Epilogue #2
I nod once, and he takes another breath. “I’ve been careful with my hands because half the time I want to grab you so hard you never leave my reach again, and the other half I’m afraid if I touch you too much, I’ll forget I’m still furious.”
The air between us shifts, but not into danger. Not exactly.
“I’ve watched you brace for me,” he says, and there is raw self-disgust in his voice now.
“I’ve watched you go quiet when I’m too quiet.
I’ve watched you apologize before I’ve even found the words to say what’s in my head.
I hate it. I fucking hate that my pain has made you afraid of your own place beside me. ”
My throat tightens. “Nikolaj…”
“No,” he says, softer now, and his free hand lifts slowly toward my face. “Listen, please.”
The touch is warm, steady, careful, as every touch has been for two weeks. But there’s something different inside it now; less question, more decision. His thumb moves once over my cheekbone, and I feel the exact second his resolve settles.
“Nothing you did tonight was wrong,” he says, then his gaze drops to my mouth, and he leans in slowly enough that I understand he’s giving me time, and that almost breaks me more than if he simply took what he wanted.
Nikolaj has always been a force. A storm. A blade with a pulse. Being chosen by him was once indistinguishable from being conquered, and I loved that too, in all the reckless ways youth mistakes intensity for proof.
But this is different. This is Nikolaj with his hands on my face and his anger still alive between us, choosing not to make the kiss another form of possession until I meet him there.
So, I do.
I rise slightly on my toes, close the last inch, and his mouth meets mine.
At first, I’m startled by the softness. That’s the honest truth. I’ve been waiting two weeks for this and dreading it just as much, because I didn’t know what would happen when we crossed this line again.
But his mouth is warm, and his hands are steady, and the kiss starts like a question neither of us has been brave enough to ask with words.
Can we still do this without bleeding?
I make a small sound against him as an answer, and his breath catches. That is what breaks the shock. My free hand lifts to his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt, and I kiss him back.
The moment I do, something in him trembles. He doesn’t deepen the kiss immediately, and somehow that restraint hurts more than hunger would have. He waits until I lean into him, until my mouth opens beneath his, until my grip on his shirt becomes less startled and more certain.
Then he steps closer, and the kiss turns deeper, not rough but full, his mouth moving over mine with the kind of aching care that makes my knees feel briefly untrustworthy.
I had forgotten and remembered this a thousand times.
The taste of him. The warmth. The slight scrape of his stubble. The way he kisses like he’s trying to say six things at once and refuses to trust any language but pressure, breath, and the angle of his hands.
I feel the old Nikolaj in it—the one who would have devoured first and considered consequence later—but I feel the new one too.
The one who has spent two weeks learning where the wounds are. The one who stops himself from taking too quickly. The one who chooses not to weaponize hunger because we are trying to build something desire can live inside instead of hide behind.
My fingers loosen from his shirt and slide up to his neck.
He makes a low sound into my mouth.
God, that sound.
It goes through me with such force I almost break the kiss just to breathe through it, but then his hand tightens at my face, thumb brushing beneath my eye, and I realize I’m crying again.
Of course, I am. Apparently, this new life comes with poor emotional regulation and saltwater at inconvenient moments.
Nikolaj kisses the tear without pulling away fully, his mouth brushing the corner of my eye, then my cheek, then back to my lips with a softness so devastating I have to grip his neck harder to stay standing.
When the kiss finally breaks, neither of us goes far. His forehead leans against mine.
This time, I do not close up. I do not step behind my face. I stand there with his hand on my cheek and mine at his throat, and I let the silence be what it is: not punishment, or withdrawal, but space for words.
His eyes close briefly, and when he opens them again, they are glassy.
“I forgive you,” he says.
Inside me, something stops so completely that I feel the absence of movement before the meaning arrives. His thumbs brush over my cheeks, catching tears before I realize they’ve fallen.
“I’m still angry,” he says, because he knows me, and he knows I need the whole truth, or I’ll start doubting the mercy. “I’ll still have bad days. I’ll still wake up sometimes and remember. I can’t give you a clean slate because neither of us has ever had one of those in our lives.”
“But I forgive you,” he says again, firmer this time.
“Not because it stopped hurting, or what you did was fine. It wasn’t.
It was fucked. It was cruel. It was strategic in the way only you could make cruelty strategic, and I might still yell about it next week because I’m not done being a bastard. ”
I chuckle, and this time his mouth twitches.
“But I forgive you,” he says again, the softness returning.
“Because you came back. Because you gave up everything. Because you’re standing here trying to carry guilt as if it’ll somehow pay me back, and it won’t.
Because I don’t want our life to be you waiting for me to punish you, and me hating myself every time you flinch.
” His forehead presses harder against mine.
“Because I love you more than I hate what happened.”
The sob comes out of me before I can stop it.
Then his eyes narrow with faint irritation at himself, and despite everything, I laugh properly this time, wet and helpless and caught against his mouth because he leans in to kiss the sound as if he cannot resist it.
“I hear you,” Nikolaj corrects against my lips.
