036— "JUST HOVERING."

Niko lowered me onto the bench at the end of the corridor and sat beside me.

He said nothing for a moment which was so unlike him that I almost looked up.

He held out water.

"I've had enough water today to drown in," I said.

He pulled it back and set it on the floor. Leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and studied the ceiling like it had personally offended him.

"I figured something out in practice today." He said.

I looked at him.

"The left edge turn," he said. "The one Coach keeps losing his mind about. I don't think it's the edge at all. I think it's the foot placement before the transition."

I stared at him.

"If you plant an inch further back…"

"Niko—"

"Just hear me out. An inch further back and the weight shifts naturally, so instead of fighting the turn you're already in it before you—"

"You're talking about hockey."

"I'm always talking about hockey." He looked at me. "Work through it with me."

"Right now."

"Conceptually. Humour me."

I looked at the wall. Then back at him. "If you plant further back you lose momentum on the approach."

"Only if your approach speed is wrong. Come in slightly faster and—"

"Then you overshoot the turn."

"Not if the foot placement compensates—"

"It doesn't compensate it just moves the problem—"

"THAT'S what I'm saying." He turned toward me like I'd said the exact thing he'd been waiting for. "The problem moves somewhere you can actually fix. You can't fix a bad edge mid-turn. You CAN fix an overshoot because it's just speed…"

"You manage speed before the turn, not during…"

"Exactly my point!"

"That's not what you said…"

"It's absolutely what I said—"

I laughed.

Didn't decide to. It just came out, and Niko looked at me and said nothing about it. Just kept going about foot placement like laughing in corridors after blood in palms was the most normal sequence of events imaginable.

We talked.

He was wrong about the foot placement but not entirely wrong and by the time he stood up I had forgotten for fifteen minutes that my hands had been red.

"Elena's sleeping," I said when he asked. "My room."

He nodded once. 

"I should go disturb Kai," he said pleasantly. "He gets deeply unpleasant when nobody disturbs him long enough."

"I'm sure he's managing."

"He never manages. That's sort of his entire personality." He stood. "Go eat something."

He walked away and I watched him go and my chest was lighter than twenty minutes ago which I was fairly certain was the whole point of the conversation about foot placement.

I got up and just walked.

No direction. Just moving through the mansion the way I did when my head needed somewhere to put itself. One corridor, another, a door I hadn't tried.

I pushed it open.

Very dark. 

I reached for the light and stopped.

A piano.

Upright. Old. Dark wood that absorbed the grey afternoon light coming through the high window, the keys sitting there pale. I crossed the room before I decided to, sat on the bench and put my hands on the keys.

One song.

My mother taught me one piece. Said every woman should know one completely. Something that was yours alone.

I played it.

Slowly at first. My fingers found the notes the way they always found them. The melody filled the room and it was so completely her that my breath snagged on the first full bar.

Her face came back.

Her actual face. Not the nightmare face — the real one. The one that laughed at its own jokes before finishing them, that looked at my father across a room like he was something she'd won and intended to keep. 

Elijah's face. The way his whole body moved when he laughed, not just his mouth. My father's hands. The scar on his chin.

I played.

Then Crew arrived in my head without being invited.

His voice.

 ‘... weak, worthless, beneath me…’

All those years of it, every cruel thing said in front of witnesses so I couldn't call it a lie. His face at the coronation. The satisfaction in it. Eight years of waiting to say no to me publicly and enjoying every second.

I played faster.

Then Kai.

I tried to stop it. My fingers didn't slow.

His eyes. The way things moved through them when he thought I wasn't watching. Things he'd never let reach his face anywhere else. 

The terrace. His hands on my neck. The kiss that had started like a decision he'd already made and I hadn't known until it was happening. His fingers underneath my dress, to my panties…

“Uhhhm.” I moaned, letting everything envelope me again.

The staircase and *beau—tiful* in two broken pieces. Carrying me upstairs. The nightmare. His hand holding mine. His office just now. The way he'd gone completely still when he saw the blood.

His arms pulling me in before I ran.

I tried to stop thinking about him.

He lingered.

I pressed a wrong note. Pulled my hands from the keys.

