Nicolas’s POV

She didn’t come find me all day.

I noticed it the way you notice a tooth gone missing—kept reaching for something that wasn’t there. The morning meeting ran long. The afternoon numbers were a disaster. Roman talked for forty minutes about eastern border supply chains and I retained maybe three words of it, which was a new personal low even for me.

She didn’t come by the office.

Didn’t appear at lunch.

Didn’t materialize in a doorway with that careful, quiet way she had of entering rooms like she was testing whether she was allowed to be there.

Nothing.

I told myself she was tired. She’d looked tired lately. Hadn’t been eating enough—Nadia had said as much, and I hadn’t forgotten it, even if I hadn’t done anything useful with the information yet. She’d probably slept through the afternoon. Probably needed it.

I told myself that.

Kept telling myself that while Roman was still talking about supply chains.

The second meeting ended. The third one started. I moved through all of it on autopilot, the part of my brain that ran the empire doing its job while the rest of me kept doing the same stupid thing it had apparently decided to do now, which was think about her. Her face over the breakfast table. The way she’d said *can we not go to war* in that careful voice like she was testing thin ice.

The way she’d pressed her face into my chest afterward.

*Thank you,* she’d said.

Like I’d done something remarkable by not being terrible.

Andrei caught me checking the time for the third time in an hour. He didn’t say anything. He looked deeply entertained.

I considered throwing something at him. Didn’t, because we were in the middle of a security briefing and the optics would have been questionable.

By the time the evening wrapped up, I was done. Done with meetings. Done with Roman’s careful voice telling me careful things I already knew. Done with the general state of not being in the same room as my mate.

I went to find her.

---

Her room was quiet.

The light under the door was off.

I stopped outside it. Stood there for a second. Felt something unknot in my chest just from knowing she was on the other side of the door. That was new. That was a very recent development in what I was apparently calling my life now.

I pushed the door open.

Dark inside. Curtains drawn. The kind of deep quiet that meant someone had been out for hours.

The shape under the blankets was obvious the second I came in. Just visible in the low light from the hallway—that lump of someone burrowed under the covers the way she did sometimes, like if she pulled the blankets high enough the rest of the world would forget she existed.

Something pulled in my chest.

I closed the door behind me. Moved across the room. Slow. Quiet. She’d startled badly the last time I’d moved too fast in the dark, and I still thought about that—the way her whole body had gone rigid, the way her breathing had gone wrong. Not doing that again.

I sat on the edge of the mattress.

She didn’t stir.

"Hey." I kept my voice low. "Sleeping this early?"

Nothing.

I reached out. Found her shoulder through the blanket, or what I thought was her shoulder. Started to rub a slow circle.

"You still awake in there?"

The shape didn’t move.

Something registered. Small and wrong. The smell was off. Not her—not that particular scent that I’d apparently memorized without deciding to, the one that had been driving my wolf insane for weeks now. Just—fabric. Laundry. Nothing underneath it.

I frowned.

"Irina."

Nothing.

I put my arm around her. Pulled back.

The weight was wrong.

Too light. Too uniformly distributed. No give where a shoulder should give, no warmth where a body would be warm.

I went still.

"Irina."

Still nothing.

I thought about what I’d been meaning to tell her. About the plan. About the reason I’d approved the visit from Iron Thorn—not because I was handing her back, not because keeping her was inconvenient, but because I’d thought it through and pulling Maxim and her father onto my territory was the cleanest way to do this. Controlled. No war. No body count in the hundreds. Just them, walking into my building, thinking they were here for a ceremony, and then—

Then they were mine to deal with.

And she could do whatever she wanted with them after.

That had been the plan. I’d been looking forward to telling her. Looking forward to the look on her face when she understood that I wasn’t—

I reached down.

Grabbed the edge of the blanket.

Yanked it back.

Two pillows.

Just two pillows, stacked together under the blanket, shaped into nothing more than the rough suggestion of a person if you weren’t looking closely.

The bed was empty.

She was gone.