Chapter 25 #2
“We’ll come back to that. Eric, we can’t run away. What about Colum? Would you really be okay never talking to him again?”
“Colum’s okay now,” he said slowly. “He has Xavier and Annie.”
She just waited.
“If the options are losing you because we can’t find a way to be together or losing him and going on the run with you...” Eric looked up. “I choose you. Every time.”
She loved him. It hit her in that moment just how completely she loved this man. She’d loved him for a long time, but there’d always been a part of her she held back, knowing their love was doomed. It wasn’t anymore.
“I love you.”
He frowned, but the line between his brows smoothed out as he studied her expression. “I love you too.”
Something inside her settled. Nikolett cleared her throat. “I think I know what will work.”
“You have a plan.” He grinned in satisfaction.
“Of course I have a plan. Several plans, actually.” Nikolett pushed her plate to Eric, then went and got her computer, opening the file called “If-Eric-stops-being-a-coward.”
Since both the file name and contents were written in Hungarian, he didn’t know what she’d called the document.
He was grinning. “You have a written plan?”
“And you have no plan.”
“I do have a plan. It was to ask you what we should do since you’re smarter than me.”
Nikolett hid her smile with a frown. She wasn’t sure it worked since she could feel the corners of her lips twitching up. “Lazy,” she chided.
“I call it knowing my strengths and weaknesses.”
“Which am I? Your strength or your weakness?”
“Both.” He sat forward. “What’s the plan?”
“Neither of us steps down, at least not right away. Basically,” she said, “we have a one-year power rebalancing and restructuring. We shift more power to the admirals while also making the fleet admiral more present in each territory, in an advisory or support capacity, thereby eliminating any issues around undue influence.”
“Does anyone actually want the fleet admiral to be more present?”
Nikolett shrugged. “When I was having trouble with my security, you sent the Spartan Guard.”
“Against your will.”
“That’s irrelevant. The point is you and the Spartan Guard are an underutilized resource. With this plan, you spend one month in each of the territories. While you and the Spartan Guard are in residence, you help the territory with whatever they need.”
“And if they don’t want help?”
“That’s not an option. If they don’t want you there but can’t figure out a way to keep you occupied and out of their way, they don’t deserve the job of admiral.”
“Still, they’re not going to like it.”
“True, which is why we are also going to strip the requirement for the fleet admiral to approve marriages. Instead, the fleet admiral still does the ceremony, but his approval isn’t necessary.
He has the right to object to marriages, but not flat-out deny them by withholding approval.
If the fleet admiral has an objection, it’s brought before all the admirals and discussed. ”
“Would I, I mean, the fleet admiral, still be able to assign marriages?”
“Yes and no. You can, but if you’re the one who creates the marriage, the admiral of anyone involved gets the same right to object. If there’s an objection to a fleet admiral-created marriage it’s, once again, brought before all the admirals.”
“How does this help us?”
“If we’re in a trinity but I’m still admiral, the fear is I’ll have undue influence over you, yes?”
“You already have undue influence. You always have. Mostly because you make every damn thing your business.”
Nikolett shot him a look.
“…and because I love you.”
“If each admiral has your undivided attention for a month, it undercuts their arguments about my influence.”
“So in this plan, you and I see each other for one month a year?” Eric pushed to his feet. “And the rest of the time you and cookie guy—”
“Gus. We need to start calling him Gus.”
“Fuck Gus,” Eric snarled. “Because that’s what you’d be doing. You’d be fucking Gus while I was listening to Ricardo or Victoire bitch about some stupid fucking thing. He’d be your husband. He’d get to have breakfast with you. He’d eat takeaway while sitting on the floor. He’d—”
Nikolett jumped to her feet, stepped into his path as he paced. He smacked into her and she would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed her.
Nikolett laid her head against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, but his hands were fisted against her back. It took a minute of standing there silently, her squeezing him as tight as she could, before his hands relaxed.
“One year,” she said once he’d calmed. “And we aren’t getting married until the end of that year, so no, I wouldn’t be having breakfast or sex with Gus. We’d say we’re looking for our third, or just say we’re making arrangements with no details.”
He was still tense but his hands cradled her back and hips, palms flat, fingers spread.
“Nine months of the year you’re with a territory, including mine. The other three…” She tipped her head up, chin on his sternum. He looked down at her, a faint frown still on his face. “I go on sabbatical.”