I hated him. Of course I did.

The room went quiet.

I sat there and the quiet had his face in it and I had absolutely no idea what to do with that so I stood up and walked out and told myself to do something useful.

                          …

The painting room door was unlocked.

The lamp throwing amber everywhere. The walls and the same woman on every one of them, and I walked past all of it to the back of the room where I hadn't gone the first time.

The back wall had a large shelf.

Floor to ceiling, covered in books and objects arranged carefully. There was something about the way it sat against the wall. 

Too flush.

I knew this because I had grown up in a house with a secret passage behind a bookcase and I knew how people hid doors inside furniture.

I reached for the candle holder on the second shelf.

"Leave. Now."I flinched.

Kai stood at the doorway. His very broad shoulders taking up the frame.

I saw the closest thing to panic I had ever seen on Kai Volkov's face.

I turned back to the shelf.

"Don't you dare," I said. "Don't you dare tell me to leave. I wouldn't even be here if you hadn't ruined everything from the beginning." 

I faced him fully. "If you hadn't burned that paper. If you hadn't kept everything you knew to yourself while I walked around this mansion thinking I was safe." 

My voice rose and I let it. "You don't get to stand there and keep quiet like you always do. You don't get to—"

"It was a setup."

I stopped.

What setup?

He stepped into the room, still looking into my eyes without blinking.

"The old woman," he said. His voice was different. Rough at the edges. 

"She wasn't old."

I stared at him.

Daria." He held my gaze. 

"The woman at the diner. The number. The meeting place. All of it was designed to get you somewhere Crew's people could take you." 

He stopped. "She was twenty-six. A Silvercrest wolf who'd been in your diner two weeks before you saw her. The age, the ring, the story about your mother—" 

His jaw moved. "Fabricated. Every word. Crew sent her."

The room tilted.

I stood very still.

The hope I'd carried. The number I'd hidden in my drawer and checked twice before sleeping and protected like it was worth protecting.

"He knew," I said. Very quiet. "Crew knew I would go to someone who mentioned my mother."

Kai said nothing.

"He built her for me," I said. "He looked at what I needed and built a person around it and sent her into my diner."

The amber light sat between us.

He moved. One step, then another, closing the distance until my back found the shelf and the wood pressed hard against my spine.

I had nowhere left to go and he didn't stop.

His hand came up beside my head, fingers resting against the spines of books.

The room went smaller, darker, the air thinning to just the space between our mouths. I could feel his exhale on my cheeks. Measured. Nothing measured about the way his eyes dropped to my lips and stayed there.

My pulse turned violent.

Thump.

Thump.

I stopped breathing properly.

"The paper I burned," he said.

His voice barely reached me. Rough at the edges. He leaned in. His breath brushed the corner of my mouth. I didn't feel anything of course.

The heat of him, the closeness, the fact that if he moved another inch—

"I knew what it was." A whisper now, his mouth near my ear, and I shuddered without deciding to, my hands finding the shelf behind me, gripping the wood. 

"I burned it because if you'd called that number—"

I turned my head and our eyes locked.

His eyes were blown wide, and I could see my own reflection in them. 

"I'd have walked straight to them," I whispered.

He cupped my face. Both hands, his thumbs brushing my cheekbones, tilting my chin up. 

I didn't move. Didn't speak. My heart raced so hard I felt it in my teeth, my fingertips, the hollow of my stomach. 

He held me there, breathing against my mouth.

His hands slid down. Over my throat, my shoulders, tracing the line of my collarbones with his thumbs, and I arched into it without deciding to, my head falling back, exposing my neck. 

He watched me do it, watched my throat work as I swallowed, and his grip tightened at my waist, pulling me in, fitting me against him until I could feel everywhere we touched.

His thigh pressed between mine and I felt the line of him against my hip and made a sound I didn't recognize.

His hands spread across my back, pulling me closer, until there was no space left.

He leaned down and his nose traced my throat, breathing me in, and I felt his exhale hot against my pulse point, his lips barely grazing, not kissing, just hovering.

His mouth moved to my ear, and I shuddered. My fingers found his hair, pulling him closer.

"Kai…”