Not irritated, impatient, or even angry, though I know that lives in him as naturally as breath. Worried. It sits naked in his face before he has time to kill it, and the sight of it drags guilt through me so sharply I nearly step back from the room.
I have seen Nikolaj feral. I have seen him aroused, furious, amused, possessive, bloodied, half mad with jealousy, and wrecked by returned memory. I have seen the boy he was, theman he became, and the terrifying blur between the two when his control thins. But this is different.
This is fear.
Actual fear.
And I realize, with a sick twist under my ribs, that it is fear of losing me.
He stands too fast and starts toward me but stops after two steps. His hands flex once at his sides.
“Nikolaj,” I say, shutting the door behind me with deliberate care. “You’re developing a habit of appearing in places you weren’t invited.”
Normally, that would get me something: a smirk, a filthy comment, or a threat dressed as flirtation. Tonight, his mouth barely moves.
“I know,” he says.
The simplicity of it makes me pause.
“How did you get in?”
“Your guards are still shit.”
There it is, almost. A shadow of him. But the line lands flat.
I look at him more closely. “That’s usually where you grin.”
His jaw flexes, then he says, “I’m not here to be funny.”
“Then why are you here?” I ask, keeping my voice controlled because if I let anything sharper into it too soon, I don’t know where this lands. “Because if you’ve come to discuss our phone call, I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours discovering half my house has been eating itself from the inside, so you’re going to need to be clear.”
He flinches.
Nikolaj Dragovich flinches.
Not physically much. Just a small jerk in his expression, a blink too hard, a breath caught and swallowed. But I see it, and it sends my anger off balance because I know him well enough now to understand this isn’t guilt over being caught.
“I fucked up,” he starts. “I knew there was movement on a hit, and I didn’t tell you. I can dress that up in all kinds of practical bullshit if I want to sound less like an arrogant cunt, but the truth is simple. I knew enough to warn you, and I didn’t.”
There is no deflection in it, and that matters. I hate that it matters so quickly.
I set my cufflink on the dresser rather than throw it, then remove the other with the slow precision of a man doing something with his hands so he doesn’t do something worse with his mouth. I do not interrupt him.
Nikolaj watches the movement, then keeps speaking.
“I told myself it wasn’t confirmed. I told myself I needed a name first. I told myself your house was already bleeding from Lucien, and I wasn’t going to drop another problem on you until I had something solid enough to make useful. And all of that is true enough to sound reasonable if you ignore the ugly part under it.” His throat works once. “The ugly part is that I decided for you.”
I feel that line land in me with surgical precision. He takes one step closer, then stops again. The idea of Nikolaj being careful around me like that hurts more than it should.
“I’ve spent months wanting to put my fist through walls over my father and Arseniy and half the fucking world deciding what I could survive. Then I turned around and did a version of it to you because I was scared and stupid and too used to handling threats alone to remember that alone isn’t what this is anymore.”
I look away first because the last sentence hits too close to the part of me still bleeding.
Alone isn’t what this is anymore.
No. It is not. That is exactly why it hurt so much.
Nikolaj drags a hand through his hair, leaving it more disordered. “And then I made it worse,” he says. “On the phone. I said I wasn’t one of your men, like that was the fucking point.Like you called because you were trying to command me and not because you were afraid.”
