Page 80 of Nikolay

So I shut the door behind me and went to meet the pack.

The GPS pin took me farther out than I expected, past the softer edges of Philadelphia and into a stretch of dark road where the trees grew close and expensive things preferred not to advertise themselves too loudly. Then the headlights caught wrought iron and gold script at once, and I sat back in my seat with both hands on the wheel, because the entrance to Ironwood was the sort of thing a person built when ordinary wealth had stopped feeling expressive enough.

Massive decorative iron gates rose out of stone pillars on either side of the drive. Above them, an arched sign read Ironwood in raised gold script, lit from below so the letters glowed warm against the dark treeline beyond. Not subtle. Not vulgar either. Just expensive enough to stop pretending modesty had ever been part of the family creed.

“Well,” I muttered to myself, rolling to a stop. “That’s not ominous at all.”

The gates did not care for my commentary.

I rolled down my window and hit the call box button. For a few seconds, there was only static and the low idle of my SUV. Then a gruff male voice came through the speaker.

“Yes?”

“Madelyn Baucaum,” I said. “I’m here at Alpha Sage Lynch’s invitation.”

Silence followed.

Not long. Just long enough to remind me I was on somebody else’s land, asking entry under his name.

Then the speaker clicked once, and the voice said nothing further at all. The gates simply began to slide open with slow mechanical finality, iron parting from iron while my headlights reached into the darkness beyond.

No welcome.

No further questions.

That probably should have reassured me.

It didn’t.

I eased the SUV forward.

The path beyond the gates was brick rather than gravel, old enough to look established and maintained enough to tell me someone spent serious money keeping it that way. Trees closed in on both sides almost immediately—old-growth, tall and thick-trunked, the kind with age in them.

The farther I went, the more the world behind me seemed to fall away.

No neighboring lights. No street noise. No hint of city left except some faint reflected brightness overhead where clouds held it captive. The woods took on that dense, private stillness land sometimes had when generations of people had kept others out of it on purpose. My wolf stirred under my skin, not frightened, exactly, but alert in the way all animals got when entering another predator’s chosen ground.

The place smelled like wealth and wolf.

Then the trees broke.

“Holy shit,” I said softly.

It was a castle.

Not in the fairy-tale sense, with silly little spires and theatrical nonsense. In the very real sense of old money deciding that residence, stronghold, and declaration of power could all occur in the same stone body and seeing no reason to choose modesty. The central structure rose broad and sure, with wings extending out from either side. A wide stone porch fronted the whole thing, reached by a sweep of steps.

I slowed even more because there were moments when a woman from Dairyville, Texas had to stop and fully appreciate that she had somehow wound up driving onto the grounds of a wolf-castle outside Philadelphia to attend a moon run with rich separatists.

Life had become ridiculous.

And there, at the top of the porch steps, stood Sage Lynch.

I felt my hands tighten once on the steering wheel before I made myself relax them.

Even at a distance, in low light, he drew the eye with an ease that had nothing desperate in it. He was built large—broad shoulders, narrow waist, the sort of physical authority that read at once as alpha and man used to having his space respected. But where Nikolay carried his size with that grave old-world heaviness, all winter marble and scholar’s restraint, Sage looked cut from warmer materials. If Nikolay was sunbeams on old stone, Sage was moonlight on rough earth.

My stomach did a small, uneasy turn at the comparison, and I hated myself a little for making it.