Nicolas’s POV

The door closed.

And then it was just us.

Me. Maxim. Mikhail. Roman hovering somewhere near the wall like he hadn’t decided yet if he was staying or going. Andrei by the window, still and quiet, that particular brand of quiet he used when he was paying very close attention and didn’t want anyone to notice.

And Maxim.

Standing in the middle of my office like he belonged there.

I went back behind my desk. Sat down. Picked up the pen I’d set down earlier. Put it back down. None of it because I needed to do any of those things. All of it because giving my hands something to do was better than the alternative.

The alternative being Maxim’s face.

I looked at his face.

He had a red mark on his jaw. She’d hit him. I’d seen it in the garden—the way his head had snapped sideways, the way his whole expression had changed from satisfied to something uglier underneath. She’d hit him with her bare hands, no wolf, no speed, nothing but whatever was left in a body that had been run down for a year and starved down to nothing.

She’d hit him.

I kept that.

Maxim was watching me with that expression he’d been wearing since the moment he walked into my garden—the one that was mostly charm and mostly nothing underneath the charm. Politician’s face. Alpha’s face. The face of a man who had spent years being the most dangerous person in any room he walked into.

He was not in that room anymore.

I didn’t think he’d figured that out yet.

"Well," he said.

He moved to one of the chairs across from my desk. Did not wait to be invited. Sat down like the chair had been waiting for him specifically.

Roman made a very small sound near the wall. I didn’t look at him.

"That was—" Maxim glanced at the door. The door she’d just gone through. The particular angle of his gaze said exactly what he was thinking about. "More dramatic than it needed to be. Don’t you think?"

I said nothing.

"She’s always been difficult." He said it like we were colleagues discussing a scheduling problem. Casually. Leaning back in the chair like he had all night. "I should have warned you. I would have, but—" He spread his hands. "You didn’t give me the chance."

I looked at him.

He met my gaze.

Held it for longer than most people could manage.

I’d give him that. He was brave, at least. Or stupid. The line between those two things had always been thinner than people wanted to believe.

"She’s spirited, I’ll say that." He almost smiled. "But it fades. You’d know that better than I would by now. A few months in this place, nothing to do, nobody to talk to—" He tilted his head. "Has she been eating? She looked—"

"Careful," I said.

One word. Quiet.

He paused.

"—thin," he finished. And then something moved in his eyes. Something that was trying very hard to look like concern and wasn’t quite making it. "I’m asking because I know her, alpha king. I’ve known her for years. Whatever she’s told you about—whatever version of events—"

"She hasn’t told me anything about you," I said. "Nothing you’d want to hear."

That landed. Just slightly. I watched it land.

Maxim’s jaw moved once. He reset. "I’m sure she hasn’t." He smoothed the front of his jacket. "She’s good at that. Presenting things. Making herself look like—" He stopped. Reconsidered. "You’re a smart man. You’ve been doing this a long time. You know what an omega does when she wants to make herself seem indispensable."

The room went very quiet.

Andrei, by the window, had gone still in a way that meant he was no longer performing his usual relaxed indifference. He was paying attention with his whole body.

Roman had not moved.

Mikhail, standing near the door, was staring at a point on the wall approximately two feet to the left of my head. He’d been doing that since they’d come in. Like if he didn’t look directly at anything he couldn’t be held responsible for what he saw.

I looked at Maxim.

His expression was still easy. Still controlled. But there was something underneath it now—something that had surfaced when I’d said *careful* and hadn’t fully gone back down. A restlessness. A person who was very good at waiting but didn’t like having to.

"She’s interesting," he said. "I’ll give her that. She got you to mark her in public, which I genuinely didn’t see coming." He sounded like he meant it as a compliment. To me. To my naivety. "That took creativity. Even I hadn’t expected that from her."

I thought about the garden.

Her on the ground. His shoe on her bag. The specific, practiced way he’d done it—the economy of motion, no hesitation, the way you move when you’ve done something so many times it doesn’t require thought.

I put the pen down.

"She really did a number on you," he continued. "I can see it. And honestly—I get it. She’s got a way about her, the crying and the flinching and the whole—" He waved a hand vaguely. "Act. Very effective. Particularly on someone who hasn’t seen it before."

Act.

The word moved through me like something was dragging it.

Act.

I thought about the bathroom floor. The way she’d been shaking too hard to hold herself upright. The specific sound she made when something got too close to her neck. The look on her face when she’d asked me—so carefully, like she was asking for something she didn’t deserve—*can we not go to war.*

Act.

