Chapter 41 #3
“And it worked.”
His eyes narrow. “Careful.”
The warning has no real heat, but I hear the pain beneath it and sober immediately. “I’m sorry.”
His hand tightens at my waist. “Don’t shrink. I’m angry, not leaving.”
I absorb that slowly.
Angry, not leaving.
Perhaps that is what we are now. Not healed. Not untouched. Not magically made whole because I returned and he held me. Just two men learning the difference between anger and abandonment, guilt and punishment, silence and absence.
I smile despite myself, and this time it stays for more than a second.
Then he pulls me back into his arms—not gently or carefully enough. The sudden pressure sends pain through my side, sharp and hot, and I gasp before I can hide it. He hears it immediately and loosens his hold with a curse.
“Shit,” he says, pulling back. “I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me.” I catch his wrist before he can move farther away. “My body is still being dramatic.”
His glare is immediate and familiar enough to make something in me soften despite the tears. “Your body was blown up, shot, burned, and stitched back together. It gets to be dramatic.”
“Only you would make that sound like a legal defense.”
“It is. I’m an excellent advocate when you stop being a stubborn Italian bastard long enough to listen.”
Another laugh slips out of me, tiny and ruined. His face changes at the sound. There he is again, the man under the monster, the one who looks at me like my laughter is evidence he can still save something.
He guides me back toward the bed with both hands on me now, not forceful but firm enough to make the argument pointless. “Lie down.”
I obey because I’m exhausted and because being ordered around by him still settles some ridiculous part of me that never learned dignity where Nikolaj is concerned.
He helps me lower myself onto the mattress, his hands careful at my back and side, jaw tight with concentration. Once I’m settled, he stands there for a second, looking down at me like he isn’t sure whether joining me will soothe the wound or reopen it.
I reach for him, and he comes instantly. That, at least, hasn’t changed. He lies down beside me, not crowding at first, but I move toward him before he can ask.
He exhales hard when I tuck myself against his chest. His arms close around me slowly this time, one hand settling at the back of my head, the other spread carefully over my lower back, avoiding every injury by memory and instinct.
“You’re too agreeable when you’re guilty,” he mutters.
A small smile pulls at my mouth against his chest. “I’ll try to be more irritating tomorrow.”
“Good. I miss wanting to strangle you for normal reasons.”
That breaks a fragile laugh out of me, and I feel his body respond to it, some of the tension loosening in his chest.
Then his mouth presses to the top of my head.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” he says, so quietly that I almost miss it under the sea. “I’m so fucking angry with you, and I’m still glad. Every second. Every breath. Even when I can’t look at you without remembering that month, I’m glad.”
The words hurt in a way that heals nothing but proves something is still possible.
I lift my head enough to look at him. His face is tired, his eyes red at the edges from the nightmare, the fear, and everything that came before it. He looks devastated. He looks alive. He looks like mine.
“I love you,” I whisper.
His eyes close briefly. When they open, the anger is still there. So is the tenderness. So is the grief. So is every complicated, brutal thing we’ll have to live with because love didn’t erase the cost of getting here.
“I love you too,” he says. “You insane, cruel, beautiful fucking liar.”
I laugh again, weak and wet. “That’s almost romantic.”
“It’s very romantic. You’re just concussed by guilt.”
“I’m not concussed.”
“You were recently exploded.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s close enough for my purposes.”
He says it with just enough of his old sharpness that I breathe easier, because this is where we’ve always been strongest—somewhere between wound and wit, holding the unbearable in one hand and making it insult us in the other.
His thumb strokes slowly over the back of my neck. “Don’t leave the bed without waking me,” he says after a while. “I need to know you’re not gone more than I need sleep.”
The truth of that lands heavily between us. I nod once. “Alright.” I press my face into his chest and let the next breath shake its way out of me. “I’ll wake you.”
He kisses my hair again and holds me until the shaking eases. I don’t know how long it takes. Long enough for the moonlight to shift across the floor. Long enough for his breathing to calm. Long enough for my guilt to stop clawing and settle back into something I can carry for another hour.
Eventually, he murmurs, “Try to sleep.”
“Only if you do.”
“I’ll try.”
It’s not a promise. We’re not foolish enough for those tonight.
But he keeps one hand tangled lightly in my shirt and the other on my back, and I keep my ear over his heart. Outside the villa, the sea moves against the shore of the island he bought for a future we had to destroy ourselves to reach.
Free.
Guilty.
Alive.
Here, in his arms, where the grief can see both of us and know it has not won.