CHAPTER SIX
I WAKE UP IN A ROOM I don’t recognize, in sheets that smell like mountain air and still water, and the first thing I see is his hand.
It’s resting on the pillow between us, palm up, fingers slightly curled.
Relaxed in a way I’ve never seen him relaxed before.
Asleep, the composure is gone, not replaced by vulnerability exactly, but by a stillness that’s different from his waking stillness.
Softer. Like the difference between a lake frozen over and a lake at rest.
His face is turned toward me. Even in sleep, even with his hair falling across his forehead and the early morning light catching the sharp planes of his jaw and the dark sweep of his lashes, he is the most breathtakingly beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
And he’s my husband.
That word hasn’t landed yet. It’s been hovering somewhere above me since the ceremony, floating just out of reach, too enormous and too strange to absorb.
Husband. The Prince of Atlantis is my husband.
I’m lying in his bed in his fortress in the Colorado Rockies and my body is sore in places I didn’t know could be sore and every inch of my skin remembers his hands.
Last night.
Last night was...
I close my eyes and the memory washes over me like warm water.
He carried me. Through the door, down the hallway of midnight blue with its constellation maps, into this room with its wide windows and its view of peaks I couldn’t see because the sky was dark and the only light was him.
He set me down like I was made of something that could shatter, and then he stood there, looking at me, and I understood for the first time what it means to be seen.
Not looked at. Not observed. Seen.
Like every part of me, the scared parts and the wanting parts and the parts that still flinched when good things happened because I’d learned that good things left, was visible to him, and none of it made him turn away.
He undressed me slowly. Each button, each layer, each reveal met with the same reverence, the same patient attention he brought to everything. And when I stood before him with nothing left to hide behind, he said my name.
Just my name.
And how he said it told me everything his composure wouldn’t let him show on his face.
What followed was...I don’t have words for it.
Not the sort that fit in sentences, anyway.
I have impressions. Fragments. The warmth of his skin against mine.
The sound he made, low, raw, almost pained, the first time there was nothing between us.
Those hands I’d spent a four-hour plane ride trying not to stare at, learning every curve and hollow of my body like I was a language he’d waited his whole life to speak.
He was gentle.
Not careful. Careful implies fragility, implies something that might break.
Gentle the way rain is gentle. Thorough and everywhere at once, and when I gasped, he paused.
When I pulled him closer, he gave me more.
When I whispered his name, not Your Highness, not sir, just Alexei, something in his eyes went dark and deep and endless, and he kissed me like the word had undone him.
And when he whispered mine back, against my shoulder, against the hollow of my throat, against the skin behind my ear, I understood, finally, what all those romance novels on my windowsill were trying to describe.
The thing that sounded like fantasy when you read it in paperback but felt like physics when it was happening to you.
Two bodies becoming a single system, synchronized, orbiting something neither of them can see but both of them can feel.
After, when the world came back and my heartbeat slowed to something resembling human, he pulled me against his chest and pressed his lips to my hair and said nothing.
He didn’t need to.
I fell asleep listening to his heartbeat beneath my ear, and it sounded like the most honest thing anyone had ever told me.
Now, in the morning light, I watch his sleeping hand and I think about Billy.
Not with longing. Not with pain. With the strange, clear-eyed perspective that comes from standing on the other side of something you thought would destroy you and realizing it didn’t.
Billy sent me four sentences and called it a breakup. He kept me in the dark for two years and called it love. He chose his inheritance over a girl who would have chosen him over everything, and he didn’t even have the courage to do it to her face.
Alexei knelt on the floor of my bedroom and told me the ugliest truth about himself, that he watched and waited and didn’t stop my heart from breaking, and then he told me I love you like the words had never existed before he spoke them.
Billy’s love was a secret he kept.
Alexei’s love is a fact he announced to the entire preter world before I’d even chosen yes.
And I think, lying here in the early light, in sheets that smell like him, watching his hand on the pillow, I think the difference between those two kinds of love is the difference between drowning and learning to breathe.
His fingers twitch. His eyes open.
The pale blue finds me instantly, as if even in sleep he knew exactly where I was, and the look on his face when he sees me...
It’s not the composed, unreadable calm. It’s not the mask. It’s naked. Open. A look that says you’re still here with a relief so raw it makes my chest ache, as if some part of him, some deep, wounded part, expected to wake up alone.
“Hi,” I say.
Brilliant. Eloquent. The first word I speak to my husband on the morning after our wedding, and it’s hi.
His mouth curves. Not a smile. Alexei doesn’t smile, not really, not the way normal people smile. But the corners of his lips lift, and something warm enters his eyes, and it’s the most beautiful expression I’ve ever seen on another being.
“Good morning, little one.”
And there it is.
The thing I’ve been circling for days. The thing I felt on the plane and fought at the Expo and denied in the bathroom stall and surrendered to at the desk and cried about in my bedroom.
The thing that has been building inside me since a man who could have anyone in the world noticed that I don’t eat fish and fixed the air vent above my desk.
I love him.
It arrives without fanfare. No dramatic realization. No cinematic swell. It’s just there, solid and undeniable, like a sunrise that’s been happening for hours and you only just opened your eyes.
I love the way he says my name. I love his patience, his impossible certainty, his hands and his stillness and the way he gave me a week I didn’t ask for because he understood I needed time I couldn’t articulate.
I love that he knelt. I love that he told me the truth even when the truth was ugly.
I love that he told me we will make it, little one and meant it with every fiber of his being.
I love him, and the feeling is nothing like what I felt for Billy.
What I felt for Billy was a candle. Small, warm, easily extinguished. I cupped my hands around it for two years, shielding it from every gust, telling myself the flicker was enough. Telling myself that a love you had to protect that fiercely must be worth protecting.
It wasn’t.