I could feel my eyes starting to change.

Not anger, exactly. Something older than anger. Something that lived lower than that.

Maxim was still talking.

"—honestly, alpha king, look at it practically. She’s trouble. She’s always been trouble. You’ve already seen it—she was running. From your own palace. On the night before I arrived." He let that sit for a second. "That tells you something. About loyalty. About what she actually thinks of—"

"She was running," I said, "because she thought I was going to let you take her."

Maxim paused.

"She thought I’d approved your visit so I could hand her back." The words came out quieter than I meant. "She thought that’s why I let you come."

Something passed through Maxim’s expression. Just for a second.

"Well." He recalibrated. Smoothly. Like oil finding level. "Wasn’t it?"

I stared at him.

"I’m not trying to be provocative," he said. "Genuinely. I’m asking—what else was she supposed to think? You let us come. You didn’t warn her. You didn’t—" He almost smiled. "You’re the alpha king. If you wanted her to feel safe, you could have made her feel safe. The fact that you didn’t—" He shrugged. "She read the room. You can’t blame her for that."

He was right.

That was the worst part.

He was right about one thing, at least. She’d read the room. She’d built a story out of the evidence she had, and the evidence had looked exactly like what she thought it was, and she’d done what she always did when she thought she understood a threat.

She’d run.

And somehow, standing here listening to Maxim’s voice, watching his face, I found that I was less angry at her for running than I was at myself for not seeing it coming.

She’d told me. Not in so many words. She’d told me with every flinch and every small careful sentence and every time she said *thank you* like she was waiting to find out what the cost was.

She’d been waiting for the floor to drop out.

I’d just handed her a reason to believe it had.

Maxim leaned forward slightly.

"Here’s what I think." His voice dropped. Confidential. Like we were making a deal. "You don’t actually want her. Not really. She’s been here three weeks and she’s already running—that’s not a mate, that’s a liability. You’re too smart for this." He met my eyes. "Let us take her. Mikhail filed the request properly, it’s all clean, no blood. She goes back to Iron Thorn, everyone moves on." He tilted his head. "We’ll compensate you for the trouble. Whatever you think is appropriate. And I’ll tell you what—there are packs to the north that owe me favors. Plenty of omega girls who’d be happy to—"

I stood up.

Maxim stopped talking.

The room went completely, absolutely silent.

I could feel it now. The thing that had been building since the garden. Since I’d seen his shoe on her bag. Since I’d seen her get up—this girl with no wolf and no speed and nothing left but whatever stubborn, unkillable thing lived in the center of her—and get up anyway and keep fighting.

My vision was going dark at the edges.

"You’ll compensate me," I said.

My voice came out wrong. Soft. Very soft.

Maxim went still.

Good.

"You came here," I said, "and you stood in my office, and you told me—" I could hear it, the way my voice was changing, the edges going ragged, "—that she’s a toy. That she’s trouble. That she’s been performing for me." I looked at him. "And now you want to compensate me."

"I didn’t mean—"

"You did." I moved around the desk. "You meant every word. You’ve been meaning every word since you walked in here." I stopped three feet away from him. "You spent a year. You spent an entire year on her. You want me to believe that? A man like you—an alpha, a pack leader, a person who could have done anything with his time—spent an entire year making one girl’s life hell."

Maxim said nothing.

"Not because you wanted her," I said. "Because you couldn’t stand that she existed. Because she was there and she was available and every time you looked at her you saw your ex-girlfriend walking out the door." I watched his face. "That’s what she was to you. A place to put it."

Something flickered.

There it was.

"Don’t—" he started.

"A year," I said. "And now you’re standing here calling her a toy."

"Alpha king." Mikhail’s voice. From somewhere behind me. Careful. Shaking slightly around the edges. "Perhaps we should—"

I ignored him.

Maxim’s jaw was tight.

The charm had dropped all the way now. What was underneath it was exactly what I’d expected. Not fear—not yet—but something adjacent to it. Something that recognized it was in the presence of something worse than itself and didn’t know what to do with that.

"Take her." He said it differently now. Less smooth. More direct. "You don’t want her. I know you don’t. You let her run and you approved our visit and you haven’t once—"

The shift happened.

I didn’t decide to let it happen. I never did. It just—went. The thing inside me that was always there, always pressed down behind meetings and reports and forty-two packs of political calculations—it stopped being pressed down.

One second I was standing in front of him.