We sit there for a minute and watch the wolves move through the wing.
Our room isthe first quiet since the briefing.
“Alexei doesn’t go dormant,” I say.
Maximus is at the window. He turns.
“I sat with him in the corridor after dawn. He told me he hasn’t slept since Konstantin’s modifications. Not dormancy. Not sleep. Nothing.”
Maximus is quiet. “That explains the recording.”
“Twenty-four hours a day. Every day.”
“And the light from his eyes,” Maximus says.
We both saw it. Neither of us needs to describe it.
“We’re immune to sunlight,” I say. “As far as we know, no one on our side except Alexei can do what he did.”
Maximus opens the shutters. Without hesitation. Without checking the angle of the sun first. Sunlight falls across the floor in a long rectangle that reaches the foot of the bed.
I’m sitting on the edge of the mattress.
He sits beside me. Close. His shoulder against mine.
I lean into him. My head against his shoulder. His arm comes around me. His hand settles on my hip, his thumb tracing a slow line along the bone.
Five things I notice in the quiet.
His heartbeat against my temple. The same rhythm as mine, the two pulses so perfectly matched that the sound is singular. One beat in two bodies.
The sunlight on his forearm where it rests across my lap. His skin warm from it. Warm in a way that still catches me off guard every time, because six centuries of cold doesn’t disappear just because the sun is allowed in now.
My breathing slowing to match his. Not because I’m trying. Because the bond does that. Pulls us into the same rhythm the way gravity pulls water downhill.
His fingers in my hair, undoing the braid I tied before the mission. Slow. One strand at a time. The kind of patience that belongs to a man with centuries of practice at being careful with things that matter.
My palms where they rest against his chest. Warmer than they should be.
The sunlight moves across the floor. The compound hums beneath us. Forty-seven people breathing in beds that were empty yesterday. Shifters standing guard in hallways built for vampires. An alliance that nobody proposed because nobody had to.
I close my eyes. I don’t sleep. But I stay.
Chapter
Twenty-One
Julian’s footage is on my desk in the study. Two body cam feeds, Alexei’s records, the clipboard data from each room. Everything organized. Timestamped. Ready.
Celeste is across from me.
“Send it to every lord tonight,” she says. “All of them. Let the footage speak for itself.”
“If we send it without context, Okonkwo will act. Dmitri will want to verify. And the lords who are already buying Konstantin’s blood will warn him, and he’ll relocate the other farms before we can reach them.”
“Then we send it to Okonkwo and Dmitri first. Get them committed before the others see it. How long?”
“One night. I draft the messages tonight. Send to Okonkwo and Dmitri by tomorrow. Then it goes wide.”
