CHAPTER SEVEN #2
I walk to the elevator with as much dignity as a woman whose legs are still unreliable can muster, and when the doors close and I’m alone, I press my back against the wall and grin at the ceiling like an idiot.
My phone buzzes.
I look down, still grinning, expecting Trish’s daily interrogation or maybe a message from Alexei, something dry and extraordinary like “You left an earring,” and the grin dies.
Unknown number.
I talked to my family. I told them they were wrong about you. I told them I should have fought. Zia, I’m fighting now. Please.
I stare at the screen. The elevator hums around me.
The fluorescent light is too bright and the residual warmth from Alexei’s study is still on my skin, and here is Billy Stein, texting me from yet another number, using the word fighting like it’s something heroic when the real fight was two years ago and he surrendered without a single blow.
I block the number.
The elevator doors open. I walk out. I go back to my desk. I work on the V-Series humidity calibration until the flush fades and my heart rate returns to something that could belong to either the desk or the text and I choose to believe it’s the desk.
At three o’clock there’s a company-wide presentation in the main auditorium, quarterly review, the sort of thing that used to mean sitting in the back row trying not to fall asleep.
Now it means sitting in the front row because my husband is presenting, and the surreal, dizzying privilege of watching the Prince of Atlantis command a room of three hundred employees while knowing what his face looks like when he sleeps.
He’s magnetic at the podium. That stallion presence, amplified.
Every eye in the room tracks him, and his voice fills the space without effort.
He talks about growth projections and strategic partnerships with the Bellecourts, and I watch his mouth move and think about what that mouth was doing an hour ago and nearly combust in my seat.
Trish, sitting beside me, leans over.
“Your face is doing a thing,” she whispers.
“Shut up.”
“A very specific thing.”
“Trish.”
“I’m just saying. If thoughts were visible, yours won’t be safe for work.”
After the presentation, I’m gathering my tablet when I feel him behind me. Not touching. Just close. That gravitational shift.
We walk through the lobby together, side by side, his hand on my lower back, and people see us.
Employees, delegates, visitors in the marble foyer.
They see the Prince of Atlantis walking with his wife, and there is nothing secret about it.
Nothing hidden. Nothing whispered or denied or kept behind closed doors.
Billy kept me in the dark for two years.
Alexei walks with me in the light.
The drive home is golden. Late afternoon light pouring through the windows, the mountains catching fire in the distance, and Alexei’s hand on my knee again.
He’s telling me about a Lyccan trade negotiation that went sideways, and the way he describes it, bone-dry, with a single aside about the delegate’s negotiation skills that makes me snort-laugh so hard I embarrass myself, is a reminder that the man I married is unexpectedly, quietly funny, the sort that sneaks up on you.
We eat dinner in the kitchen because I asked and he agreed and I think it secretly delights him that his wife would rather sit on a counter stool and eat pasta than be served in the formal dining room that seats forty.
He makes the pasta himself, sleeves rolled, dishcloth over his shoulder, that look of focused determination that says the fettuccine has personally wronged him, and I sit on the counter and steal pieces of basil and tell him about Trish’s collar theory and he does the almost-smile.
I’m telling him about Trish’s boyfriend’s 5 p.m. goodnight texts, how they arrive like clockwork, how Trish turns pink every single time, how she hides in the server room to read them, and he listens with that quiet attentiveness that makes you feel like the most interesting person in any room, and when I’m done, he says: “She should marry him.”
“They’ve been dating for two months.”
“I married you after a week.”
“You gave me a week. There’s a difference.”
He leans across the counter and kisses me. It tastes like basil and the almost-smile, and when he pulls back, there’s something in his eyes that I’ve been seeing more and more this week, the warmth that lives behind the composure, the tenderness that a lifetime of solitude couldn’t kill.
“There isn’t,” he says softly.
And the humming starts.
That low, barely audible vibration in his chest that I’ve learned is a stallion trait.
A sound he makes when he’s settled. Content.
He doesn’t know he’s doing it, or maybe he does and doesn’t care anymore, and either way, the sound of it, warm and constant, makes me want to crawl inside his chest and live there.
I haven’t said it yet.
I love you.
The words have been pressing against my ribs for days.
Getting bigger. Getting louder. They climb my throat when he hums. They fill my mouth when he fixes my collar.
They nearly escape when he says my name in his sleep, which he does, every night, a whispered Zia in the dark that makes me lie very still and hold my breath and feel things so enormous they don’t fit inside a human body.
Tonight. I’m going to say it tonight.
We’re on the couch. His arm is around me.
I’m reading one of the novels I brought from my apartment, he sent someone to collect my things on the second day, including every book from the windowsill, arranged by color, exactly as I had them, and his fingers are tracing absent patterns on my shoulder while he reads something on his tablet.
I set my book down. I turn to face him. I open my mouth.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table.
I glance at it. The screen lights up with a notification, and the preview text is visible for just a second before it goes dark.
One second.
But Alexei’s eyes are faster than mine.
I see it in the shift of his attention. How his gaze moves from his tablet to the phone on the table and then to my face, all in one fluid motion.
How something in his expression changes, not dramatically, not visibly to anyone who hasn’t spent a week memorizing the micro-movements of his composure, but I’ve spent that week, and I see it.
“Who is that?”
His voice is casual. Light. The voice of a man asking an idle question.
But his eyes aren’t idle.
“N-nothing.” The stammer comes before I can stop it, and I feel my cheeks warm, and I hate myself for it because there is nothing to stammer about and nothing to blush about.
Billy is nothing to me now. A closed door.
A forgiven ghost. I blocked every number and deleted every message and I’m sitting on a couch with the man I love and the boy I used to love is nothing.
I pick up the phone. I swipe the notification away. I set it back down.
“Just spam,” I say.
I know Billy means nothing to me now, but why does it feel like I’m hiding something?