Page 110 of Nikolay

I turned before thought caught up.

He moved, to his credit. Doc moved faster.

The hybrid caught my arm before my fist connected with Bohdan’s jaw, his grip like iron around my forearm. I had forgotten, in my present condition, precisely how strong Lucia’s blood had made him.

“Could we perhaps keep the killing reserved for our enemies?” Doc drawled. His eyes cut to Bohdan with open irritation. “And Bohdan—keep your smart-ass comments in your mouth for once.”

Bohdan lifted both hands in surrender, though his expression retained that infuriating amusement. “A fair correction.”

“It was not correction,” Lucia said. “It was calling out your stupidity.”

“Also fair.”

I tore my arm free and planted both hands on the desk instead. Better wood than bone. Better splinters than family blood. Across from me, Bohdan’s expression sobered by degrees. He knew me well enough to understand when he had gone one cut too far.

Amelia, practical soul that she was, ignored the near assault entirely and kept organizing the materials on the desk with the efficiency of someone used to men ruining things with testosterone.

Father looked at her then, and his voice, when he spoke, carried that measured gravity he reserved for truths that ought to be honored.

“As always,” he said, “your intel is what keeps the Kozlovs in the game.”

A flush rose faintly under Amelia’s freckles, but she only gave a short nod and reached for the rolled map tube one of the staff must have brought in while my attention had been elsewhere. She spread a detailed map of Ironwood’s territory across the desk over a cleared section of parchment, flattening the corners with crystal paperweights and one old silver letter opener. Beside it, she placed a lunar calendar already marked in several inks. We had hours. Less than 24 hours to wrench my mate from the grips of a madman.

Chapter 17

Maddie

Icame awake, hard, like somebody had put a hand around my heart and squeezed. The room lay black and unfamiliar for one blind second, sheets twisted hot around my calves, breath tearing in and out of me too fast to be useful. Then Ironwood returned all at once—the carved headboard, the heavy curtains, the faint smell of extinguished fire—and with it the same certainty that had sent me to sleep uneasy: something was wrong, and whatever it was had my name in its mouth.

I pushed myself upright and sat there listening.

Nothing.

No footsteps in the hall. No voices below. No wind loud enough to trouble the windows. Just the old house holding its pre-dawn silence around me while my pulse kicked itself ragged in my throat.

But it was not silence inside me.

Something pulled.

I did not have a better language for it in that moment. It was not pain, exactly. Not even fear, not in the clean, simple sense. It felt closer to being tugged by a thread sunk somewhere behind my ribs, a low, insistent draw that made stillness impossible. My palms flattened on the mattress without my deciding to put them there. The sheets were damp beneath my hands. I was too warm. My skin felt wrong on me.

Nikolay.

The name came up whole and immediate.

I swung my legs out of bed so fast I nearly tangled myself in the blankets and hit the floor half standing, half stumbling. Cold bit into the soles of my feet. I didn’t care. I grabbed for the phone I always kept on the nightstand.

Empty wood.

I frowned, reached again, patted wider as if it might somehow appear under my hand by force of need. Nothing. I dropped to a crouch and looked under the bed, then checked the other side table, then pawed through the sheets with less dignity than sense.

“Come on,” I muttered.

No phone.

I stripped back the comforter, found only pillow, blanket, my bra from last night, and my own rising irritation. I checked the bathroom counter. The armchair by the window. My overnight bag. The floor beneath the dresser. Not there. The absence landed strangely. I was not careless with my phone. I slept with the damn thing close enough to hear if Bronc called from Texas or work texted or any number of disasters found me after midnight.

My keys sat on the dresser exactly where I had left them, the metal catching the thin gray hint of approaching dawn around the curtains.