Page 33 of Curvy Sold Mate

His throat moved. He was quiet with it in a way she hadn’t anticipated—no deflection, no charm deployed as a shield. He sat with her words the way a man sat with a medical result he’d been half-expecting and had hoped would come back clean.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have been paying better attention.”

“It wasn’t serious.”

“That’s not an excuse.” He finished his tea in one long pull. “My brother pays attention. I’ll give him that. The man has been watching you for a decade, and I don’t think he’s blinked.”

Her pulse kicked. She kept her face arranged in the expression she wore for conversations that were trying to turn a corner she hadn’t agreed to round.

“He watches everyone,” she said. “It’s his job.”

“He watches everyone because it’s his job. He watches you because he can’t stop.” Damian set the empty mug on the bench between them. “I was with you for three months, and I never once saw his face change when you walked into a room. You know why?” He waited until she met his eyes. “Because I wasn’t looking. I was too busy being the version of easy that made me feel like enough, and I never thought to wonder why my brother left every room I entered with you ten minutes after we sat down.”

“I should go,” she said. “The archive files need sorting before Viktor, and I meet this afternoon.”

“The investigation. Yeah, I heard something about that.” He stood when she stood, and the courtesy was genuine, the manners their mother had beaten into both Hale boys surviving in Damian as a reflex, even when the rest of his attention was scattered. “Olivia.”

She paused.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “In the pack, doing what you’re doing. I wish I’d been the kind of man who could have seen it when it mattered.”

She held his gaze for a moment that stretched past comfortable and into the territory where things were understood without being named. He had loved her as much as he was capable of loving anyone at the time, and it hadn’t been enough.

“You weren’t ready for it,” she said, and it came out gentler than she’d intended, the edge worn off by the morning air and the honesty that had passed between them.

She walked back into the compound with the mug empty and the conversation settled in her chest beside everything else she was carrying—the investigation files, the bond’s low warmth, the memory of Viktor’s voice through the bathroom door last night saying something she’d pretended not to hear. And Damian’s words, aimed at a wound he’d only just realized he’d helped make, pressing against it with a weight that felt less like pain and more like something being set down.

She went to the archive. Pulled the week-six file. Opened her notebook to a fresh page and uncapped her pen. The work was waiting.

Chapter 20 - Viktor

The sparring yard was empty at five in the morning, which was why Viktor used it then.

He wrapped his hands in the dark. The tape was old, fraying at the edges. He wound it by feel—three turns around the knuckles, two across the palm, a figure-eight through the thumb—the way his father had taught him before his father stopped teaching him anything at all.

He’d been out here for twenty minutes when Damian appeared.

His brother leaned against the fence post with a cup of coffee he must have charmed out of Elena, which was a feat in itself—Elena didn’t brew before six, and she didn’t make exceptions. Damian had gotten an exception.

Viktor hit the bag. The chain rattled.

“You still do this,” Damian said. “Every morning?”

“Most mornings.”

“Doesn’t that get boring?”

“No.”

Damian sipped his coffee. The steam curled in the cold air, and the light was coming up behind the mountains in that grey-violet wash that preceded sunrise by half an hour. Viktor could feel his brother watching.

He hit the bag again—jab, cross, hook. The tape was starting to darken with sweat at the knuckles.

“She looks good,” Damian said.

Viktor’s fist connected with the bag a fraction harder than the last strike, and the chain swung wider.

“Olivia,” Damian clarified, as though there were anyone else he could have meant. “She looks settled, confident—more than she used to be.”