Page 42 of Nikolay

“She was right,” I said.

My father’s face did not alter. The stillness in him deepened by some nearly imperceptible degree. Permission. Continue.

“So I bowed like a chastened courtier and left her there among her books.” I stared into the bourbon as if the amber depth might produce an alternate history less humiliating than my own. “Then I returned to Obsidian and attempted to prove to myself that she had no hold on me.”

I did drink then. The liquor burned richly across my tongue and down my throat, offering no relief except sensation.

“I chose a woman from the main floor. French. Elegant. Precisely the sort of woman I once imagined at my side. I took her into an alcove and put my mouth to her throat because I wanted—” I stopped, because there remained no honorable way to phrase it. “Because I wanted evidence that my appetite remained mine.”

Devon made a soft sound under her breath. Not shock. Pity, perhaps, which I found difficult to bear.

“Maddie saw us.”

The office held very still around that sentence.

“She had just come in for reasons I am still unclear. She was not on the schedule. She turned the corner, saw me with another woman, and I watched the look on her face close like a wound sealing shut. She walked into the service corridor. I followed.” Shame by then had become almost mechanical; each confession only producing the next. “I tried to explain. I do not know what I thought I could say. She stopped me before I had half a sentence. Told me I had made the matter very clear. Told me she was done being yanked around by whatever crisis of conscience I had made of her.”

I set the bourbon down carefully.

“She walked away from me,” I said. “Twice in the space of a week. Left me standing like an idiot both times.”

A faint pressure tightened on my arm. Devon again. Her gaze had softened into open pain for me, which should have soothed and did not. I had not wanted tenderness tonight. I had wanted strategy. Unfortunately, truth, once admitted, had made strategy look absurd.

“And now, the alpha wolf, Sage Lynch is here.” I leaned forward, forearms on my thighs, glass abandoned on the table. “He asked after her at the door. Amara confirmed it. From the moment he entered the building, he had been looking for Maddie. I saw her in the VIP lounge seated with his pack as though they had opened a space in the world she had been missing for weeks. Which, I suspect, they had. She looked...” I stopped, because the word that came first was happy, and I found that impossible to say aloud. “She looked at ease. And he was watching her.”

I looked up then, directly at my father for the first time since sitting.

“Like his intention was to continue watching her.”

The room absorbed that.

For a moment, nothing moved except my own breathing and the small, involuntary sweep of Father’s thumb along Devon’s wrist where her hand rested near his on the chair arm. The gesture was slow, almost absent. A private rhythm made visible.

When he finally spoke, his voice came low and measured as ever.

“The Lynches do not mingle for novelty.”

I waited.

“If Sage Lynch came to Obsidian tonight group in tow,” my father said, “it was not coincidence. Men like that do not drift toward neutral ground simply because the evening bored them elsewhere.”

The words dropped into place with the cold authority of pieces aligning on a board I had been too agitated to see clearly.

“I had no grounds to deny his membership,” Father continued. “Whatever his private views, he has committed no sanctionable breach. His house remains in good standing. His fortune makes many institutions kinder than wisdom recommends. Had I attempted to bar him without cause, I would have created a political grievance where none officially existed.”

“Understood,” I said.

He inclined his head once, accepting that I did, in fact understand and perhaps had all along. Then his gaze sharpened by a shade.

“I did not, however, anticipate that he would make a move on my son’s unclaimed mate.” A pause. “Nor did I anticipate my son being a colossal ass.”

Devon’s mouth twitched.

Ordinarily, I might have taken offense. Tonight the phrase seemed so devastatingly accurate that contradiction would only have humiliated me further.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Then we are spared the tedious portion where you defend yourself.”