CHAPTER NINE
I REACH FOR HIS HAND across the breakfast counter, and his fingers close around mine a beat too late.
Not wrong. Not cold. Just late. A fraction of a second where there used to be none, a gap so small it shouldn’t register, except my hand has been reaching for his every morning for two weeks and it knows the difference between a man who catches you and a man who remembers to.
He’s still holding my hand. He’s still looking at me with those pale eyes. He’s still Alexei, the collar-straightening, breakfast-ordering, espresso-machine-tolerating man I married.
But the humming stopped.
I noticed it two days ago. I told myself I was imagining it.
I noticed it again yesterday. I told myself he was tired.
This morning, I woke up and he was already dressed.
Not unusual. He’s an early riser, and Ruby sends the morning briefing at 6 a.m. sharp.
But he was standing by the window instead of the bed.
Looking at the mountains instead of at me.
And when he turned and said “Good morning, little one,” the words were right but the warmth behind them was a degree cooler than it used to be.
One degree.
Most people wouldn’t notice one degree. Most people can’t tell the difference between a man who is completely present and a man who is almost completely present, because the gap is so small it’s invisible.
But I’ve spent two weeks learning the temperature of Alexei Lykaios, and one degree is an avalanche.
I don’t say anything.
Because what would I say? Your humming has gaps in it? You were looking at the mountains instead of me? Your “good morning” was faster than usual, which means you said it from habit instead of from the place where you keep the things you mean?
I would sound insane.
And besides, there are reasonable explanations.
The Blood Oval has been demanding more of his time.
Three separate Lyccan territories are disputing border rights, and the trade negotiations with the Bellecourts have reached a stage that requires his personal attention.
Ruby’s briefings have gotten longer. His meetings run later.
The preter world doesn’t pause because its prince got married, and the weight of the things he carries, the alliances, the politics, the impossible balancing act of being the last of his kind in a world that needs him to be everything, would exhaust anyone.
He’s busy.
That’s all.
He’s busy, and I’m overthinking, and the humming will come back when the border dispute settles, and the one-degree difference in his voice is the product of exhaustion, not distance.
This is what I tell myself.
I tell myself this when he comes home from a late meeting and kisses me hello but doesn’t linger.
I tell myself this when we’re in bed and his arm is around me but his body is turned slightly away, an angle so subtle that measuring it would require instruments more sensitive than the human heart, except the human heart is the most sensitive instrument there is and mine is tuned to him.
I tell myself this when I catch him looking at me across the kitchen with an expression I can’t read. Not the warmth. Not the composure. Something in between, something searching, something that looks almost like a question he’s afraid to ask.
And I tell myself this most aggressively on Friday evening when I’m curled against him on the couch and I lean up to kiss his neck and he goes still.
Not the good still. Not the still that means I’ve found the seam in his composure and his body is deciding how to respond.
A different still. A careful still. The still of a man who is holding something back.
It lasts a second. Less than a second. Then his arm tightens around me and he turns and kisses me properly, and the kiss is thorough, warm, extraordinary, and I decide that the second of hesitation was nothing.
Exhaustion.
Stress.
Bellecourts.
Not distance.
This is what I tell myself on Sunday morning when Alexei comes into the kitchen where I’m losing a war with Mariano and says, “I need to go in to the office.”
Sunday.
He doesn’t work on Sundays. Sundays are ours.
Sundays are breakfast in the kitchen and the couch and the library and the long, slow afternoons where he reads and I read and the humming fills the space between us like a third heartbeat.
Ruby doesn’t call. The Blood Oval doesn’t summon.
Sundays are sacred in the way that only two people who are still learning how to be together can make something sacred, by showing up, by being present, by choosing each other over everything else.
But he’s standing in the kitchen doorway in a suit on a Sunday, and his expression is the composed, unreadable one, the prince, not the husband, and he’s saying he needs to go.
“The Bellecourt negotiations,” he says. “A development that requires my attention.”
“On a Sunday?”
“The Bellecourts don’t observe weekends.”
This is true. I know this is true because I’ve heard him say it before, and because vampires are nocturnal and their relationship to the human calendar is at best adversarial. And he’s looking at me with those pale eyes, and his voice is even, and nothing about this moment is wrong.
One degree.
I smile. “Okay. I’ll be here.”
He crosses the kitchen. He kisses my forehead. Not my mouth. My forehead. And the kiss is gentle and brief and it lands on my skin like an apology for something I don’t know about yet.
“I won’t be long,” he says.
And then he’s gone, and the kitchen is quiet, and Mariano hisses at me from the counter, and I stand there with my mug in my hands and tell myself: see? He’s busy. The Bellecourts. Negotiations. Sunday is an inconvenience, not a pattern. Nothing is wrong.
The forehead kiss sits on my skin like a fingerprint.
He kissed my forehead, not my mouth. And I know this means nothing.
People kiss foreheads all the time, it’s tender, it’s sweet, it’s what a man does when he’s in a hurry and his wife has coffee breath.
But Alexei has never once been too hurried to kiss me properly.
Not when we were late for work. Not when Ruby was calling. Not when the Blood Oval was waiting.
Stop it.
I take a breath.
I let it out.
I take my coffee to the library and I’m going to have a normal, peaceful Sunday and I’m not going to spiral about forehead kisses and missing hums and one-degree temperature changes that probably only exist inside my own anxious, overthinking, still-healing head.
