Page 42 of Curvy Sold Mate

“Elena says you haven’t eaten,” Damian said, setting a plate on the desk beside the patrol reports. “She also says you’re an idiot, though she used a longer word that I think was German.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’re never hungry. You eat because the body requires fuel, and not eating would impair your operational efficiency.” Damian sat in the chair across from him and bit into a piece of bread. “That’s not the same thing as not being hungry. It’s just a sadder version of eating.”

Viktor moved the plate to the edge of the desk without picking up the fork.

Damian watched him with the kind of attention that was harder to bear than his usual lightness.

“You look like hell,” Damian said at last.

“Thank you.”

“I’m serious. You look like a man who’s been fighting himself for three days and losing.” He set the bread down. “What happened after the shard came out?”

Viktor’s hand stilled on the desk.

“The whole compound felt it, Viktor. The bond flared. Elena dropped a vase. Gideon came out of his quarters looking like the second coming had arrived and he’d forgotten to dress for it.” Damian leaned forward, elbows on knees. “And then you and Olivia disappeared for four hours, and you haven’t been in the same room together since. You’ve been in here since before dawn every morning reading the same page of the same report.”

“It’s a different report.”

“It’s the same page. I can see the fold from here.”

Viktor looked down. He had, in fact, been staring at the same page for twenty minutes. The fold mark where he’d gripped it too hard was visible in the overhead light.

“Talk to me,” Damian said, and the words came out stripped of their usual buoyancy, the charm set aside the way a man set aside a tool that wasn’t right for the job. “I’m your brother. I know I haven’t always earned that, and I know I left when I should have stayed, and I know there are things between us that we’re going to have to deal with eventually. But right now, you look like you’re coming apart. I’m not going to sit here and watch you eat yourself alive over a woman who is clearly, obviously, demonstrably in love with you and waiting for you to stop being terrified long enough to notice.”

The words landed in the quiet room with a weight that pressed the air flat.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said, and the sentence came out rough, scraped raw, the most honest thing he’d said to his brother in four years. “I don’t know how to want something this much and still function. I’ve only ever been Kahn’s Beta. As long as I care to remember, I’ve known exactly who I am and what I’m for, and that certainty is the foundation I built everything on, and she—” He stopped, breathed. “She makes the foundation move.”

Damian was quiet for a long time.

“Yeah,” Damian said finally. “That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

Viktor looked at his brother.

“The foundation is supposed to move,” Damian said. “That’s how you know it’s real. If it didn’t shake you, it wouldn’t be worth having.” He picked up the bread again, took a bite, chewed with the deliberate casualness of a man who had just said the truest thing he’d ever said and was now going to pretend it was ordinary. “Eat your lunch. Go find your wife. Stop reading the same page.”

He left the plate and walked out, and Viktor sat in the briefing room with the patrol report he’d been pretending to read and the untouched food and the bond humming with Olivia’s presence from across the compound, and for the first time in three days, he didn’t try to wall it off.

Chapter 25 - Olivia

The breaking point came at dinner, and it came wearing Damian’s smile.

Olivia was at the long table in the dining hall, seated between Caitlynn and Chris, working through a plate of Elena’s lamb stew while the conversation around her moved in the comfortable patterns of a pack at evening—low voices, the clink of cutlery, the occasional burst of laughter from the younger wolves at the far end. Viktor was at the head of the table beside Kahn, where he always sat, his posture correct, his attention on his plate, the bond between them a steady, low hum that she’d been monitoring all day, the way you monitored a weather system that hadn’t decided yet whether to break.

Something had shifted in him that afternoon. Olivia’d felt it through the connection around midday—a loosening, a softening in the rigid frequency he’d been maintaining since he’d left her bed before dawn three days ago. The walls were still there, but they’d stopped actively pushing her away. The difference was notable enough that she had paused mid-sentence in her conversation with Lena Vasik about the transport records and had to ask the woman to repeat herself.

Damian was across the table, telling Chris a story about a truck that had broken down in the northern territories. The story involved a goat and a mechanic named Benny and was, by all appearances, both true and wildly entertaining, because Chris was laughing in the way that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made Caitlynn lean into his shoulder.

“—and Benny looks at the goat, and the goat looks at Benny, and Benny says, I’m not the one who put it there—”

The table erupted. Even Kahn’s mouth moved at the corner, which, from Kahn, was practically a standing ovation. Olivia felt herself smile—the reflex automatic, pulled from her by the warmth of the moment, the absurdity of the story, and the effortless gift Damian had for making a room lighter simply by being in it.

Damian caught her eye across the table, grinned, and then did the thing that detonated the evening: he reached across and touched her hand.

It was nothing. A casual gesture, the kind of contact that happened between friends at dinner tables everywhere, his fingers brushing the back of her wrist as he reached for the bread basket. He may not have intended it. He may not have even noticed he’d done it.