Page 154 of Nikolay

Not hard. Firm enough to still me.

“Madelyn.” My full name in his mouth had never sounded like that before. Not formal. Reverent.

He took the bloodied strip from my fingers and let it fall.

“You have no reason to apologize to me,” he said quietly. “None.”

I swallowed.

He shifted his hold just enough to bring his forehead near mine. Around us, men moved and spoke, and torches hissed, and the world kept trying to continue, but the center of everything had narrowed to his voice and the space between our mouths.

“I was the fool,” he said. “A damn fool, and a proud one, which is a particularly ugly species of man.”

Despite everything, my mouth trembled toward a laugh.

His thumb brushed once at the nape of my neck.

“I saw your sweetness and called it softness. I saw your honesty and mistook it for roughness. I saw the bright, unvarnished wonder of you and set myself above it because I had spent too long worshipping refinement as though it were virtue.” His eyes searched mine with a steadiness that made lying impossible. “You were never lacking. Not in breeding, not in worth, not in grace. You were perfect, and I was too blinded by my own pride to see it with the gratitude it deserved.”

My throat tightened so hard it hurt.

No one had ever spoken to me like that. Not because the words were pretty, though they were. Because every one of them cost him something.

“I have wounded you,” he went on, and now the old-world cadence in him deepened, each phrase polished by sincerity rather than performance. “Not only by hesitation, which might have been sin enough, but by making you feel for even a moment that you were less than the treasure you are. If there is any mercy in you still for me, I ask for your forgiveness.”

Ask.

Not take. Not assume. Ask.

It undid me.

I framed his face in both my hands, blood and all, and kissed him.

He made a low sound against my mouth that was more relief than triumph, and then his lips were on mine with a care so fierce it made my whole body go weak. The bond thrummed between us like a string finally drawn true after too long hanging slack and tormented. Heat moved through me in waves. Not the drugged softness from before. This was clean. Living. Mine.

He kissed me like a man starving with perfect manners finally given permission to be hungry.

I kissed him back like I had almost died without it.

When we broke apart, both of us were breathing harder.

His forehead rested against mine again for one suspended second.

Then Bronc’s voice cut through the clearing, flat with long-suffering and threaded through with relief.

“Could we maybe put the kibosh on this scene until we get back to the estate? I’ve had about all I can take for one day.”

I laughed into Nikolay’s mouth before I could help it.

He closed his eyes briefly, as if mastering either amusement or murder. “Your brother’s timing remains abominable.”

“Yeah,” I said, breathless. “That’s kind of his gift.”

He finally set me down, though his hand stayed at my waist like he no longer trusted the universe to keep me upright unaided.

The clearing looked different now that I was no longer staring at it from stone.

Smaller, somehow. Sadder. The torches were guttering low, their flames no longer fed by ritual intent and now merely burning themselves toward exhaustion. Above us, the eclipse had begun its slow retreat. A thin edge of silver returned to the moon, cold and clean against the black bite still taking its shape. Sage’s body lay where it had fallen, already becoming less a man and more a consequence.