Page 41 of Curvy Sold Mate

“Terrifying?”

“Disorienting. Because I’ve spent eight years believing he didn’t. And the bond is telling me a different story, every minute of every day, and the two versions can’t both be true, and the one I believed for longer is the one my body still reaches for when I’m not paying attention.”

Caitlynn nodded slowly. The wind moved through the garden, carrying the scent of rosemary and the distant metal clang of the training yard. Olivia’s wolf stirred in her chest with a contentment that had nothing to do with the conversation and everything to do with being whole again, being present in a body that ran on a current she’d taken for granted until it was gone.

“The bond will keep telling you,” Caitlynn said. “It doesn’t lie, and it doesn’t edit, and it doesn’t arrange information to protect your feelings. Whatever Viktor is carrying—the wanting, the fear, the thing he does where he walls everything off and then spends the night rebuilding the walls because your existence keeps cracking them—you’re going to feel all of it. And he’s going to feel yours.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Because he’ll feel the wanting?”

“Because he’ll feel the doubt.” She pressed her thumb into the ceramic of her mug hard enough that the nail whitened. “He’ll feel that I still flinch, Cait. He’ll feel the part of me that looks in a mirror and hears a voice that isn’t his telling me what he sees when he looks at me. He’ll know that the voice is louder than the bond, and I don’t know how to explain to him that it isn’t about him—that the voice was there before him and will be there after anything he says or does, because it lives in a room he can’t reach.”

Caitlynn set her mug on the bench between them and put both hands on Olivia’s knee, the grip warm and firm and grounding in a way that Olivia needed more than she was willing to admit.

“You don’t have to explain it to him,” Caitlynn said. “You have to let him see it. There’s a difference, and the difference is that explaining asks him to understand, and letting him see asks him to stay. Viktor Hale has never once in his entire miserable, disciplined, self-denying life left a room he was supposed to be in.”

Olivia’s eyes burned. She blinked against it, hard, twice, and looked at the scorched training stone in the garden until the burning passed.

“I sometimes think you’re too wise for twenty-four,” she said.

“I set a curtain on fire last month and pretended it didn’t happen. My wisdom has limits.” Caitlynn squeezed her knee and let go. “Your wolf looked magnificent, by the way. The howl registered on Kahn’s seismograph. He thought it was a landslide.”

“Kahn does not have a seismograph.”

“He has very sensitive ears and a tendency toward catastrophic thinking, which is functionally the same thing.”

Olivia’s mouth betrayed her with something that was almost a smile. Caitlynn saw it, acknowledged it with a tilt of her chin that said There you are, and walked back toward the compound with the mugs dangling from her fingers and her hair catching the light.

Olivia stayed on the bench. The sun was warm on her face, and her wolf hummed in her chest, and the bond pulsed with Viktor’s presence. She let it pulse without reaching for it, because reaching was his job now, and she had spent enough of her life bridging distances that other people had made.

Chapter 24 - Viktor

She was angry, and he knew it.

The bond carried the texture of it—a tight, hot frequency that sat behind his sternum the way a pulled muscle sat in a joint, present with every movement, impossible to ignore. He could tell when she’d poured her coffee because the frequency spiked, which meant someone had said something to her, or she’d thought about something that cut, or she’d looked at the chair where he usually sat and found it empty because he’d been in the briefing room since four, doing what he’d always done when the inside of his own head became uninhabitable: working.

He had not slept.

Three nights since the infirmary, and he had not slept. He’d lain in the dark and felt her through the bond from across the compound—her breathing, her moods, the slow cycle of her sleep that he could track the way he tracked patrol rotations, by rhythm and deviation—and the intimacy of it was so far beyond anything he’d experienced that his body treated it as a threat.

He could feel her now, moving through the kitchen with the precise, contained energy that meant she was performing normalcy for the benefit of whoever was watching. Elena, probably, who watched everything and commented on nothing, which made her the ideal audience for the show Olivia was running: I am fine, nothing has changed, I did not sleep with my husband three days ago, and then wake up alone and spend the following seventy-two hours pretending neither of us remembers.

Viktor pressed his thumb against the edge of the desk. The patrol reports blurred.

The problem was that he remembered everything. Every sound she’d made, every place she’d touched him, the way her eyes had opened and found his in the dark, and the bond had flared between them with an intensity that had left him raw, exposed, his chest cracked open like a house with the walls torn out. He remembered the weight of her against him after, the silence that had held them both, the warmth of her breath on his collarbone, and the bone-deep terror of realizing that he had given someone something he could not take back and had no idea how to protect.

So he’d left before she woke. Had dressed in the dark with the care of a man disarming a tripwire, had eased himself from the bed without disturbing the sheets more than necessary, had walked to the briefing room and sat at this desk attempting to begin the process of putting himself back together.

Three days, and the process was not going well.

The walls wouldn’t stay. He’d build a section—discipline here, routine there—and then Olivia would walk past the briefing room, or he’d catch her scent in the corridor, or the bond would carry a flash of her irritation or her laughter or the quiet ache she felt when she thought about the, and the section would crumble, and he’d have to start again.

He was running out of material.

Damian found him at noon.

His brother appeared in the doorway with two plates, evidently having chosen to be useful, and he made it clear that he was not going to be turned away.