CHAPTER FIVE #2
I answer by pulling him closer.
His fingers slide under the fabric, and there is no phone to interrupt. No Ruby with impeccable timing. There is only his mouth on my neck and his hands, warm, slow, achingly patient, moving over my skin like he’s learning me by touch alone, committing me to a memory he intends to keep forever.
He takes me apart slowly.
Not with urgency. Not with the desperate, fumbling heat that I associated with intimacy before him. With care. With the attention of a man who has waited fourteen months and is not going to rush the first time he gets to touch me without an interruption or a deadline or a wall between us.
I never wanted this with Billy. That thought surfaces, clear and startling, in the middle of everything. Two years, and I never once felt this pull to cross the line. Billy respected that, and I told myself it was because I wasn’t ready. But that wasn’t it. It was never about readiness.
It was about him.
This pull. This compatibility that goes deeper than attraction, deeper than choice, all the way down to whatever it is in my blood that his system identified at 97.2%. My body knew before my brain did. My body was waiting for this specific person.
His mouth finds the curve of my shoulder.
He finds the places that make me gasp, that make me grip his shirt, that make sounds come out of me I didn’t know I could make.
And through all of it, he’s gentle. Touching me like I’m precious, like I’m something he’s afraid of breaking even though I’m the one who’s already broken and he’s the one putting me back together.
He whispers my name against my skin. Once. Twice. Like a prayer, like a confirmation, like the word itself is something sacred he’s only now been given permission to say out loud.
When I come undone, it’s with his name on my lips and his arms around me, and the sound I make is not desire.
It’s release.
The kind that comes from holding on so tight, for so long, to a version of yourself that was built for survival and not for living.
The kind that comes when someone sees all of you, the scared parts and the scarred parts and the parts that still flinch when someone says “I love you,” and stays anyway.
I cry.
Not delicately. Not prettily. I cry the way you cry when something inside you that’s been locked for seven months finally opens, and everything you stored in there comes flooding out at once.
I cry into his shirt while he holds me, and he doesn’t tell me to stop, doesn’t ask what’s wrong, doesn’t do any of the things people usually do when someone falls apart in their arms.
He just holds me.
Like he was made for this.
THE WEDDING IS TWO days later, and it is small, and it is nothing like what I imagined a royal wedding would be.
It’s held in a garden on the Lykaios estate, a space I didn’t know existed, tucked behind the fortress and accessible through a door that appears only when Alexei touches the stone beside it.
The garden is wild and intentional-looking, full of flowers I can’t name and trees that seem to hum with something old, and the sky above is the deep blue of late afternoon shifting toward evening.
On the walk through the grounds, I notice small stone structures dotted along the tree line. Low, weathered, like ancient changing rooms.
“For changing,” Alexei says when he catches me looking.
I assume he means riding gear. The estate has stables; I’ve seen them from the upper windows. I don’t ask more, because I’m still learning the rhythms of preter life and I’d rather not reveal the full depth of my ignorance on my wedding day.
My mom cries through the entire ceremony.
She’s wearing a dress she bought three days ago and shoes she’s already complained about twice, and she’s holding Trish’s hand for support because Trish, who has cried exactly once in the two months I’ve known her, and that was when the man she’s dating sent her flowers at work and she had to hide in the server room, is also crying.
Nicolo Celestini stands to Alexei’s left.
The man I’ve heard so much about, the brooding alpha, the perpetual glare, is smiling.
Not a polite smile. A real one. The sort that transforms his face from intimidating to almost boyish, and he keeps looking at Alexei with an expression I can only describe as recognition.
Takes one to know one, his smile says.
Maryah is next to him, and meeting her is like suddenly gaining an older sister I didn’t know I needed.
And Ada, her assistant, is...well, she’s the cousin you love fiercely but can’t help feeling nervous about, because within five minutes of arriving she’s already knocked over a champagne glass and called Alexei “Your Majesty” by mistake.
Before the ceremony, I watched Nicolo clasp Alexei’s shoulder and say something low that I couldn’t hear.
Whatever it was made Alexei’s composure crack for half a second, not into vulnerability but into something almost like amusement, and Nicolo laughed, a real laugh, and I thought: these two have history.
The sort where one man can look at another and know exactly what he’s feeling because he’s felt it too, and the knowing is enough.
Alexei was watching me. Not the ceremony preparations. Not the guests. Me, laughing at Ada’s chaos, and the look on his face—
It was the look from the plane. From the Expo. From every stolen moment of the last week where I caught him watching me with something vast and barely contained behind his eyes.
Except now I know what it is.
Now I have a name for it.
The ceremony itself is brief. The officiant is a preter I don’t recognize, someone from the Viver tradition, humans with mystical knowledge who have been performing supernatural unions for centuries.
The words are spoken in a language I don’t understand, and then in English, and when Alexei says “I do,” his voice is the steadiest thing I’ve ever heard.
When I say it, mine breaks.
But I say it.
And then he’s cradling my face and kissing me, and Joni is sobbing, and Trish is sobbing, and Nicolo has his arm around Maryah and he’s looking at Alexei the way you look at someone you’ve known for a very long time who has finally found what you always hoped they’d find.
And I’m married.
I’m married to the Prince of Atlantis in a hidden garden with humming trees, wearing a dress that Ruby produced from thin air.
My mom corners me as the light is fading, her eyes red and her mascara halfway down her face and her smile so wide it looks like it might split her apart.
“You know what the best part is?” she says, gripping my arm.
“What?”
“He looks at you like you’re the only person in the room. Billy never did that.” She cups my face. “I always knew, sweetheart. I always knew Billy wasn’t it.”
“You never said anything.”
“You needed to figure it out yourself.” She wipes her eyes. “Also I was afraid you’d stop calling me on Sundays if I criticized your boyfriend.”
I hug her so hard she squeaks.
Later, when the guests have gone and the garden is empty and the evening has settled into that deep, quiet blue that comes just before full dark, Alexei takes my hand.
“Come,” he says.
And I go.
Because I chose yes. Because I chose this. Because for the first time in seven months, the fear in my chest is quieter than the wanting, and I’m done, finally, terrifyingly done, letting Billy’s cowardice decide the shape of my life.
Alexei leads me through the garden, through the door in the stone, and into a hallway I’ve never seen, and the fortress closes around us like a held breath, and his hand is warm in mine, and my heart is hammering, and I’m walking toward my wedding night with the man I married three hours ago.
The man who climbed my building.
The man who memorized my lunch and fixed my air vent and sent me miso soup because I mentioned it to the cleaning crew.
The man who stood in my bedroom in moonlight and told me I love you like the words had been waiting inside him his whole life.
He opens a door.
And I walk through it.
Behind me, on the table in the garden beside an empty champagne glass, my phone lights up.
The screen glows for a few seconds in the empty garden.
Then it goes dark.