Page 46 of Curvy Sold Mate

She fell asleep sometime around four. When she woke, the sun was up, and Damian was in the garden.

Olivia saw him from the kitchen window while she waited for the kettle—seated on the stone bench, elbows on knees, a mug balanced in his hands.

She poured her tea and went outside.

He looked up when she approached, and the smile that crossed his face was real and muted, a dimmer version of the brightness he usually carried, as though someone had turned down the wattage.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning.” She sat on the far end of the bench. The stone was cold through her trousers, the early air sharp with the smell of damp earth and the rosemary that grew along the garden wall. “You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep.” He turned the mug in his hands. “Seems to be going around.”

They sat with that. The garden was quiet around them, the morning still young enough that the training yard hadn’t started, the compound holding its breath the way it did in the hour before the day’s machinery engaged.

“I saw him last night,” Damian said. “After the corridor. He came back to his quarters, and I was in the hallway, and he looked—” He paused. “He looked like someone had taken his skeleton out and put it back in wrong.”

Olivia drank her tea and didn’t respond, because the description was accurate enough that responding would have meant admitting she knew exactly what Viktor had looked like, and the knowing was still too raw to share.

“I owe you an apology,” Damian said.

She looked at him.

“Not for touching your hand at dinner. That was an accident, and I’d take it back if I could, though I suspect the damage was done the moment I walked back into this compound.” He set his mug on the bench between them. “I owe you an apology for four years ago. For the way I was with you. For what I didn’t see.”

“We covered this in the garden last week.”

“We covered the surface of it. I said I was shit to you, and you were generous enough to call it inattention rather than cruelty, and we both pretended that was enough.” He pursed his lips. “It wasn’t enough. I need to say the rest.”

She waited. The tea cooled in her hands.

“I knew,” he said. “That’s the part I haven’t told you. I knew you were in love with my brother when you started seeing me. I could see it—the way you flinched every time his name came up, the whole careful performance of being over someone you weren’t over. I knew, and I pursued you anyway, because I liked you, and I wanted you. I told myself that wanting someone was enough to justify being with them even when I was standing in a space that belonged to someone else.”

The words arrived with the careful, considered weight of something that had been carried for four years and was being set down with the deliberate attention of a man who understood that how you put a thing down mattered as much as the putting down itself.

“I wasn’t cruel,” he said. “You were right about that. I was just… convenient. I was the version of what you needed that didn’t require you to face the thing you actually wanted. I went along with it because the wanting was flattering and the facing would have been difficult. I have never in my life chosen the difficult thing when the easy one was available.”

“Damian.”

“Let me finish.” He held up a hand, and the gesture was his brother’s, the same palm-out pause Viktor used when he needed a sentence to land before the next one arrived. “My brother has loved you for eight years, and he spent every one of those years standing three feet behind Kahn’s shoulder, doing his job, saying nothing.”

He picked up his mug and drank. The gesture was steadier than she expected, as though saying the words had lifted something from him rather than adding to the weight.

“He’s not going to know how to do this,” Damian said. “Being loved. Letting someone in. The man has been a locked door for so long he’s forgotten there’s a room behind it. He’s going to get it wrong. He’s going to retreat, and overcorrect, and turn a feeling into a tactical assessment because that’s the only language his brain trusts.” He looked at her, his eyes warm l and entirely without agenda. “But he’ll stay. That’s the thing about Viktor. Whatever else he gets wrong, he stays. He has never once in his life left a room he was supposed to be in.”

“You’re a better man than you give yourself credit for,” she said, the words leaving her warmly.

“I’m a man who left,” he said. “That’s the thing I’m trying to be better than.”

She reached across the bench and squeezed his wrist—brief, firm, the kind of contact that meant I hear you without requiring either of them to elaborate—and he covered her hand with his for a second before letting go.

Chapter 28 - Viktor

Viktor was losing an argument with a loaf of bread when she walked in.

He’d been at the counter for three minutes with a paring knife and the sourdough Elena had left to cool that afternoon, producing slices that ranged from wedge-shaped to structurally inadvisable, and the rational part of his mind—the part that coordinated military operations and read topographic maps at three in the morning—understood that a different knife would solve the problem. But the serrated blade was on the upper rack of the magnetic strip, and reaching for it would mean admitting that the approach he’d chosen was failing.

He heard her footsteps in the corridor. Knew the cadence before she reached the doorway—the pace she walked when she’d made a decision and was carrying it forward, unhurried because urgency would have implied doubt. Olivia did not carry decisions she doubted.