Epilogue
Vincenzo
The beach looks different when no one is trying to resurrect a dead man on it.
That is a cruel thought, maybe, but it’s the first one that comes to mind as Nikolaj and I walk along the shoreline at sunset, our footprints trailing behind us in the damp sand until the waves creep up and erase them one by one.
The air is warm, but the wind off the water has cooled enough to raise goosebumps along my arms where my linen shirt is rolled up to the elbows. The sky has gone soft at the edges, gold bleeding into bruised purple, the horizon cut clean and dark where the sun lowers toward the sea.
Isle Lucia wears evening well. Too well, perhaps. It has a talent for making grief look cinematic, which feels personally insulting after everything it has witnessed.
Two weeks ago, I stood on this sand and broke Nikolaj’s heart all over again by being alive.
That’s how long it’s been since I came back from the dead and found Nikolaj on this beach with my ring in his hand and devastation carved into his face.
Two weeks since he screamed at me until his voice cracked, and I stood there taking it because there was nothing else to do.
Two weeks since I touched his cheek and apologized for hurting him, for breaking his heart, for forcing him to mourn a body I knew wasn’t mine while telling myself the plan needed his grief to be believable.
Two weeks since he held my wrists and felt my pulse like he was trying to decide whether love could be trusted after I used it as part of a lie.
We haven’t kissed since I came back.
There have been touches. His mouth on my hair in the dark, rough and barely there. My lips against his knuckles when his hand trembled once while changing the bandage on my side.
His forehead against my shoulder when the nightmares came but didn’t take him all the way under. Small things. Careful things. The kind of intimacy that might look like restraint from the outside and feels, from the inside, like learning to handle a blade without cutting ourselves open every time.
We haven’t been sexually intimate either.
My body is still healing, though that’s only part of it. The bigger part sits between us without needing to be named every hour.
He wants me, I know he does. Nikolaj has never been subtle where I’m concerned, even now, even through anger and grief and caution.
I feel it in the way his eyes move over me some mornings when my shirt slips off one shoulder. I feel it in the way his hands pause at my waist before he lets go.
I feel it in the way he turns away sometimes, jaw tight, as if wanting me and being angry with me at the same time still confuses something in him.
I want him too. God, I want him.
But wanting isn’t the problem. Wanting has always been the easiest thing between us. We wanted when we were enemies, when we were stupid boys at Vintermoor carving hate beneath each other’s skin and pretending hunger was another form of violence.
We wanted through blood, through lies, through memory loss, through marriage and crowns and eight years of absence.
Wanting never saved us. Wanting never asked whether the ground underneath could hold. This time, we’re trying to build the ground first. It’s slow, ugly in places, and some days it works.
Nikolaj has stopped waking up calling for me.
That is the first sign that something inside him has begun to loosen.
The nightmares still come sometimes. I feel them before I hear them, the way his whole body goes rigid, the breath catching behind his teeth, the hand tightening at my waist until pain flashes through me and I have to carefully say his name.
But he no longer wakes shouting, “No, no, no!” as if the explosion is still tearing the line out of his hand.
He wakes hard, breathing fast, eyes wild for a second, and then he touches me. Once, he pressed two fingers under my jaw to feel the pulse there and looked so ashamed afterward that I took his hand and kept it there until his breathing steadied.
The tide rushes in higher than expected and curls around my foot. I hiss at the cold and step sideways, almost into him.
Nikolaj’s hand shoots out on instinct, catching my elbow. “Careful.”
I look at him dryly. “It’s water.”
“It’s sneaky water.”
A laugh catches in my chest before I can stop it, and his eyes flick to my mouth at the sound.
There. That look again. Not the hungry one, not exactly. Something softer and more startled, as if my laughter is still a thing he can’t quite believe he gets to hear outside memory.
It has been appearing more often these last few days, and every time it makes me want to kiss him and apologize in the same breath.
“That might be the most ridiculous thing you’ve said this week,” I tell him.
He considers that. “Unlikely.”
“You’re right. Yesterday you threatened a toaster.”
“It burned your bread.”
“It was doing its job.”
“It did it badly.”
“You said you’d have it replaced with something more obedient.”
“I stand by that.”
