Page 11 of Curvy Sold Mate

Chris looked at Kahn. “He’s not wrong about the legal exposure. I’ve seen the claiming codes used in the border territories—it’s ugly, and it’s enforceable.”

A long silence followed, one that was uncomfortable to an almost painful degree.

“My sister,” Kahn said, “was kidnapped on my watch, during a ritual I approved, from territory I failed to secure.”

He looked at Viktor with his friend’s face, stripped of rank. “If you hurt her, there will not be a conversation. There will not be a debrief.”

“I know.”

“I need you to understand what I’m telling you.”

“I understand.”

Kahn held him there long enough that the understanding wasn’t just spoken but shared. “Then you have my consent,” he said heavily.

Viktor nodded—understood, agreed, moving on. But this time the nod carried something it never had before, and both of them felt the difference.

Kahn turned to Chris. “The ward configurations on the eastern boundary—where are we?”

The question wasn’t unusual. The fact that it was directed at Chris, with Viktor still in the room, was.

Chris answered without hesitation—patrol response data, the vulnerability window between anchor points six and seven, the reinforcement schedule Caitlynn had proposed. Viktor listened, and what he heard was more than the words. He heard the current beneath it: the slight reorientation of Kahn’s attention away from his Beta and toward his advisor. This question in any other week would have been Viktor’s to field. A small thing, aimed two feet to the left of where it would normally go, and no one who hadn’t spent as much time as the person Kahn turned to first would have felt the shift.

When the briefing ended, Chris left first, clapping Viktor on the shoulder as he passed—warm, uncomplicated, a kindness he appreciated more than he could have said.

He paused at the door. “Kahn.”

“I won’t hurt her.”

Kahn’s expression didn’t change. “I know you believe that.”

It wasn’t agreement, and it wasn’t doubt. It was the space between.

Viktor went to his quarters, sat on the edge of the bed, and stayed there until the light through the window shifted from gold to grey. He could have told Kahn the whole truth: that when Chris walked in with the ransom note, it had left him breathless, and that on the drive to Marcus’s camp, the only thought in his head for four hours was alive, she has to be alive, and that when they brought her out of the tent, the relief had hit him with a magnificent force.

Chapter 7 - Olivia

The ceremony took eleven minutes.

Olivia knew because she counted—her mind latching onto numbers, reaching for the solid edges of data while everything else went liquid. Eleven minutes from the first word of the binding rite to the last, spoken in a room that smelled of cold stone and the iron tang of ward anchors.

Kahn performed the binding himself. His voice carried the words with the flat authority of a man signing legislation—correct, final, stripped of ceremony. He didn’t look at her while he spoke. He looked at a point above her left shoulder, and she understood that her brother was holding himself together by choosing where to aim his eyes, and that looking at his sister while he handed her to another man would crack the mortar.

Viktor stood across from her in the clothes he’d been wearing all day—no formal dress, no concessions to ritual. His face held the same arrangement it had held in the great hall, in the forest, in Kahn’s study: nothing. A wall with the lights off. She could have been anyone. She could have been a border treaty.

She kept her own face still.

The vows were three sentences long. Legal language, pack law, the binding of names, protection, and territory.

Caitlynn stood to Kahn’s left, her hands clasped. She was the only person in the room whose expression acknowledged that eleven minutes was both too short and exactly right, that stretching this out would have been a cruelty neither of them deserved. Her green eyes moved between Olivia and Viktor.

When it was done, Kahn’s hand found her shoulder. One squeeze, brief enough to be professional, tight enough to be her brother. Then he left. Chris followed, and Caitlynn touched Olivia’s wrist on the way out—her fingertips warm, a pressure that said I’m here without requiring Olivia to answer.

The door closed, and the room contracted by half.

“The quarters are east of the main corridor,” Viktor said. “I had your things moved this morning.”

“How efficient.”