Irina’s POV

I didn’t sleep.

I’d told myself I was going to. At some point. When the adrenaline wore off and my body remembered how to stop bracing for impact. But the hours kept moving and the room stayed dark and I stayed exactly where I was—sitting on the edge of the bed, shoes still on, the vial turning over and over in my fingers.

Sofia had fallen asleep in the chair by the window.

I’d watched it happen. Her eyelids going heavy, her breathing going slow, her whole body finally giving up on the effort of staying alert. She’d tried to stay awake. She’d kept asking me questions—*are you okay, are you hungry, do you want me to get you something*—until the questions stopped coming and her head dropped forward and she was just gone.

I let her sleep.

The room was very quiet.

I turned the vial over again. The glass caught the faint light from under the door. Small. Cold. Unremarkable. You’d look at it and think it was nothing. Medicine, maybe. Something ordinary.

*One cup of coffee,* Sofia had said.

I pressed my thumb against the stopper.

He was going to come eventually. That was the thing. He was always going to come eventually. Nicolas didn’t leave things unfinished. He didn’t sit on problems and hope they went away. That wasn’t how he was built.

He was going to walk through that door and he was going to be—

What?

I didn’t know. That was the problem. I’d spent three weeks building a map of him in my head. The anger. The stillness. The way he said things that landed differently than you expected. And then tonight had happened and the map didn’t match anymore and I was sitting here in the dark with no idea what came next.

*He let you come.* Katerina’s voice. *That was your first mistake.*

I closed my fist around the vial.

Was she right?

She’d been so certain. That quiet, devastating certainty—the certainty of someone who had watched this world long enough to stop being surprised by it. She’d built a whole story. *He approved the visit. He didn’t warn you. He could have said no.*

Except.

He’d walked into that office and the room had gone cold.

I kept coming back to that. The way the temperature had dropped without him doing anything. The way Maxim had—for just one second, just one—looked like something that knew it was in the wrong place.

That didn’t track with *letting them take her.*

The vial was warm from my hand now.

I set it down on my knee. Looked at it.

*You do what you think is right,* Sofia had said.

What did I think was right?

I thought about his face in the garden. That one second before he’d looked away. Before the controlled, careful expression came back down like a curtain.

He hadn’t looked like a man who was done with me.

He’d looked like a man who was—

I didn’t finish that thought.

I picked the vial back up.

Put it down again.

My hands were shaking. Not from cold. The room was warm enough. Just—the particular tremor of a person who’d been holding themselves together for a very long time and was running out of things to hold onto.

I was so tired.

That was the thing underneath everything else. The bone-deep, three-weeks-of-this, one-year-before-this, years-before-that tired. The tired that wasn’t about sleep. The tired of always being the one who had to calculate. Who had to be careful. Who had to think three steps ahead because the cost of getting it wrong was too high.

I was exhausted.

And I was still sitting here at—what time was it? I didn’t know. Late. The kind of late that was almost early.

Still sitting here.

Still holding this stupid vial.

Still waiting.

Sofia shifted in the chair. Made a small sound. Settled back into sleep.

I looked at her.

She’d sat down on the floor for me tonight. Just—folded herself down onto the carpet and listened to me talk for an hour, and she hadn’t once told me I was overreacting or that I needed to calm down or that everything was going to be fine. She’d just listened. And then at the end she’d looked at me with those clear eyes and said *you weren’t going to use it* and I hadn’t lied.

She deserved better than this palace.

She deserved better than spending three years in a place that had eaten her brother and then expecting her to fold napkins.

I thought about Pavel. The photograph still in his pocket when they brought him back. The twenty-three-year-old who’d wanted somewhere quiet.

I thought about Katerina. The way her hand had gone to her stomach before she caught herself. The way she’d looked walking away. Not looking back.

Not once.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum.

I thought about my father’s face when I’d run into him. That cracked-open expression. Raw. Unprepared. He’d looked—

Shocked. That was the word. He’d looked shocked to see me.

Like he hadn’t known what I actually looked like anymore.

I wondered what I looked like to him. If he’d expected the version of me from before. Before the year in that pack house. Before the weight I’d lost and the way I moved now and the bruise that was probably blooming across the side of my face from where Maxim—

I stopped.

The vial.

I was turning it over again without realizing.

*One cup of coffee. He’d never know.*

I knew the answer. I’d known the answer since the bathroom floor when I’d been half-delirious with fever and I’d looked up and he’d been there, sitting on the tile, not touching me, not demanding anything, just—there. Just present in the way that shouldn’t have mattered but did.

I wasn’t going to use it.

I wasn’t going to use it and the only question was what came after that.

What came after was him walking through that door. And me having to sit in this room and look at him and not know if he was going to—

Something outside the door.

I went still.

Footsteps. In the hallway. Not rushed. Not careful either. Just the sound of someone walking like the hallway belonged to them, like the whole palace belonged to them, like the ground itself was optional.

I knew that walk. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

My hands gripped the vial.

The footsteps slowed.

Stopped.

Just outside the door.

My heart was slamming. I could feel it in my throat, my fingertips, the scrapes on my palms. Everything in me had snapped awake all at once—all the exhaustion gone, replaced with that specific, electric terror of a body that knows something is about to happen.

Sofia.

I looked at her. Still asleep. Head dropped, chest rising and falling in that slow, easy rhythm.

*Please stay asleep.*

The door didn’t open.

Just—silence. The specific silence of someone standing right on the other side.

I couldn’t breathe.

My thumb pressed against the stopper of the vial. Not consciously. Just—there. Automatic. The body doing its own math while the brain was still catching up.

*One cup of coffee.*

I looked at the door.

He was right there.

I knew he was right there. I could almost feel it, that stupid mate bond thing, that warm pulse in my chest that had been wrong and complicated and unhelpful since the day he’d marked me. It was doing something now. Not telling me anything useful. Just—present. Like a hand on my shoulder I hadn’t asked for.

I looked down at the vial.

At my own hands.

The red marks across my knuckles. The scrapes from the grass. One broken nail from where I’d grabbed Maxim’s wrist. Evidence of tonight. All of it still fresh enough to sting.

I thought about what Sofia had said.

*If he comes in here angry—if he decides tonight was the last straw—the option’s still there.*

And I thought about what I’d thought, alone in the garden with the roses and the bird and Katerina’s voice still in my ears.

*I couldn’t hurt him.*

The realization was the same as it had been then. Heavy. Complicated. Not welcome. Absolutely true.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t do it.

Not because he’d promised me no more wars. Not because of the mate bond. Not because of breakfast or the dark or his arm around my waist.

Because.

Because he’d sat on a bathroom floor and not touched me when he could have. Because he’d asked Roman what the word for *mate* was in another language, like it mattered to him what it was called. Because when I’d said *can we not go to war* he’d said *no* like the question was almost funny in how easy it was.

Because every time I thought he was going to be what I expected, he wasn’t.

I wasn’t going to use it.

I wasn’t going to use it.

I put the vial in my pocket.

My hands were still shaking. My face hurt. My knees hurt. Everything hurt.

I sat up straight anyway.

Waited.

The silence from the hallway stretched.

Then—a voice.

Low. Quiet. The kind of voice that didn’t need to raise itself to carry.

Nicolas.

"Everyone out."