This time, his mouth curves, not fully, but enough. Enough that my heart stumbles over the sight of it.
I missed his almost-smiles in the month I let him believe I was dead. I missed his scowls too. His threats. His arrogance. His ridiculous certainty that the laws of weather, machinery, and international politics are personal insults if they inconvenience him.
I missed him while I was alive, hidden, and in pain, and the guilt of that still sits under my ribs, but tonight, I let myself feel the simpler part too.
I missed him, and I’m here.
He lets go of my elbow as if he realizes he’s still holding it, but then, a few steps later, his hand brushes mine. Accidental, maybe. But then it happens again.
Not accidental.
I keep my gaze on the water because if I look at him too quickly, he might retreat behind irritation and pretend he wasn’t reaching. His fingers graze mine once more, rough knuckles against my palm, and then his hand closes around mine.
My breath catches.
It’s ridiculous. We’ve done more than hold hands. We’ve done everything two men can do to each other and several things that probably qualify as war crimes in polite circles.
He has had his mouth on every inch of me. He has seen me bleed, cry, come apart, beg, lie, rule, fall, and return. But this—his hand sliding into mine in the open sunset—hits both of us harder than it should.
I look down at our joined hands, then at him. His face remains pointed toward the water, expression carefully blank, but the tips of his ears have gone faintly red.
Oh.
God help me, he’s nervous.
The realization almost undoes me. I curl my fingers more securely through his, and his grip tightens once in answer. We keep walking, and for a little while, neither of us ruins it with speech.
Then Nikolaj stops abruptly.
The sudden stillness pulls me half a step back because he still has my hand. I turn toward him at once, heart kicking hard for no rational reason.
His gaze is fixed on me, strange and intent, his face unreadable in the way that has become dangerous to me now. Once, that expression would have made me curious. Aroused, probably. Ready for a fight or a kiss, whichever one he decided to weaponize first.
Now, after the month, after the beach, after two weeks of learning which silences are safe and which are not, something inside me closes before I can stop it.
I’ve done something wrong.
The thought arrives with such speed it humiliates me. My hand tightens once in his, then loosens, ready to be released if that is what he wants. My spine straightens, and my face becomes careful.
I hate that he sees it happen, but I cannot stop the instinct quickly enough. This is the damage now; not only his, but mine.
My body has learned to anticipate the cost of hurting him before he speaks. Every pause can become judgment. Every strange look can become the moment he decides the grief outweighs the love.
I know he hasn’t said that. I know he has stayed. I know his hand is in mine. But guilt has its own logic, and it is not kind.
Nikolaj sees me closing up, and the effect on him is immediate. His expression shifts from whatever private thought had stopped him to something stricken and angry, though not at me.
I see it clearly enough that he hates himself for having that effect on me, for teaching my body to brace under the weight of his silence, for being hurt badly enough that I now prepare for punishment even when he has only stopped walking.
“Vincenzo,” Nikolaj says. “You did that again.”
I frown. “Did what?”
His jaw flexes. “You disappeared behind your face.”
The accuracy of it lands with unpleasant force. I look away toward the water, but his fingers tighten around mine, not enough to hurt, only enough to ask me to stay in the moment.
“I thought something was wrong,” I say.
“Something is wrong,” Nikolaj says, his voice roughening. “But not with you.”
That almost makes me laugh. “That’s not a very reassuring sentence.”
“I know,” he says, then immediately catches himself and grimaces like he’s stepped on broken glass. “Fuck. I hear how that sounds.”
The correction should not make my eyes sting. It does anyway.
He lets out a slow breath and turns fully toward me. “I hate that I made you do that.”
“You didn’t make me,” I say.
His eyes sharpen. “Don’t.”
I close my mouth, and he steps closer, our joined hands between us, the last light catching along the hard lines of his face.
He looks younger in sunset somehow, though not softened.
Nikolaj is never soft in the simple way.
He is brutal even in tenderness, all of him too intense to make comfort look easy.
But there is something exposed in him tonight, something that has been building quietly for days without my noticing the full shape.
“You came back after a month of me mourning you. I have been angry, and I’ve made sure you knew that.”
“I deserved—”
“I know what you deserved. Let me finish.”