Page 92 of Nikolay

“You do not have to do that,” I said, though I let him.

“I know.”

That should have irritated me a little. Instead, it warmed some stupid, neglected part of me I had not brought here intending to feed.

He carved the prime rib himself, selecting a slice that bled just enough to make my mouth water, then another because apparently one wasn’t going to cut it. Potatoes. Mushrooms. Carrots. Green beans. He built the plate like a man paying attention, not piling on nonsense, not guessing blind. By the time he handed it to me, I was so charmed by the fact that he had watched what I looked at and acted accordingly that my better instincts had to take a seat.

“Eat,” he said.

Lord.

There was something about a commanding man handing a wolf-woman a full plate that hit lower than common sense.

“Yes, sir,” I said before I could stop myself.

His eyes darkened by a degree so small another person might have missed it.

“You do not have to call me that,” he murmured.

“Good,” I said, taking my plate. “Because that’s not a word I give away with ease.”

“I’ll tuck that tidbit away for now.”

He took his own plate after mine and led me toward the long dining table set a little apart from the fireplace cluster. Not formal exactly, but long enough and heavy enough to announce continuity.

I ate.

I came from wolves. I had grown up at tables where people worked with their hands, ran hard, lifted heavy, and thought appetite was a sign of health instead of a thing to apologize for. So when that prime rib hit my tongue all peppered crust and salt and bloody tenderness, I just closed my eyes a second and enjoyed it. The potatoes were rich enough to make me borderline emotional. Somebody had put actual care into every damn thing on that table, and my body knew it before my mind did.

Sage sat beside me.

Not across. Beside.

That, too, was a choice.

The wine was poured at some point without my seeing exactly who did it. Darker than any red I’d had before, nearly black in the bowl of the glass when the firelight didn’t catch it, and richer on the tongue than I expected. Not sweet. Not dry either. Something earthier than ordinary vineyard wine, with a depth that sat warm and heavy at the back of my mouth and then opened into fruit and oak and some other darker note I couldn’t quite name.

“This is different. Delicious.”

Sage gave me a wry smile. “It’s our own vintage. You won’t find it anywhere else but here.”

I took a second sip.

Then a third.

By the time I finished the first glass, my shoulders had dropped without asking permission. The knot I’d been carrying behind my sternum since I drove through those gates loosened. Not vanished. Just eased enough that breathing felt simpler.

The room softened around the edges after that, not in a sloppy way, just enough to make me stop bracing for hidden tests in every sentence. Wolves kept talking. Plates emptied. More meat was carved. Someone told a story about a disastrous charity gala involving a donor too drunk to understand that one did not, under any circumstances, ask a female wolf if she was “still changing on moon nights.” That one got me laughing before the punchline had even finished landing.

Moriah, I discovered, was funny in a dangerous, elegant way.

Not loud. Never reaching for the room. Just dropping observations with surgical timing.

When one of the younger men asked if Texans were really obsessed with high school football, she lifted her glass and said, “That depends. Are you calling something an obsession or a religion? Because the way I understand it, in Texas, high school football is interchangeable.”

I laughed hard enough to surprise myself, telling them she wasn’t half wrong.

The sound came out clean and real and a little louder than I intended, and for one strange second I just sat in it. Me. Laughing in a wolf castle outside Philadelphia with people I had barely met, a plate of prime rib half gone and expensive wine in my hand.