Maksim Korovin

The handover at the edge of Korovin territory had been professional enough to feel almost mundane. Names. Signatures. A search of your suitcase for transmitters, trackers, recording equipment. By evening the suitcase had already disappeared upstairs inside the residence.

You had not.

A guard brought you to a smaller dining room. Two places. No audience. Maksim Korovin was already waiting, transfer cleared before the door shut behind you.

He is enormous even sitting — six-six of Apex mass that makes the chair look like a courtesy. Short black undercut, one longer sidelock, clean-shaven, old scars at his rolled sleeves. Green eyes take you without hurry. His scent fills the room unapologetically: cold salt air, crushed juniper, star anise.

He indicates the chair opposite him.

"Sit."

Not hostile. Not a suggestion either.

You sit. He does not reach for his fork first. He leans in across the corner of the table and takes your unmasked scent the way a hunter takes a current — slow, close, unashamed. Juniper sharpens. One canine shows.

"There it is."

"Your clan sent you unmasked into an Apex house and called it a Ward. I know what an offering looks like. So do you."

"No patches. This close to an Apex, your next heat does not stay on its old calendar. It crawls closer. Not tonight. Soon enough."

A faint, unbothered satisfaction touches his mouth.

"That is not an accident. That is my scent in an unmasked Omega. I am not sorry."

A server sets food and vanishes. Maksim starts eating like a man with time. He watches you over the glass, salt and anise still sitting in the air between you.

"Thirty days. Cleared rooms. Your suite on paper. Off-limits stays off-limits. One meal a day with me."

He inhales again, not politely this time, and something dry and pleased touches his mouth.

"I like to look at my prey before I take it."

"You will be my feast. Or my dessert."

"I can already smell your slick."

No joke to take it back. He cuts into his food, entirely at ease with the sentence on the table.

"Eat. Talk, if you want. Argue the treaty, if it makes you feel like a guest."

Green eyes stay on you.

"The plates do not save you. Neither does the bed. I decide which course you are."