Chapter 28
AURORA
"The boss says to pack warm," Margareta says, setting a folded blanket on my bed like that explains anything. "And comfortable. He says no heels."
I look up from my laptop. "Where are we going?"
She smiles, closes the door.
That's all I get.
Okay... what the hell? I was busy reading when Margareta came in with an announcement from Axel, and now I’m sitting here, stunned for a full ten seconds, staring at the blanket.
Then I close the laptop, open the wardrobe, and start looking for the warmest thing I own, which turns out to be a cream knit sweater and a coat I never thought I'd need.
I pull them both on, look at myself in the mirror, and head downstairs.
Axel's already at the car when I step outside, dressed in dark trousers and a heavy jacket, hands in his pockets.
The cold evening air hits me immediately, and I hug my coat tighter.
Viktor's nearby, speaking quietly into a radio.
Two other cars are idling at the end of the driveway, engines running, windows dark.
Axel turns when he hears me on the steps, and something in his expression shifts. Quick, almost imperceptible, the way it does sometimes when he thinks I'm not watching.
"You look warm," he says.
"Margareta told me to pack warm and wear no heels." I stop in front of him. "That's the sum total of my information."
"Good." He opens the car door and steps aside.
"Axel."
"Get in the car, Aurora."
I huff and get in the car.
He slides in beside me, the door closes, and the convoy starts moving, four cars rolling down the long driveway in the dark, and I watch the estate gates disappear behind us and decide to let myself not know for once. To just sit with the not-knowing and see where it takes me.
For the first half hour, we move through the city. I watch it through the window, the lit-up restaurants and the late-night foot traffic and the bridges over dark water, all of it streaking past in amber and white. Axel's quiet beside me, calm, one hand resting on his knee.
Then the city thins. The lights space out.
Buildings give way to warehouses, then to trees, then to nothing at all except road and sky and the occasional farmhouse sitting dark in a field.
The roads narrow, the tarmac roughens, and the world outside the window becomes the kind of empty that doesn't exist anywhere near a city.
Just land and dark, and the smell of cold air even through the sealed windows.
I press my face to the glass like I'm twelve years old and watch the landscape change.
Where in the world are we going?
The cars climb. The road curves upward, and the trees fall back on either side, shorter now, windswept, bending slightly in a way that says we're high enough that the weather means something up here. My ears pop.
Then the car stops.
I look out. We're on a hill, wide and open, no buildings, no roads visible in any direction, nothing except grass and cold sky and Axel's men already spreading out silently across the ground.
Viktor stays close. The other cars settle into position at the edges of the space, headlights clicking off one by one until the only light is whatever the sky is doing.
Axel opens his door. Comes around to mine, opens it, and holds out his hand.
I take it and step out into the cold, and it hits me everywhere at once — my cheeks, my lungs, the backs of my hands. Sharp and clean and nothing like city cold, nothing like anything I've felt before. It smells like grass, altitude and pure untouched space, like the world before people got to it.
Maybe I’m rambling. But everything here feels and looks magical.
"Look up," Axel says.
I look up.
And I stop breathing.
Oh… my… world.
The sky is moving.
Not the clouds, not a plane, not anything I have a name for immediately — just the sky itself, alive, shifting in long trembling curtains of green that fold and unfurl like something breathing.
Pale at the edges where it starts, then deeper, richer, moving toward a center so bright it's almost white.
A thread of violet curls along the bottom of one ribbon.
Another wave rolls in from the left, slow and enormous, and the green deepens as it passes, darkening toward something closer to teal before fading back again.
My hand goes to my mouth.
Wow.
I knew what they were called. I'd seen the photographs, hundreds of them, on screens and in books and on the walls of travel agencies. I thought I understood what they looked like.
I understood nothing.
Because photographs don't move. They don't breathe. They don't make you feel like the ground beneath you has become irrelevant, like up and down are suggestions, like you are standing at the bottom of something infinite, and the infinite is doing something extraordinary just because it can.
My eyes are burning. I don't blink because I'm terrified to miss a single second.
"A-Axel." I whisper in awe.
"Northern Lights." His voice is low beside me. "Private land. Three hundred acres. We have it until morning."
I can't look at him yet. Can't pull my eyes from the sky. Another ribbon unfurls, this one wider, rolling across the dark like a slow tide, and I make a sound I've never made before — not a word, not a cry, just something that escapes before I can stop it.
He did this.
The thought arrives quietly at first, then louder.
He did this. Axel Santego, who runs a criminal empire, has stitches in his side from a knife wound and is handling an active investigation into a mole in his own house, remembered a bucket list I mentioned weeks ago, in passing, in the middle of chaos.
He remembered it, found private land, arranged security, transport, and a thermos that I can see sitting at the edge of a blanket someone spread on the grass, and he brought me here.
He brought me here.
The tears come without permission. I don't wipe them. They're cold on my cheeks immediately, and I don't care, I just stand there with my face tipped up, and my hand still pressed to my mouth, and watch the sky move.
