Irina’s POV

The office floor was cold.

That was the first thing I registered. Cold tile through the fabric of my jeans, the impact jarring up my palms where I’d caught myself. My bag had come off somewhere between the hallway and here. I didn’t know where.

I didn’t look up.

I could hear him.

Nicolas was standing somewhere across the room. His back to the door—I knew because I’d looked up for exactly one second when they’d brought me in, and that one second had been enough. His shoulders. The back of his head. The particular stillness of someone who was choosing very deliberately not to move.

I looked back at the floor.

The room was full of people. Roman. Andrei. Two guards I didn’t know who’d come up out of nowhere in the east garden, moving with that particular efficiency that meant they’d done this before. Maxim, standing four feet to my left, straightening his jacket like none of this had happened. My father, two steps behind Maxim, not quite looking at anything.

Nobody spoke.

The silence was the kind that pressed.

I stayed where I was. On the floor. Not because I couldn’t get up—I could. I just hadn’t decided to yet. There was something almost tactical about it, the way there was something tactical about a lot of things I’d learned without meaning to. If you stay down, they forget to watch what your hands are doing.

My hands were shaking.

I pressed them flat against my thighs.

"Well." Maxim broke first. Of course he did. Maxim could never stand silence that he wasn’t controlling. "I have to say." He sounded easy. Conversational. Like we were all just having a perfectly normal evening. "Security here is something to be admired. Truly. The kind of setup that lets a—" he paused, considered, "—*guest* wander off the grounds undetected." He tilted his head toward Nicolas’s back. "With respect, alpha king. A toy slipped out and you didn’t even know."

The word hit me in the sternum.

*Toy.*

Not even said to me. Said *about* me. To Nicolas. Like I wasn’t on the floor three feet away. Like I was furniture that had inconveniently relocated itself.

I kept my eyes down.

I heard Nicolas shift.

Just slightly. One small movement. The sound of a person turning.

I didn’t mean to look up.

I looked up.

His face was—

I’d seen Nicolas angry before. I’d seen him cold and I’d seen him sharp and I’d seen that particular flat expression that meant something in the room was about to get destroyed. I’d seen his eyes go dark at the edges when Roman said something he didn’t like. I’d seen the version of him that made entire rooms of people suddenly find the floor very interesting.

I hadn’t seen this.

The temperature seemed to drop.

I watched Maxim’s face.

He caught himself—barely. Something flickered. A microexpression, the kind I’d learned to spot because spotting it was survival. For one half-second, Maxim looked like what he actually was underneath the tailored jacket and the easy smile: a person who had just realized, too late, that he was standing in the wrong room.

Then he got it under control.

But it had been there.

My father took a very small step backward. He probably didn’t know he’d done it.

"Mm." Nicolas hadn’t said anything. He didn’t need to. He crossed the room—unhurried, that same deliberate pace, like physics was optional for him—and stopped behind his desk. Stood there. His hands rested on the surface.

The room held its breath.

Maxim recovered faster than I expected. That was the thing about him—he was genuinely good at this. At the performance. At looking like he wasn’t afraid when the evidence suggested he should be.

"I meant no disrespect," he said. Easier now. Smoother. "The *omega* is clearly valued. Obviously. Given that she’s been retrieved." The word *omega* landed differently than *toy* had. Technically more accurate. Somehow worse. "I was simply making an observation about—"

"About my security." Nicolas’s voice.

Quiet.

That was the thing that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Not loud. Not sharp. Just quiet in a way that filled the entire room like water filling a space, finding every corner, leaving nowhere to stand that wasn’t wet.

"You were making an observation," Nicolas said, "about my security. In my office. At my desk."

Maxim’s jaw moved. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

He didn’t answer.

Nicolas picked up a pen from the desk. Set it back down. The movement was completely idle. The most controlled thing in the room.

"You drove four hours," he said, "to stand in my building and tell me how it could be run better."

"I—" Maxim started.

"That’s generous of you." Still quiet. "I’ll take it under consideration."

He wasn’t looking at Maxim anymore.

He was looking at me.

I realized it a second too late—my gaze had drifted to the desk, to his hands, to the pen he’d just set down—and when I looked back up his eyes were already on my face, and the black was still there, rolling at the edges of the green, and I couldn’t read it. I’d thought I was starting to learn how to read his face. I’d thought, three weeks in, I was at least getting somewhere.

I had no idea what this was.

Was he angry at me? Was he—

He looked away.

Looked at Roman, standing near the door. Some wordless thing passed between them.

"Take Miss Irina to her room," Nicolas said.

His voice was different now. Level. Careful. The anger—or whatever it was—tucked away somewhere I couldn’t see it anymore.

"I have things to discuss with our guests."

I opened my mouth.

Something in Roman’s face told me not to.

He was already moving, crossing the room toward me, and his expression was—not unkind, exactly, but very, very clear about what was happening. He put his hand under my elbow. I let him pull me to my feet because fighting it would have meant staying in this room and the room suddenly felt like the worst place I could be.

I got up.

My knees were still singing from the grass. My palms were scraped. The side of my face where Maxim had—

I didn’t finish the thought.

I was almost at the door when I stopped.

I don’t know why. Some stupid, animal thing. The mate bond, maybe, that warm pulse in the center of my chest that had been doing wrong things since I’d come around the corner and seen him standing there in the dark of the garden with the guards. Roman’s hand on my elbow kept moving. I had to make my feet stop.

He didn’t look at me.

Nicolas was already turning back to Maxim. Back to my father. Back to whatever came next in rooms I wasn’t allowed to be in. His shoulders were straight. His voice, when he said something to Maxim—I didn’t catch the words, just the tone—was completely controlled. Completely composed.

Like I’d already left.

Like I was already gone.

*He’s not going to fight for you.*

Katerina’s voice. Quiet. Certain. Devastating.

The mate bond pulsed.

I looked at the back of his head. The familiar shape of it. The set of his shoulders.

He didn’t turn around.

Roman’s hand tightened on my elbow.

"Miss Irina." Very quiet.

I let him guide me out.

The door closed behind us.

The hallway was exactly as I’d left it—pale walls, carpet, the distant sound of the palace doing its ordinary thing—and I stood in it for one second with my scraped hands and my ringing face and the vial still in my pocket and no idea what any of this meant.

"Take Miss Irina away first. I have things to discuss with our guests who came from afar."