Chapter 17
Nico
* * *
She sleeps.
I don't. Not yet. I lie in the dark with her body pressed against mine and her breathing slow and even against my chest, and I try to remember the last time another person slept in this bed.
No one has. Ever.
I don't sleep beside people. Proximity triggers the tactical brain.
The one that catalogs exits and threats, the one that runs scenarios while the body rests, the one that made me the youngest head of a Greek organization in forty years because it never, ever turns off.
Women I've been with understood the rules: their place or a hotel, never here, never this bed, never the vulnerability of unconsciousness in the presence of another person.
She's here. In my bed. Her hand on my chest. Her hair across my pillow. Her breathing the only sound in a room that's been silent for years.
The tactical brain is quiet.
Not gone. Not disabled. Quiet, the way a guard dog goes quiet when it recognizes someone who belongs. She belongs here. In this bed. In this room. In the space I built to keep everyone out.
She knocked. She walked through the door. She traced the scar that no one has ever touched, and she looked at me with eyes that held everything. The gun. The blood. The man. The monster. And she stayed.
I pull her closer. She murmurs in her sleep, presses into me, and the feeling in my chest is so large I can't name it because I've never had it before. I've built empires, won wars, ended lives. I have never felt this.
I should sleep. For the first time in longer than I can remember, I could.
Her presence doesn't trigger vigilance. It quiets it.
With her breathing against my chest and her hand over my heart and the silk nightgown pooled on my floor like evidence of the bravest thing anyone has ever done for me, I could sleep.
But Viktor Reznikov has a photograph of my wife. And the war isn't over.
I hold her tighter. I watch the city through the east-facing window. I sleep better than I have in years.
And that terrifies me more than Viktor Reznikov ever could.