Page 24 of Curvy Sold Mate

He was in the study, because he was always in the study—the desk, the lamp, the neat stacks of paper arranged in a configuration only he could decode. The door was open. Olivia stood in it, and he looked up, and whatever he saw on her face made his pen stop mid-stroke.

“You briefed Kahn.”

It wasn’t a question.

Viktor set the pen down. Aligned it with the edge of the page. The gesture took less than a second, and she read it clearly: a man buying time in millimeters.

“Yesterday afternoon,” he said. “Three suspects. Nadia Soren, Brennan Cole, Maren Holt.”

“I know their names. I gave you two of them.”

“You did.”

“And then you took them to Kahn’s study, sat across from his desk with Chris beside you, laid out the case I helped build, and presented it as yours.” She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, because if she stepped fully into the room, she’d be closer to him and closer meant smaller. “Tell me where I’m wrong.”

He held her gaze.

“You’re not wrong.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“I needed to be certain before—”

“Before what? Before you included me in a conversation about my own safety? About a mole who sold me to a man with a suppression shard and a padlock?” Her voice stayed level. The effort of it sat behind her sternum, hot and pressurized, a heat she contained because releasing it would feel like losing, and she had lost enough this month. “Before you brought me into the room where decisions about my life were being made—again—by men who’d decided I wasn’t ready to hear them?”

Viktor’s hands lay flat on the desk. She could see the tendons across his knuckles, the controlled tension running through his fingers, and she recognized the posture—the same stillness he’d held in the great hall when her name was called, the same locked-down containment that was itself a confession if you knew what to look for.

She knew what to look for.

“The kidnapping,” she said, and she wasn’t shouting—she was doing something worse than shouting. She was laying bricks, building a wall from facts, each one placed with care. “I wasn’t consulted. The ransom—I wasn’t told until it was paid. The marriage—I was informed on a forest trail, thirty minutes after someone cut zip ties off my wrists. And now the investigation into who sold me—the investigation I’ve been working alongside you for days, sitting on your archive floor, cross-referencing your patrol logs, flagging gaps you missed—”

“I know.”

“—and you walked into Kahn’s study without me.” She paused. Let the silence do what silence did when it was loaded correctly. “That’s four times, Viktor. Four decisions made about my life, around me, without me. And each one was made by you.”

Something moved behind his eyes. She couldn’t name it, didn’t try—she’d spent too many years reading things into Viktor’s face and getting the translation wrong, building narratives from fragments. She wasn’t doing that anymore. She was standing in a doorway, stating facts, and if he wanted her to understand what lived behind those facts, he was going to have to say it out loud.

He didn’t speak for a long time. The lamp buzzed faintly—a sound she associated with late evenings in the quarters, the background hum of the hours he spent at that desk while she lay on the other side of the wall, both of them pretending the proximity wasn’t a presence they were accounting for.

“I wasn’t protecting you,” he said at last. His voice had changed—the flat delivery that passed for normal had developed a crack, hairline, visible only because the surface was usually so controlled that any fissure showed. “I was being thorough. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“I don’t move on intelligence until I’m certain. That’s how I operate. It’s how I’ve always operated.”

“With Kahn. When the subject was border security, patrol rotations, and threats to the pack.” She took a breath—one that she needed. “This isn’t that, Viktor. This is about who handed me to Marcus Cole. And you don’t get to decide when I’m ready to know the answer.”

He looked at her, and for the first time since she’d walked into the doorway, his eyes carried something that wasn’t control or deflection or the careful arrangement of an expression designed to reveal nothing. She couldn’t have described what it was—open wasn’t the right word, because Viktor Hale had never been open in his life, but something behind the wall had moved closer to the window, and she could see its outline against the glass.

“You’re right,” he said.

Two words. He didn’t dress them up; he didn’t soften them with justification, condition, or a sentence that started with but. The rare admission of error landed harder than any speech could have.

She stayed in the doorway. Her arms were still crossed, her spine still pressed against the frame, and she was aware that her posture hadn’t changed because she hadn’t expected this—hadn’t expected the concession to be this clean, this undecorated, and the absence of fight left her braced against a blow that wasn’t coming.

Viktor opened the bottom drawer of the desk. Pulled out a folder—thick, tabbed, the edges worn from handling. He set it on the desk’s surface and pushed it six inches toward her.

“Everything,” he said. “Timeline, personnel records, cross-references, the archive access logs you started. The three names and the evidence against each of them.” His hand stayed on the folder for a beat longer than necessary before he withdrew it. “It should have been on this desk two days ago.”