Because that’s what this is. This is Billy’s legacy, the part of me that was trained to look for signs of leaving, to measure affection in millimeters, to interpret every small silence as a prelude to abandonment.
Billy taught me that love could vanish overnight, and now my stupid, scarred brain is applying that lesson to a man who knelt on my bedroom floor and told me I love you like the words had never existed before he spoke them.
Alexei is not Billy.
Nothing is wrong.
I take my coffee to the library. I curl up in the leather chair that has become mine, the one by the tall window, where the morning light falls in long golden strips and the silence has a quality I’ve come to love, deep and old and full of peace.
I read. I drink my coffee. I text Trish about Saturday’s dinner plans.
I call Joni, who has opinions about tablecloths and is not afraid to share them.
I talk to Gerald, the fern in the conservatory, the one I named on our third day because he looked like a Gerald, and ask him if I’m overthinking things, and Gerald, as always, offers no comment.
It’s a normal Sunday.
Alexei has been gone for maybe twenty minutes when a staff member appears in the library doorway. I don’t know her name. The fortress has a small team that maintains the grounds and the interior, all preters, all so discreet they’re practically invisible.
“Mrs. Lykaios?”
I’m still not used to that. Mrs. Lykaios. Every time I hear it, my brain does a small, bewildered reset, like a GPS that keeps recalculating a route it didn’t expect to be on.
“Yes?”
“You have a visitor.”
A visitor. On a Sunday. At a fortress in the Rocky Mountains that exists in a pocket dimension and doesn’t appear on any map.
“Who?”
The staff member’s expression gives nothing away, but something in how she holds herself, a slight stiffness, a careful blankness, tells me she knows this name carries weight.
“A Mr. Stein, ma’am. Billy Stein.”
The coffee mug in my hands goes very still.
The library goes very still.
Everything goes very still, and the world narrows to the two words in the staff member’s mouth and the blood leaving my face and the particular, sickening lurch of my stomach that accompanies two realities crashing together that were never, ever supposed to touch.
Billy is here.
Billy is here, at the fortress, at my husband’s home, on a Sunday morning when my husband just left for the first time since we were married, and the coincidence of that timing is a thought I can’t complete because completing it would mean acknowledging something I’m not ready to acknowledge.
How did he even get here? The fortress exists in a pocket dimension. The roads only appear when they’re supposed to. You can’t just Google Maps your way to the Prince of Atlantis’s front door.
Unless you’ve been watching long enough to learn the way.
I shut that thought down. Hard.
“Ma’am?” the staff member says. “Shall I...”
“Yes.” My voice sounds far away. “Yes, let him in.”
I don’t know why I say it. I should say no.
I should tell the staff member to send him away, to close the gate, to inform Mr. Stein that Mrs. Lykaios is not receiving visitors.
That would be the smart thing. The safe thing.
The thing that a woman who has spent two weeks building a new life would do to protect it.
But I’m not a woman who leaves things unfinished.
He’s standing in the living room when I walk in.
And the first thing I think, the very first thing, before the shock settles, before the anger arrives, before any of the complicated emotions that come with seeing someone who broke your heart, is: he’s smaller than I remember.
Not physically. Billy is tall, fit, his long blond hair pulled back in that ponytail he always wore, the emo poet look I used to find romantic.
But standing in Alexei’s living room, in the fortress that my husband built, surrounded by the quiet power of a space that belongs to the Prince of Atlantis, Billy Stein looks diminished.
Like a candle brought into a room that’s already full of sunlight.
He turns when he hears me. And his face...
He looks the same and completely different.
The same dark eyes, eyes I used to think were soulful, before I understood they were just confused, the eyes of a boy who never quite figured out how to step out of his mother’s shadow.
The same jaw, the same face I used to trace with my fingers in the dark while he whispered promises he didn’t keep.
But there are shadows under his eyes now, and something in the set of his mouth that I’ve never seen before, a rawness, an openness, like the boy who hid everything has finally run out of places to hide.
“Zia.” His voice cracks on my name. He takes a step forward, and his hand comes up, instinctive, automatic, reaching for my cheek the way he used to, leaning in to press his lips to my face.
I step back.
Quick. Sharp. My body moving before my brain has finished processing, because whatever we were, whatever we had, that intimacy belongs to another woman. A woman who doesn’t exist anymore. A woman who waited for his texts and wore his secret like armor and believed that a hidden love was still love.
Billy’s hand drops. His face crumbles for a second before he catches it.
“W-why are you here?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “What exactly do you want?”
“Zia, I just need to talk to you. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why are you so nervous?” He frowns. Studies me.
And something shifts in his expression, a hardening, a flash of the old Billy, the one who made assumptions and followed them to conclusions that suited him.
“Did he forbid you to talk to me? He did, didn’t he?
That’s why I waited for him to leave...”
My eyes widen.
He breaks off.
But it’s too late.
The words are already in the room, filling the space between us with their full, horrifying weight.
I waited for him to leave. Not I happened to come by.
Not I took a chance that you’d be home. He waited.
He watched. He knew when Alexei left and how long he’d been gone and he chose this specific window of time to show up at a fortress that doesn’t appear on any map.
“Have you been stalking me?”