen delight on her face and wanted, with a force bordering on illness, to be the cause of it again.

I named it as I named bloodlines, treaties, risks.

Love, perhaps in its earliest articulate form.

The word did not arrive crowned in beauty. It arrived with precision and dread.

Because what I felt did not obligate her.

That was the terror in it, the thing my father had laid bare with such brutal economy. Choice. Her choice. I could finally know her worth, desire her honestly, ache to ease her loneliness, imagine her pleasure, buy her books, offer apologies, even place my throat on the block of humility and tell her the truth—and she could still refuse me.

As I had tried to refuse her.

My jaw tightened so hard the muscles ached.

I looked down toward the dark club and saw again not the empty floor but the dark corner earlier that night. Maddie serving Ironwood’s table. Her shoulders loose in a way they almost never were around me. Her laughter unguarded. Her body angled without caution toward the warmth offered freely by wolves who asked nothing impossible of her before extending it. She had fit there too easily. That was the part that wounded. Not because it was wrong. Because it was right.

And Sage Lynch.

Dark-eyed, composed, watching her with that civilized stillness men like him cultivated in place of obvious hunger. I knew predators. I had spent centuries among them and being one. There had been nothing casual in the way he looked at her. Nothing merely social. He had identified something. Value, perhaps. Beauty, certainly. Opportunity, likely. Desire, if I trusted my own instincts, and unfortunately I did.

His pack had no need of Obsidian for vice. The Ironwoods were too wealthy, too insulated, too ideologically selective to seek out my family’s carefully managed pleasure house simply for novelty. Men did not build compounds, fortunes, and segregated little empires only to slum it among vampires, witches, demons, and every other species they claimed to find culturally inconvenient. Not without purpose.

Why had he taken a membership?

Why had his younger sister, sheltered all her life within that polished wolf enclosure if rumor could be trusted, suddenly taken a job on my floor?

My hand closed flat against the desk, then curled. The wood creaked faintly under my grip.

Questions multiplied in me faster than restraint could sort them. Had Sage joined to observe Obsidian as neutral ground? To gather leverage? To test access routes into Kozlov territory under the harmless cover of nightlife? Or had he scented some political opportunity attached to wolves already under my father’s loose protection? Maddie, through Bronc. Lucia, through the increasingly impossible architecture of our family. Sloan’s employment. Sage’s timing. None of it sat cleanly.

And beneath every strategic question, an uglier one moved like a blade under cloth.

Had he come for her?