Page 10 of Curvy Sold Mate

Chapter 6 - Viktor

Kahn didn’t sit down, which told Viktor most of what he needed to know.

When Kahn was conducting business, he sat behind the desk. When Kahn was angry, he paced. When Kahn was processing something he hadn’t expected, he stood at the window with his hands behind his back and didn’t turn around.

He was standing at the window now.

Chris sat in the chair by the desk, legs stretched out, arms loose. He’d arrived thirty seconds before Viktor, which meant Kahn had sent for him—wanted a witness or an ally or both. Chris read people from a different angle than Viktor did. He was more intuitive, more human, and Kahn wanted both sets of eyes on this conversation. That was fair.

Viktor closed the door when Kahn told him to. The click of the latch settled into the room, and the three of them occupied the silence for a count of five before Kahn spoke.

“Tell me what this is.”

“The bond is real,” Viktor said. “I felt it confirm during the channeling. It’s direct, person-to-person. The magic drew her name and mine, and whatever mechanism Caitlynn built into the ritual paired us deliberately.”

“That answers what the ritual did,” Kahn said, still facing the window. “It doesn’t answer what I asked.”

“The threat to Olivia is ongoing. Marcus’s ransom was a funding exercise, not an endgame. Until we know what he’s building toward, an unbonded she-wolf is legally vulnerable under the old codes. A formal marriage closes the loophole he exploited.”

“I’m aware of the law. I helped write the amendments. Try again.”

The room pressed closer around him, threatening to suffocate him.

“The bond is real,” he said again, and this time the repetition was deliberate, because what he was about to add changed the shape of the sentence entirely. “And I can’t unfeel it. I’ve tried. Since the channeling, since the drive to Marcus’s camp, since I stood in front of a man who had your sister in a tent and handed him a satchel of everything this pack could scrape together in an hour—I have tried to put it back where it was, and it won’t go.”

Kahn turned, and the expression on his face was complicated as though he was seeing, for the first time, a door that had always been there but had never been open.

“How long?” Kahn asked.

Two words, and Viktor closed his eyes for just a second at the utter betrayal radiating from his friend.

“Longer than the ritual,” he said.

“She kissed you. When she was eighteen.”

The memory surfaced unbidden—a hallway, evening light, the smell of the garden through an open window. Olivia at eighteen with her chin lifted and her dark eyes holding a courage that had no business being that steady, and the five seconds during which he’d kissed her back before the rest of his brain caught up and slammed the door hard enough that he’d been listening to the echo for eight years.

“Yes.”

“And you stopped it.”

“She was eighteen. She was your sister. It was—”

“I know what it was. I know why you stopped. I would have done the same.” Kahn’s voice dropped. “That doesn’t change the fact that you’ve been carrying this for eight years and never said a word.”

“The situation was closed.”

“The situation was never closed, Viktor. You sealed it. There’s a difference.”

Viktor absorbed it without deflecting.

Chris spoke for the first time. “The marriage—is it the only option?” His face was open, absent of judgment. This was why Kahn kept him in the room.

“An informal bonding offers partial protection, but under the old codes, an unmarried bonded female can still be challenged for, even claimed. The marriage removes that entirely.”

“And Olivia agreed to this?”

“Olivia agreed to the logic. She hasn’t agreed to much else.”