Epilogue
TOREN
The apartment Xaden found in October is nothing like the one I rented in September.
Mine had ambitions.
His has a statement.
Top floor of a building six blocks from campus with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the mountains, a kitchen that has never once been used to its full potential because neither of us can cook, and a master bathroom with a rainfall shower that I have developed an almost religious relationship with now that everything below my waist has decided to stage a permanent protest.
The first time I walked through the front door, I stopped in the middle of the living room and said, “Xaden, this is a penthouse.”
He set my bag down and said, “I know.”
“We're students.”
“I'm aware.”
“Normal students don't live in—” I gestured at the exposed brick and the designer furniture and the view that looked like a painting, “—whatever this is.”
He looked at me with that look. The one that says he finds me mildly entertaining and isn't going to apologize for a single thing. “Do you want to go back to the shoebox?”
I looked at the rainfall shower visible through the open bathroom door.
“No, thank you,” I said.
That was four months ago. Now I'm thirty-four weeks pregnant and the shoebox is a distant memory and I have claimed the large corner of the living room with the best light for my books and my restoration projects, and Xaden has somehow incorporated this into his idea of what our life looks like with so little fuss that I suspect he planned for it all along.
There are bookshelves where there wasn't furniture before.
A worktable that appeared one Tuesday without comment.
I did not ask. I never ask about the things he does that are quiet and deliberate and entirely for me, because asking would mean acknowledging them and acknowledging them would mean I have to deal with what it does to my chest when I think about it too long.
We have a life here. A real one. Built from scratch, in a city that belongs to neither of us, which means it belongs to both of us equally, which is more than I ever thought I'd have.
My phone buzzes on the worktable. I don't look at it for a long moment because I already know who it is and what they'll say and the whole thing still makes me feel a specific complicated thing I haven't fully sorted out yet.
I pick it up.
Alex - Andrade dealt with it. All quiet.
I set the phone back down and press my free hand flat over my stomach and breathe.
All quiet. Two words that encompass an entire world I used to live inside, the Kellar Cartel and the Devlin Cosa Nostra, merged now into something new under the steady, ruthless hand of Alexander Denver, with Andrade running the day-to-day operations and keeping the peace between the territories the way only someone who has been doing it for years and never once slipped up can.
It was Xaden's decision.
That's the thing people don't understand.
They assume he was pushed out, that stepping back from the Cosa Nostra was some kind of defeat.
It wasn't. He sat across from Alex at a table in November and laid out terms and Alex accepted them, because Alex is many things but he isn't stupid and having Xaden Devlin as an ally is infinitely preferable to having him as an enemy.
Xaden still makes calls. Still has reach.
Andrade keeps him informed daily. The structure holds.
And then there's Carnage.
Carnage, who calls me every Tuesday without fail, which I know because his brothers tease him about it relentlessly and he tells them all to go to hell with a level of conviction that makes me feel simultaneously loved and guilty.
Carnage, who was there on the nights I couldn't sleep when I was living in the third-floor apartment alone.
Who drove to Colorado and sat on the end of my bed at two in the morning because I called, he answered and he never once made me feel like it was an inconvenience.
Carnage, who held my hair when the morning sickness had me on my knees and rubbed my back without saying a word, and somehow managed to make the worst nights feel survivable.
Carnage, who loves me. Not the way Xaden loves me, not that sharp, consuming, terrifying thing that we spent most of a year fighting before it finally won.
Carnage loves me the way a person loves someone they would genuinely burn the world down for, not out of possession but out of something quieter, deeper and entirely its own.
Xaden knows.
That's the part that surprises me most, that Xaden, who spent so long treating Carnage like a threat, came to understand what he actually is to me.
The conversation they had in December is one neither of them has told me the full contents of and I have stopped asking because the fact that Carnage got on a call with me the next morning and said, "Your man isn't a complete fuck up, darlin’" told me everything I needed to know.
He's going to be our baby’s godfather.
That was Xaden's idea and when Carnage found out he was so uncharacteristically speechless that Halo screenshotted his face and sent it to me with the caption you broke him and I saved it and will cherish it until the end of time.