That little correction undoes me almost as thoroughly as the forgiveness did.
He rests his forehead more firmly against mine. “And because if I don’t forgive you, the month wins,” Nikolaj says. “The explosion wins. Byrne, Reyes, all of them, they get a piece of us. They already took enough. I’m not giving them this, too.”
That is what breaks me fully.
My arms go around his neck and his close around my back, carefully enough not to hurt my ribs but tightly enough that I feel every word he just said pressed into the shape of his body.
I bury my face against his throat and cry without trying to hide it. He holds me through it, one hand in my hair, the other spread across my back, his mouth against my temple.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“I know,” he murmurs, then huffs softly when I tense. “I hear you, My King. Fuck, I hear you.”
That makes me cry harder and laugh at the same time, which is deeply undignified and probably exactly what the moment deserves.
We stand like that until the worst of it passes. The sun lowers farther. The water reaches our feet once, cool around our ankles, and Nikolaj swears under his breath because even emotional absolution has limits when the sea gets his trousers wet.
I pull back, wiping my face with one hand. “You bought the beach,” I say, voice unsteady. “You can complain to management.”
“I am management,” Nikolaj says.
“Then file a complaint with yourself.”
He looks down at the water, then back at me with that faint, dangerous spark in his eyes that I have missed more than I knew. “I’ll handle it later.”
His gaze drops to my mouth again, and the air changes between us. Not violently; the shift is slow, warm, and inevitable. The kiss opened the door, forgiveness stepped through it, and now everything we’ve been holding back for two weeks stands there waiting.
Want, yes, but not only want. Need. Love. The body’s desperate wish to prove what words can only begin. The instinct to come together not to erase the pain, but to carry it differently.
Nikolaj sees it in me. I see the moment he does. His hand slides from my hair to the side of my throat, thumb resting over my pulse. “Are you sure?”
The question nearly undoes me.
Once, he would have turned that into something filthy, arrogant, and teasing enough to make me roll my eyes while dragging him closer.
The kiss he gives me this time is not tentative. It is still careful in the ways that matter, but the restraint frays at the edges almost immediately. His hand slides to the back of my neck, his other arm wrapping around my waist, and when he pulls me closer, I go willingly.
The sound I make against his mouth is small and helpless and exactly the kind of thing he usually uses against me. But tonight he only groans and holds me steadier, like my need might knock him out from under himself.
The tide curls around our feet again, but I don’t notice the cold this time.
When he pulls back, his forehead presses to mine again. His eyes are dark now, the pale blue nearly swallowed by want. “Tell me if anything hurts,” he says.
My throat tightens for a different reason. “I will.”
His gaze hardens slightly. “I mean it.”
“I know,” I say, then before he can correct himself or me, I add softly, “I hear you.”
His expression flickers, pleased and wounded and so in love that the sight of it makes my knees weak.
“We don’t have to,” Nikolaj says, and the words sound like they physically pain him. “Not tonight. Not if you’re not ready. Not if forgiveness feels too new.”
I lift a hand to his mouth and press two fingers lightly against it, stopping him before he talks himself into another noble sacrifice neither of us wants. “I have been ready,” I say. “I was waiting for you.”
His breath leaves him hard. “Fuck.”
“That’s the general idea,” I say, and my voice comes out far less steady than intended.
For one second, he just stares at me. Then he laughs, low and disbelieving, and the sound rolls through me like heat. “You’re a menace.”
“I learned from the worst.”
His hand finds mine again, fingers linking with a firmness that leaves no room for doubt. “Come inside,” he says.
The simple command settles low in my stomach. Nikolaj does not drag me; he doesn’t need to. He begins walking, and I go with him, hand in his, sea at our backs, sunset dimming behind us.
Halfway there, Nikolaj stops again, but this time I don’t close up.
This time, I look at him and wait. He brings my hand to his mouth and kisses the inside of my wrist, right where my pulse beats too fast under his lips.
“For what it’s worth,” he murmurs, “I might still yell next week.”
I laugh softly. “For what it’s worth, I probably deserve it.”
“You do.”
“Fair.”
He kisses my wrist again. “But tonight I want my husband back in my bed.”
My breath catches. The word husband, in his voice, under the sunset, after forgiveness, after everything—it hits so deep I feel it behind my knees.
“Then take me home, mio re,” I whisper.
His eyes darken, but the smile that follows is tender enough to break me all over again in a way I finally don’t mind.
“Gladly, My King,” he says.
Home.
The word no longer feels impossible.
It feels like a room still under construction. A bed with two men learning how to sleep again. A bath that smells of cedar and whisky. A terrace where silence might one day become peaceful instead of haunted.
A place where I can be Vincenzo Dragovich and not flinch from the name because it cost too much to wear lightly.
I let him lead me back toward the villa, toward the room where grief, anger, and forgiveness can become something warmer beneath our hands.
Toward the life we destroyed kingdoms to reach, toward the peace we never thought men like us could have, and toward the reign we are only just beginning to understand was never about power at all.