“Sabbatical?” The frown shifted from concern to confusion.
“The three months you’re not with a territory, you’re at Triskelion. I take a three-month sabbatical from being admiral of Hungary and I join you at Triskelion. While I’m with you, I’m not the admiral of Hungary, I’m just your fiancée.”
“Just my fiancée…Nikolett, I don’t want you reduced to that.”
“Oh, I will be helping you with Masters’ Admiralty society-wide issues. Any issues really. I’ll be the unofficial vice fleet admiral.”
“Fuck, why don’t we just make you the official vice fleet admiral?”
“There might be precedent for a new power structure. Colum can look into it.”
“Good. He needs to go through all the records at Triskelion anyway.”
“Why are the records there and not at the…actually, never mind.”
“I don’t like this plan but I don’t hate it.” Eric kissed her head. “What happens after a year?”
Now she inhaled, exhaled. “I step down.”
“No,” he said immediately. “I’ll step down. I’ll step down and you become fleet admiral. As long as we get married first, you’re qualified.”
“None of the other admirals are going to agree to swapping you for me. People don’t like me.”
“I like you. A lot.”
“Thank you, but even if there wasn’t an issue with my likability, the fact is no one wants the fleet admiral to be someone who is a current territory admiral.
They have no neutrality. The rule is it has to be a former admiral, but in practice, hasn’t it always been a retired admiral who was out of office for at least a few years? ”
“Colum could check the records.”
“I’ll be happy,” she assured him quietly. “I like solving problems and creating action plans more than I like the day-to-day running of the territory. You’re a more charismatic leader, and in a crisis, people will follow you.”
“Nikki…”
“We’re a good team. And we have one year to decide. Maybe one of the other admirals will retire tomorrow, and in a year, they can be fleet admiral and you can come to Hungary with me.”
“One year. And I only get to spend four months of that year with you.”
“It’s better than seeing one another for a day or two every few months during a crisis.”
“But not as good as living with you full time.”
“No, it’s not.”
“At the end of the year is when we get married?”
“Yes. That’s part of the plan now too—Arthur recruits Gus, he has a chance to be a regular member, and at the end of the year when we get married, he becomes our third. If you want. If there’s someone you’d prefer...”
“I’d prefer not to share you.”
“Would another woman be less stressful?”
“Not really. The idea of some sexy woman fucking you with a strap-on isn’t better.”
“Maybe I’d be fucking her with a strap-on,” she protested.
Eric just looked at her. “Nikki, baby, you’re the absolute definition of a power bottom.”
She tried to look affronted, but didn’t manage to smother her laugh.
Eric walked over to the wall and sank down, sitting with his back against it.
Nikolett joined him. A patch of sunlight from the window created a trapezoid of light across their legs.
“Why are we always sitting on the floor?” she asked.
“My back.” He looked at her. “I’m old.”
“You’re not that old.”
“Older than you.” He laced their fingers together. “There is another option, besides Gus, the cookie man.”
“Who?”
“Not really ‘who’ but what.”
“…what?”
“We do what I did for Nyx and Grigoris.”
Nikolett studied him, puzzling it out. “What do you mean?”
“Josephine was never really going to be their third,” Eric said quietly.
“I would never have put her in a trinity with people who couldn’t or wouldn’t move to Dublin.
Grigoris was a janissary. His trinity would have to be in Ottoman.
” Eric shook his head. “I would never have made Josephine move away from Colum.”
“You mean it wasn’t real?”
He shrugged. “Nyx and Grigoris were in love, and they’d been through hell and back.
Adding a third would have been a heavy emotional load but they deserved to be married.
Not that they wouldn’t have loved and cared for Josephine.
They would have. But if she’d lived, I would never have let Josephine marry them.
” Eric sighed. “I never talked to them about it, but sometimes I wonder if they know.”
“It’s a loophole,” Nikolett said quietly, still processing the implications. “Because the fleet admiral can form and approve a trinity at the same time. All it takes is your word.”
He nodded. “If an admiral tried it, technically it wouldn’t work because the trinity didn’t—couldn’t if one of them was dead—come to me to be approved.”
“Eric, are you proposing we wait until an unmarried member somewhere dies and then quickly, retroactively say we were in a trinity with them?”
“Yes.”
“That’s…morbid.” But appealing. Very appealing. Horribly so.
“I wouldn’t have to share you.”