He's flying in for the game tonight. I cannot wait for Carnage to see Xaden in his true element.
And Cas.
Cas, who is Alex's brother. Who is still navigating what that means in the quiet hours. Who has somehow managed to maintain every existing loyalty while building a new one, which is very Caspian Vought and also proof that he is a fundamentally better person than almost everyone around him.
The arrangement works because the people inside it are the right people. That's all it ever comes down to.
I told Xaden once that the past didn't own him.
I think he's finally starting to believe it.
The nursery argument starts, as most arguments in this apartment start, with Caspian being right.
The room we've designated as the nursery is the smallest bedroom, which in this apartment still means it could comfortably house a small family of four, but we are not discussing that. What we are discussing or rather, what Xaden and Cas are discussing at a volume, that I can hear clearly from the kitchen where I’m making tea and actually eating the last of the biscuits and listening to every word, is the flat-pack wardrobe.
“Step seven clearly fucking says—"
“I know what fucking step seven says.”
“Then why is that panel facing the wrong way?”
“It's not facing the wrong way.”
“Xaden. That panel is objectively facing the wrong way. Look at the fucking diagram.”
“I've looked at the stupid diagram.”
“Have you? Because the diagram is very clear and what you've built looks nothing like—”
“Cas, I swear to fucking God—”
“The drawer is upside down.”
Silence.
“That's how I want the drawer, dumbass.”
“That's not—”
“Caspian.”
“Xaden.”
“Don’t—”
“It won't open if it's upside down, Xaden, that's the point of a drawer—”
I take my tea and my snack, lower myself into the armchair in the corner of the nursery doorway and watch. I have learned, and this is genuine, hard-won wisdom, that there is exactly one correct response to Xaden Devlin being told he is wrong about something and it is to say nothing and wait.
Cas does not have this wisdom. Cas has a different and equally valid approach, which is to simply be correct at full volume until Xaden's pride catches up with his intelligence.
“Give me the fucking Allen key,” Cas says, holding out his hand.
“Fuck off.”
“Xaden.”
“I'm not giving you the Allen key, asshole.”
“The baby needs to be able to open the drawers—”
“The baby isn’t even born yet, Caspian. The baby does not currently require access to a functioning fucking drawer—”
“Give. Me. The. Allen. Key.”
I eat a biscuit.
There is a long silence from the nursery. Then the particular sound of something being taken apart with aggressive precision. Then silence. Then the careful, methodical sound of something being put back together correctly.
Cas emerges from the doorway, brushing sawdust off his hands with the expression of a man who has won something and is being extremely mature about it. He sees me in the armchair. He sees the biscuits.
“Don't say it,” I tell him.
“I wasn't going to say anything.”
“You had a whole face.”
“I don't have a face.” He drops into the chair across from me. “I have a look of quiet satisfaction. There's a difference.”
From the nursery. “I can fucking hear you!”
Cas raises his eyebrows at me. I raise mine back. We eat biscuits in companionable silence.
Twenty minutes later Xaden appears in the doorway and leans against the frame with his arms crossed and the specific expression he wears when something has been fully assembled correctly and he wants credit for it.
“Done,” he announces.
Cas and I both look at the doorway behind him. The wardrobe is pristine. All drawers opening in the correct direction. I look at Xaden. He looks back at me with the expression of a man who will never in a thousand years admit that Caspian Vought rebuilt what he put together.
“It looks great,” I say.
He nods once.
“All by yourself?” Cas asks.
“Don't fucking push it, Vought,” Xaden snarls and shoots him an ice-cold glare.
He makes coffee wrong.
He has been making coffee wrong for four months and I have not said a single word about it because the alternative—telling him and having him do it correctly from that point forward—means losing one of the very few things about Xaden Devlin that is genuinely, endearingly, completely human.
He puts the grounds in before the water.
Every time. Without fail. With the absolute conviction of a man who has never once considered that there might be a different way to do it and would not care if you told him.