CHAPTER FIVE
THE PHOTOS ARE EVERYWHERE.
Lauren Ashford, who is tall and golden and Lyccan and has cheekbones that could cut glass, with her arm looped through Alexei’s and her head tilted against his shoulder and a smile on her face that says this man is mine and I know it and so does everyone else.
The photos are intimate. Not scandalous, not explicit, just..
.close. The closeness that comes from familiarity.
His hand on the small of her back (the same place he puts his hand on mine).
Her fingers adjusting his collar (the casual possessiveness of a woman who has done this a hundred times).
The two of them at what looks like a formal event, her dress gold, his suit dark, their bodies angled toward each other with the gravitational ease of two people who have shared space for a long time.
The caption on the gossip feed reads: Sources confirm Prince Alexei Lykaios was seen with former partner Lauren Ashford at a private event earlier this week. The timing is notable given his recent engagement to human Zia Morgan.
Earlier this week.
He was with her earlier this week.
While he was kissing me in corridors and sending me breakfast and noticing that I don’t eat fish, he was with her. At a private event. With her hand on his collar and her head on his shoulder and her body curved into his like she’d never left.
My phone buzzes. Trish.
Trish: Have you seen this
Trish: ZIA
Trish: Those photos are OLD. Look at his hair. It’s longer. That’s not how he looks now
I stare at her message. I zoom in on the photos.
His hair. Is it longer? I can’t tell. I can’t tell because my eyes are blurring and my hands are shaking and the rational part of my brain, the part that designs polymer casings and calibrates dispersion algorithms, has been completely overridden by the part that remembers Billy.
Because this is what happened with Billy.
Not photos. Not a gossip feed. But the same architecture of betrayal: the slow realization that the man you trusted was somewhere else, with someone else, being someone else, while you sat in the dark believing you were the only one.
Billy’s mother told him to end it. He did. Four sentences. No warning.
And now the Prince of Atlantis, who kissed me at my desk three days ago, who had his hand under my shirt, whose breathing went ragged against my neck, who notices my air vent, is in photographs with a Lyccan shifter whose body language screams we never stopped.
Trish: Zia please answer me
Trish: Those are OLD PHOTOS someone is messing with you
I pick up my phone. Not to answer Trish.
I open my thread with Alexei. The messages are sparse. He doesn’t text much. There’s the logistics message Ruby sent through his phone about the Expo, and one message from him, just one, sent Tuesday morning after the corridor kiss:
The breakfast will include miso soup tomorrow. You mentioned it once to the cleaning crew.
He remembered that I mentioned miso soup to the cleaning crew.
And now there are photos of him with a beautiful Lyccan woman and I can’t breathe.
I type.
I saw the photos. I can’t do this. I’m sorry. Please don’t contact me.
Four sentences. I realize, as I hit send, that I’ve just written Billy’s text. The same structure. The same cowardice. The same running.
I put my phone face down on the bathroom floor and I cry.
Not the dignified kind. The kind where your whole body participates, where your ribs ache and your throat closes and every sob sounds like it’s being ripped out of you by something that doesn’t care how much it hurts.
I cry for Billy and for Alexei and for the stupid, reckless hope I let myself feel when he got on his knees in my mind and whispered my name like a prayer, except he didn’t, that was the fantasy I was building, the story I was writing in my head where someone finally chose me and meant it.
I drag myself to bed. I don’t change. I don’t wash my face. I just lie there with mascara on my pillowcase and my phone abandoned on the bathroom floor and the taste of salt in my mouth, and I fall asleep the way you fall when you’ve run out of everything: all at once, without choosing to.
I WAKE UP BECAUSE THE air is different.
Not wrong. Not dangerous. Just...different. Warmer. Charged. That specific shift in atmospheric pressure that my body has learned to recognize in the space of five days, the one that means—
I sit up.
He’s standing by my window.
My third-floor window, which I leave cracked because the building doesn’t have central air and it’s June in Colorado and the landlord’s idea of climate control is a suggestion to “buy a fan.” The window is open wider than I left it, and the curtain is pushed aside, and Alexei is standing in my bedroom in a dark shirt with his sleeves rolled and his hair slightly windblown and an expression on his face that I have never, in five days of stolen kisses and quiet intensity, seen before.
He looks wrecked.