"You said you wanted to see them." Axel's voice is quiet.
"I-I did." My voice is unsteady. "You remembered that?"
"I remember everything you tell me."
That's what breaks me open completely. Not the lights, though they're the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. Not the private land, the convoy, the cold, or the planning. Just those six words, simple and certain, from a man who isn't simple or certain about anything.
I remember everything you tell me.
I turn to him then, finally, and his face in the light of the aurora is something I want to keep. The green moving across his features, that silver hair, the dark eyes watching me with an expression that has no armor in it at all.
I step toward him, take his face in both my hands, and kiss him.
I kiss him the way I've wanted to since the moment I stepped out of the car and realized what he'd done. It’s slow, deep, and says everything I haven't yet found words for. He makes a low sound against my mouth before pulling me in by the waist and kisses me back until I forget the cold completely.
When I pull back, his eyes are still closed for a half second.
"Thank you," I breathe against his mouth.
His eyes open. He grins, slow and warm, that rare genuine smile, and pulls me back in — one hand at my jaw, deliberate, tilting my face up — and kisses me again, longer this time, his thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone while the lights drift above us.
When he finally lets me surface, he keeps his forehead against mine. "Do you love it?"
I pull back just enough to look at him properly. My eyes are absolutely swimming. I nod, and a tear escapes, and his expression does something complicated and tender that I don't think he even knows is on his face.
He tucks me into his side, I press my face briefly into his chest and breathe, and then we move to the blanket on the grass together.
I sink down, lean back on my hands, and look up.
Axel settles beside me, close enough that our arms press together the full length, and neither of us speaks for a long time.
The lights shift overhead, green into violet, violet back to green, in a slow rhythm like something enormous breathing in and out.
The cold is sharp, but the blanket is thick, Axel is warm beside me, and I feel very far from everything difficult.
"I used to think," I say finally, "that if I ever saw them I'd feel something enormous. Like an answer to something I couldn't name." A new ribbon rolls across the sky, and I watch it travel from one edge to the other. "I don't feel an answer. I just feel very small."
"Is that bad?"
"No." I think about it honestly. "It's actually the nicest I've felt in months. Like nothing I'm carrying is as heavy as I think it is."
He doesn't respond right away. I hear him breathe deeply.
I turn my head to look at him and see him looking back at me.
The light moves across his face, and I think about who he was to me weeks ago — a man I met in a club, a stranger with silver hair — and I can't reconcile that person with this one, the one lying beside me on a hillside he rented so I could see something I've always wanted to see.
"I love you," I tell him.
He goes still.
Not the controlled stillness he uses in meetings. Not the quiet before something dangerous. This is different.
"I've been sitting on it for weeks," I continue, because now I've started and I can't stop.
"Because it scared me. Because everything about this is fast and complicated and there are people trying to kill you and I'm pregnant and my father isn't speaking to me.
" I hold his eyes. "And none of that changes what I feel. I love you. I wanted you to know."
The silence stretches.
His mouth opens. Closes. He looks away for a second, jaw working, like the words are somewhere inside him and he's trying to find the way to let them out. He's not performing the difficulty. It's real, visibly real, a man reaching for something he has never once in his life picked up before.
Then he looks back at me.
"I love you." His voice comes out low, rough, and slightly unsteady in a way I have never heard from him, not once.
He clears his throat, like that'll fix it, but it doesn't. "I don't — I don't know how to do this properly.
I've never done it. Never wanted to before.
" His eyes stay on mine, and there is something almost bewildered in them, like he's surprised to find himself here, on this hillside, saying these words, meaning every syllable.
"But I think about who I was before you walked into that club.
What my life looked like. And I can't—" He stops. "I don't want to go back to that."
"You won't," I say softly.
"I don't know how to be this person yet." The admission is so honest it physically aches. "Don’t yet know how to properly love you."
"You just did." I reach over and cover his hand with mine. "You're doing it right now."
He turns his hand over and laces his fingers through mine. We lie back on the blanket together and look up at the sky.
The lights are still moving. They'll move all night, Margareta told me, all these hundreds of miles of sky doing this ancient thing it has always done, indifferent and extraordinary and completely unaware that somewhere below it two people are lying in the cold, figuring out how to love each other.
I rest my free hand on my stomach without thinking. The small, barely-there curve of it beneath my coat. Not visible in most clothes yet, just a gentle new roundness that is still half the time making me do a double-take in the mirror.
Axel notices.
His eyes drop to my hand. His expression goes quiet in a different way, the bewildered softness from a minute ago deepening into something wordless.
He lifts our joined hands and rests them gently over mine.
Neither of us says anything.
I look back up at the lights. Green and violet and white against all that dark, moving the way they've always moved, the way they'll move long after tonight is a memory.
I think — we are so small down here. We are so small and so scared and so determined to build something real in the middle of all this chaos, and somehow that doesn't feel impossible tonight.
Tonight it just feels like love.