Epilogue
—BISHOP—
When the door of Orenda opened and Katarina stepped out on Anna’s arm, all those here to witness our wedding ceremony gasped.
Was it because they saw her aura the way I did? How her glow had nothing to do with the sun’s rays shining on her?
The woman who would soon be my wife was so many things.
Brave enough to refuse to leave a collapsing building while there were still others inside who needed to be rescued, even after dragging herself from under a beam, knowing damn well that her arm was broken and her leg wasn’t strong enough to hold her.
Her loyalty knew no limits. She stood up the next day and told those in front of her that no matter what the enemy brought to her door, she’d continue to fight in honor of every person she’d loved and lost. That she’d march into battle alone to save the lives of all those left standing if that’s what it took.
She moved toward the people she loved. Every time. It was the first thing I learned about her, and she’d proved it over and over again in the days, weeks, and months that followed.
Katarina was funny. A smartass. Dry and fast and merciless.
She gave me shit from the first day I met her and hadn’t let up since, and God help me, I hoped she never would.
She could land a line that leveled a room.
She’d done it to me more times than I could count, and every time she did, I fell more in love with her.
Lyra had told me once that she’d never in her life seen Katarina reach for something she wanted for herself. Until she met me. She was a woman who’d spent her entire life always giving, never taking, and yet had opened her hand to me.
It was that softness that truly won my heart. She let so few see it, but she had me. She’d let me in, and I understood what it had cost her to do it. She’d set her pride aside, her fear of asking for help, because she trusted me. I would spend the rest of my life being worthy of it.
She and Anna came down the steps of the porch of the home we’d built together, to the lawn where our ceremony would take place.
Her cheeks flushed when her eyes met mine.
Did she doubt her beauty? I let my gaze travel from her long dark hair, down her elegant neck, to the ivory dress that hugged the curves of the body I’d worshiped with every part of mine.
When my eyes met hers a second time, she blushed again at the desire I felt for her and would never hide.
Anna leaned close and whispered in her ear, but Katarina didn’t look away from me as they walked across the grass toward me, to the place where Henry would pronounce us man and wife.
I grinned.
I couldn’t not.
—Katarina—
When Anna opened the door of Orenda and we stepped out onto the porch together, my heart steadied at the sight of Bishop, the man I would spend the rest of my life with, waiting for me.
Steadiness came naturally to him. He calculated before he moved, and once he moved, he didn’t stop.
He was the man who’d lifted a beam off me inside a building that was coming down around us, and returned inside to rescue others, knowing it might collapse at any minute.
He was the man who’d built the architecture of the Genesis Consortium on a whiteboard in ten minutes on the worst morning of my life, then sat down without pointing at what he’d done, because his intelligence was the kind that didn’t announce itself.
He was patient, never demanding before I was ready to give, never asking me for the more I didn’t know I had but that he saw in me.
Honesty, decency, and honor were part of who he was.
Innately. When I asked him a question, he didn’t hedge.
He answered. Truthfully. There hadn’t been a single moment when I hadn’t known he saw me as his equal.
He respected my intelligence, capability, and strength without being threatened by them, yet he somehow knew when I needed to let my guard down, to give into my fear and doubt, letting me know, without words, that he’d be there to hold me together when I did.
Bishop loved me. He wanted me, openly, constantly, without apology.
When he said the words, I knew he meant them, that there were no conditions attached to them, and he’d never stop loving me.
Anna tightened her hand on my arm, and as we made our way down the porch steps, hers wasn’t the only presence I felt beside me.
My grandmother was here too. She’d been with me all morning, from the moment I woke from a dream of her to when I put on the dress that she wore when she married Mikhail, which Anna had given me the day Bishop and I told her we’d set our wedding date.
It had been sitting in the bottom drawer of the dresser in my babushka’s bedroom, wrapped in tissue paper and waiting for me, just like her ring had been. My ring now.
I could hear her voice as I walked across the grass to the man waiting for me. “The soul knows,” she said.
And mine did.