Not angry. Not composed. Not wearing the mask. Wrecked, the way a man looks when something he thought was indestructible has just been threatened, and he crossed a city and climbed three stories of brick facade to get to it.
“Did you climb my building?”
My voice comes out hoarse and swollen and I’m suddenly, horribly aware that I’m in a T-shirt and shorts with last night’s makeup streaked down my face and my hair in a state that could only be described as hostile.
“The fire escape,” he says. “Mostly.”
Mostly.
“You can’t be here.” I pull my blanket up like it’s armor. “I sent you a text. I was very clear.”
“You sent me Billy’s text.”
The words land like a slap. Not because they’re cruel. Because they’re true. He recognized it. He read my four sentences and he knew exactly what I’d done, where I’d copied from, what it meant that in my worst moment I’d reached for the same template that destroyed me.
“The photos are from three years ago.” His voice is even but there’s a fracture running through it.
“Lauren Ashford. We were involved briefly, before That Day. It was never—” He stops.
Starts again. “It was proximity. Strategy. Two preters who understood each other’s world when the world didn’t know ours existed.
It ended before That Day, and it ended because there was nothing to sustain. ”
“Then why—”
“Because she saw the engagement announcement and decided the world should see what it lost.” A muscle works in his jaw. “The event in the photos was a Lyccan territorial summit. Three years ago. I’ve already had Ruby contact every outlet. The retraction will run by morning.”
I’m gripping my blanket so hard my knuckles ache. The rational part of me, the part that Trish was trying to activate with look at his hair, it’s longer, hears him and believes him. The photos are old. Lauren is bitter. It’s a setup.
But the Billy part of me, the part that lives in my chest like scar tissue, is screaming.
“You should go.”
“No.”
“Alexei—”
“I love you, Zia Morgan.”
The bedroom goes silent.
Not quiet. Silent. Silence that has weight, that presses against your eardrums, that makes you aware of your own heartbeat that borders on painful.
He’s still by the window. He hasn’t moved toward me.
Hasn’t crossed the room. He’s giving me all the space in the world, and he’s standing in the moonlight that’s coming through my cracked window, and his eyes are on mine, and what I see in them isn’t composure or control or any of the things I’ve come to associate with the Prince of Atlantis.
It’s fear.
He’s afraid.
The man who walked through the Convergence Expo and made alphas bow.
The man who announced our engagement to the entire preter world without asking.
The man who climbed my building ten minutes ago.
He is standing in my bedroom and he is afraid, because a twenty-two-year-old human in a tear-stained T-shirt sent him a text, and it had the power to terrify him.
“I’ve never said that to anyone.” His voice is barely above a whisper.
“My family was taken from me when I was a child. The Sceleri saw to that. I’ve been alone since then.
Everything I built, every wall, every company, every alliance, I built from that emptiness.
” He pauses. “And I never said those words. Not once. Until you.”
A tear rolls down my face. I don’t wipe it.
“I’m not that boy, Zia. I won’t ever be that boy. And I’ll spend whatever time you give me proving it.”
I look at him. Standing in my bedroom. Moonlight and fear and rolled sleeves and the faint windburn of a man who climbed a building for me.
“The photos really are old?”
“Three years.”
“And Lauren—”
“Means nothing. Meant nothing.”
“And you climbed my building.”
The ghost of something crosses his face. Not a smile. But close.
“The fire escape. Mostly.”
I let go of the blanket.
“Come here,” I whisper.
He crosses the room. And when he reaches me, when his hands find my face and his thumbs trace the mascara tracks on my cheeks, the gentleness of it cracks something inside me that I’ve been holding together with determination and duct tape for seven months.
“Yes,” I say.
One word.
His eyes close. Just for a second. And in that second, the mask, the composure, the iron calm, all of it falls away, and what’s left is just a man who has been waiting for a very long time to hear one syllable.
He kisses me.
And this kiss is nothing like the others.
The stolen kisses were claims. The desk kiss was hunger.
This is relief. This is him cradling my face, his forehead pressed against mine and his breath unsteady against my lips, and I’m crying and kissing him at the same time, which should be unattractive but I don’t care because he’s whispering my name between kisses like it’s the only word he knows.
“Zia. Zia. Zia.”
His hands move down. Not stealing this time. Not claiming. Asking. His fingers trace the hem of my T-shirt, and he pauses, and in that pause is a question that he waits for me to answer.