Epilogue #2
Soren, raw determination in a tiny blue swimsuit, charges towards the incoming tide with the confidence of a man ten times his size.
His legs are chubby pistons. He's got his mother's bronze skin and something around the eyes that might be mine, and right now, his arms are outstretched as the water rushes toward him and—
I move before I think. My hands hook under his armpits and I swing him up, up, into the dying gold of the afternoon.
He shrieks. That particular shriek that means again, again, do it again, and his wet feet kick constellations of saltwater across my chest, across the vines tattooed around my throat.
“Papa!” He grabs at my nose. Misses. Grabs my lip instead.
“Little wolf.” I lower him until our foreheads touch. “You're going to swallow the whole ocean if I don't watch you.”
His answer is a string of syllables that might be words in some language only he speaks.
Over his shoulder, I catch Zara watching us.
Her smile has taken over her entire face.
It's in the crinkle of her eyes, the way her cheekbones have gone round, the slight part of her lips.
She's wearing a white cover-up that the wind keeps pressing against her curves—those hips I know by heart, the soft belly that carried our son, the thighs I've mapped with my tongue more times than I can count.
Something twists in my chest. Something adjacent to pain, but sweeter.
“Put him down before you spoil him rotten,” she calls.
“Too late.” I settle Soren on my shoulders instead, his small fists clutching handfuls of my hair. “The spoiling happened day one.”
Our cabin goes quiet after eight, because Soren is currently tucked into his grandmother’s bed.
Soren fought sleep like it was a personal enemy, but his eyelids betrayed him eventually.
We built a nest of blankets on the floor by the fireplace—not that we need a fire, not in this weather, but the crackle of it soothes him.
His chest rises and falls in that rhythm I've memorized, the rhythm that still makes me check on him at three in the morning sometimes, just to be sure.
“He’ll be fine tonight, Zara,” Samira reassures her daughter, nearly pushing us both out of the room. “Now go and have some alone time. God knows you both need it.”
I go red in the face as Zara splutters; the bedroom door closes behind us with a click that echoes.
“Well…” I clear my throat.
She giggles. “Mom wasn’t wrong. It’s nice to be alone with you,” she breathes.
When we’re in our room, she leans against the door, the moonlight through the window doing obscene things to the shadows on her collarbone. Her cover-up is gone. Underneath, a simple sundress—yellow, thin-strapped, the kind of thing that slips off one shoulder when she's not paying attention.
She's paying attention now.
“Three days,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “Three days I've been watching you.”
“Watching.” Her eyebrow arches. “Is that what we're calling it?”
“Torture. We're calling it torture.”
She laughs, and the sound hits me somewhere below the sternum. "You're so dramatic."
"I'm honest." I close the distance between us in three strides.
My hands find her waist. The fabric of her dress is warm from her skin, and underneath it, the shape of her is exactly as I remember—softer in some places, firmer in others, different than before Soren but somehow more.
"Three days of your ass in that swimsuit.
Your legs. The way you lick salt off your lips. "
“You notice a lot.”
“I notice everything about you.” My mouth is at her ear now. “Every single thing.”
Her breath catches. Just a hitch. Just enough.
Then she shoves at my chest.
Not hard. Playful. Her palms flat against the ink, her eyes glinting with that specific brand of trouble she's perfected over the years.
“You think you can just—what? Growl a few words at me and I'll melt?”
“Usually works.”
“Not tonight.”
I know this game. I've played it with her a hundred times, a thousand, and it never gets old because Zara doesn't just submit.
She makes me earn it. She pushes back. She looks at me with those brown eyes full of fire and dare and prove it, and something in me wakes up that the rest of the world never gets to see.
"Not tonight," I repeat, stepping back to give her room. "Okay. So what do you want tonight?"
She doesn't answer with words.
Her fingers go to the straps of her dress.
One, then the other, sliding them down her shoulders with excruciating slowness.
The fabric pools at her elbows, catches on her breasts, holds for a breathless second before falling to her waist, to her hips, to the floor.
She's wearing nothing underneath. She knew she'd be wearing nothing underneath.
The moonlight paints her in silver and shadow. Her breasts, fuller than before, the nipples dark and already peaked. The soft curve of her belly, the wider sweep of her hips, the triangle of dark hair at the juncture of her thighs.
“This,” she says. “I want you to stop talking.”
I don't remember moving. But suddenly I'm on my knees, and my hands are on the backs of her thighs, and my mouth is pressed to the warmth of her stomach. She exhales—a shaky, surprised sound—and her fingers thread into my hair.
“Zara.” Her name is a vibration against her skin.
“Mikhail.”
Mocking me. But her voice is thinner now.
I look up at her. The angle makes her seem towering, powerful, a goddess in the moonlight. “You're going to let me worship you. And then you're going to get on your knees and worship me. And we're going to do it fast, because Soren sleeps like his mother—”
“Lightly?”
“Like a tiny dictator who might wake at any moment.”
She's laughing even as I pull her down to the bed, even as I roll her beneath me, even as my mouth finds her throat and the pulse that hammers there. The laughter dissolves into a gasp when my teeth graze the spot where neck becomes shoulder.
The bed creaks. The window is open and the surf murmurs outside, a constant low rhythm that we've been listening to for days without really hearing. I hear it now. It matches the blood rushing in my ears.
“Tell me what you need.” My lips move against her collarbone.
“Fast. You said we're doing this fast.”
“That's not what I asked.”
Her hips roll up against mine. I'm still wearing my pants and she's completely bare, and the friction pulls a groan from somewhere deep in my chest. She feels it—my cock, hard and straining—and her eyes flutter half-closed.