Page 56 of Curvy Sold Mate

Viktor’s hands stilled on his knees.

“The compound’s stable, the rogues are dealt with, and I’ve been here long enough to make my point.” Damian’s voice carried its usual lightness, but the lightness was thinner than it used to be, and what was underneath—the tiredness, the uncertainty, the question he wasn’t asking—was audible to someone who had known him for thirty-six years.

Viktor looked at the mountains. The light was moving across the peaks in that late-afternoon wash that turned the stone gold and the shadows blue, and the compound was quiet around them, the sounds of repair and recovery blending into the background hum of a pack that was healing.

“Stay,” he said.

Damian looked at him.

“Stay,” Viktor said again, and the word came out with more weight the second time, carrying the thing he’d been unable to say for four years—that his brother’s leaving had cost him, that the empty space Damian left was a space Viktor had filled with work and discipline and the performance of sufficiency, and that the filling had never been adequate, and he was tired of pretending it was. “There are things between us that need fixing. We can’t fix them if you’re not here.”

“You want me to stay?”

“I want you to stay.”

It was the first thing Viktor Hale had asked for himself since he was twenty years old.

Damian was quiet for a long time. The garden held the silence with the patience of a space that had hosted harder conversations than this and would host them again.

“You’re going to have to teach me what’s changed,” Damian said. “I don’t know this version of you. The one that asks for things.”

“I don’t know him either. We’ll figure it out.”

Damian’s mouth moved into the grin that Viktor remembered from childhood—wide, unguarded, the full-wattage version that Damian usually dimmed for public consumption—and the sight of it landed in Viktor’s chest beside the place where Olivia lived, and the space there, which had been so carefully rationed for twenty years, expanded without asking permission.

“Fine,” Damian said. “I’ll stay. But I’m not calling you sir.”

“You’ve never called me sir.”

“And I’d like to keep the streak alive.”

Viktor looked at his brother on the bench in the garden of a compound they’d both grown up in and one of them had left, and one of them had never left, and the distance between those two choices was still there—it hadn’t vanished, hadn’t been erased by one night of fighting side by side—but it was crossable now, and that was enough.

He sat in the garden with his brother beside him and his wife in the kitchen and the compound rebuilding around them, and for the first time in his adult life, the thing Viktor Hale had was his own.

He sat in the garden with his brother beside him and the compound rebuilding around them, and the thing he kept circling back to—the thing his mind returned to the way his wolf returned to the eastern trail, by instinct, by pull, by the deep-grooved habit of attention—was the unfamiliarity of his own contentment.

He had never possessed anything that wasn’t functional. His quarters were functional. His clothing was functional. His relationships—with Kahn, with the pack, with the carefully maintained distance he’d kept between himself and the rest of the world—were functional, each one serving a purpose within the architecture of service he’d built his life inside. The architecture was sound. It had held for twenty years, through grief and war and the slow, grinding attrition of days spent standing behind someone else’s shoulder, useful, necessary. If he was hollow at the center, the hollowness was structural—load-bearing, even, the empty space that kept the walls upright.

Olivia had filled the hollow.

He could feel her now, through the bond—in the kitchen, warm, her attention split between a conversation with Elena and the mental inventory she was running of the repair materials needed for the eastern barracks, because Olivia’s mind never ran on a single track when multiple tracks were available. Her presence in his awareness was a warmth along the left side of his chest, constant, textured, carrying the particular quality of a woman whose consciousness operated at a frequency he’d spent decades tuning himself to receive.

She was his. The word sat in his mind with a weight that made his hands go still on his knees—possessive, unfamiliar, the vocabulary of ownership that he’d never applied to a person and wasn’t sure he was qualified to use. She was his, and he was hers. The mutuality of it was the part that undid him, because owning was one thing and being owned was another, and being owned by Olivia Voss meant that someone had the key to every sealed room he’d ever built, and instead of opening them all at once she was moving through them with the methodical, thorough attention she brought to archive files, examining each room on its own terms, rearranging the furniture, letting light into spaces that had been dark for so long the walls had forgotten what shadows looked like.

He was terrified, and the terror was different from any he’d felt on a battlefield or a patrol run or in the frozen seconds before a ward breach, because those terrors had solutions—tactical responses, trained reflexes, the machinery of competence engaging to process the threat and produce an outcome. This terror had no solution, because the threat was joy, and the joy was something he had no training for, and the absence of training left him standing in an open field with his hands at his sides and nothing between him and the enormity of his own happiness except the willingness to stay there and feel it.

Viktor was willing. That was the discovery he kept making, morning after morning, when he woke in a bed that smelled of her and the bond carried her sleep into his awareness and the light came through the window and landed on the floor in the same pattern it had landed in yesterday and would land in tomorrow—the discovery that he was willing to be happy, that the willingness was its own kind of courage, that standing in the open field required a bravery he’d never developed because he’d never needed it before, because all his bravery had been the defensive kind, the kind that kept things out, and this was the kind that let things in.

Damian sat beside him on the bench, quiet for once, the easy chatter that was his default mode set aside in favor of the companionable silence of two men watching the same view and carrying different versions of the same history. The rosemary along the garden wall was recovering from the battle’s scorch marks, green shoots pushing through the blackened stems.

“I spoke to Chris this morning,” Damian said. “He says the scar makes him look distinguished. Caitlynn told him it makes him look like he lost an argument with a hedge.”

“Both are accurate.”

“He also said—” Damian paused, turned his mug in his hands. “He said you put me on the southern line because you trusted me to hold it. Not because you were managing me, or keeping me out of the way. Because you thought I could do the job.”

Viktor looked at his brother. At the sling on his arm, the healing cuts along his jaw, the face that had always been quicker to smile and slower to think, and was now, for the first time Viktor could remember, holding both qualities in balance rather than letting one compensate for the other.