This is a furnace. Love that could heat a fortress built into a mountain. Love that doesn’t flicker when someone opens a door. Love that, once lit, changes the temperature of everything around it, permanently, irreversibly, in ways you can’t undo even if you tried.
I don’t say it. Not yet. The word is too new and too enormous and I need to hold it inside me for a little while longer, how you hold a breath before you dive.
Instead I lean forward and kiss his jaw, just below his ear, and he goes still the way he always does when I initiate, that particular quality of surprised stillness that tells me the Prince of Atlantis, who has anticipated everything else, did not anticipate being kissed softly on a Sunday morning by a girl from Colorado.
His arm wraps around me and pulls me close, and I press my face into his neck and breathe him in, and the world outside this room, the preter politics and the Blood Oval and the L’Alliance coverage and my mother’s group chat, all of it ceases to exist.
There is only this.
Only him.
Only his heartbeat against my cheek and the warmth of his arms and the mountain light pouring through the windows, and I’m happy.
Genuinely, entirely, terrifyingly happy, and the terror comes from knowing that I’ve never had anything this good and the last time I thought I did, it was taken away in four sentences.
But that was Billy.
And this is Alexei.
And they’re not the same.
We stay in bed until the light shifts from gold to white.
He orders breakfast, not from a kitchen staff, but from Ruby, who delivers it to the door without entering or speaking, which suggests she has a preternatural sense for when her boss does not wish to be disturbed.
The tray has everything I like and nothing I don’t, and there is no fish.
I laugh, and he watches me laugh, and his eyes do that warm thing again.
We eat in bed. I tell him about the romance novels on my windowsill, about how the heroes in them always say the right thing at the right time and he’s ruined me for fictional men because no book boyfriend has ever fixed an air vent.
He almost smiles at that, the lips-lifting thing, and I realize I’m collecting his almost-smiles the way some people collect stamps, cataloguing each one, noting what caused it, filing it away for future study.
He tells me about his past. Not Atlantis, not in detail, but the shape of his life after the war with the Sceleri.
Growing up mostly alone. Protecting the secrets of his race.
Building walls and companies and alliances from emptiness, because the alternative was sitting in a fortress and letting the silence win.
“It was only after a private meeting with Domenico Moretti that I agreed to work with L’Alliance,” he says. “Human affairs were never relevant to me. I simply joined because it was logical and practical. But after meeting you...”
He trails off. Looks at me with those pale eyes.
All I can do is swallow. It’s just so hard to believe that a man like Alexei has feelings for me, and when he suddenly sweeps me into his arms and carries me to the shower...
All I can do is wrap my arms around his neck. The thought of what we’re about to do feels so embarrassingly intimate, but...oh...oh...
AFTER, WE TOUR THE fortress.
He walks me through rooms I didn’t know existed: a library that spans three floors, a conservatory with plants that glow faintly in the dim light, a music room with a piano that he tells me hasn’t been played in years.
I touch the keys and a single note rings through the space, pure and lonely, and I wonder how long he’s lived in this beautiful, enormous place by himself.
We pass those same stone structures I noticed during the ceremony, the low weathered ones along the tree line. “For changing,” he’d told me then, and I still haven’t asked what exactly needs changing in them. Riding gear, probably. The estate has stables. I file it away again and keep walking.
He shows me a balcony that overlooks a valley I’m fairly sure doesn’t exist on any human map, and we stand there in the cold mountain air while I wear his shirt and his arm rests around my shoulders, and I think about how the word “home” has always meant a studio apartment with books arranged by color and a window that doesn’t close all the way.
It might mean something different now.
It might mean the weight of his arm and the scent of mountain air and a piano waiting to be played.
I take his hand.
He looks down at our intertwined fingers like he’s never seen anything like it before.
And I think: I love you. I love you. I love you.
And I will say it soon.
But first, I need to find my phone, because my mother has probably called seventeen times and organized a welcome brunch and invited the neighbors.
Ruby, efficient as always, has collected my things from the garden and placed them in the suite adjoining Alexei’s bedroom, a room that I think is supposed to be mine, with closet space that could fit my entire apartment and a vanity table that has already been stocked with products I recognize as my brands.
I don’t ask how she knows. I’ve stopped asking how anyone in Alexei’s world knows things.
My phone is on the nightstand. Dead.
I plug it in and wait for it to come alive, and when it does, the screen fills with the expected flood: texts from Joni, texts from Trish, notifications from social media accounts I keep forgetting I have.
I scroll through them with a half-smile, my thumb moving automatically, my mind still back in the music room with his hand in mine and the single piano note hanging in the air.
And then I see it.
Between a congratulatory message from a college acquaintance and a missed call from an unknown number, there’s a text.
From Billy.
The name stops me cold. Not because I want to see it. Not because some dormant, traitorous part of me has been hoping for it. But because the body remembers things the mind has tried to forget, and the body remembers what that name used to mean.
Late nights waiting for his text. The three-dot bubble that was the highlight of my day. The secret smiles I wore like armor against the loneliness of being someone’s hidden thing.
My thumb hovers over the notification.
I should delete it. I should delete it without reading it, because nothing Billy Stein has to say can touch me now.
I’m married. I’m in love. I’m standing in a fortress in the Rockies wearing my husband’s shirt and my body is still warm from his touch and his mouth and his whispered Zia, Zia, Zia and nothing, nothing, from before can reach me here.
I tap the message.
Billy: Zia, I saw the news. I know I don’t have the right to say this.
I know I lost that right when I let you go.
But I need you to know that I’m sorry. For all of it.
For every day I kept you secret and every night I should have fought for you and didn’t.
I was a coward. You deserved better. You always deserved better.
And I still love you. I never stopped. I’m sorry it took losing you to make me brave enough to say it.