CHAPTER ELEVEN
I DIDN’T GO BACK TO him.
I said “excuse me for a moment” and I walked down the hallway, and instead of stopping at the library or the bedroom or the bathroom or any of the places where a woman might go to collect herself before returning to have a conversation about the end of her marriage, I walked straight to the garage.
I took the first car. I didn’t check whose it was.
I got in and I started driving and I didn’t look back, because if I looked back I would see the fortress, and if I saw the fortress I would think about the piano and the library and the espresso machine I named Mariano and the couch where he hummed with his arm around me, and I would break.
I can’t break.
Not yet. Not here. Not on a private road in the Rocky Mountains with my hands shaking on the steering wheel and my vision blurring and the words would you prefer a divorce or an annulment playing on a loop in my head like a song I can’t turn off.
A divorce or an annulment.
Like those were equal options. Like choosing between the method of destruction made the destruction itself more bearable. Like a woman whose husband just told her their compatibility was a mistake should be able to calmly select the paperwork she prefers.
Etienne Hirsche rechecked the numbers.
Etienne Hirsche, whose technology is legendary, whose name carries the weight of absolute authority in the preter world. If Etienne Hirsche says the numbers don’t work, then the numbers don’t work, and the marriage that felt like the truest thing I’d ever known was built on a statistical error.
Except.
Except it didn’t feel like an error. It felt like breathing. It felt like the humming in his chest and the way he said my name in his sleep and the collar he straightened every morning and the espresso war he let me fight for a week because he found it informative.
How can that be an error?
How can a man who gets on his knees and says I love you like the words have never existed before, how can that be the product of a number that didn’t add up?
Unless it was never about the number.
Unless it was about Billy.
The thought hits me so hard I can’t breathe.
He knows. Somehow, some way, he found out about Billy’s visit, and this is his response.
Not rage, not confrontation, not the possessive fury of a man who found another man in his home.
This is Alexei’s version of letting go. Cold.
Clinical. Dressed in the language of science and compatibility scores because his pride would never let him say: I saw him, and I think you want him, and I’m setting you free.
He’s setting me free.
The man who told me we will make it, little one is setting me free because he thinks I don’t want to stay.
A sob tears out of me. Raw, ugly, from deep in the chest. And then another. And another. And I’m driving and crying and I can’t see the road, and the mountains are blurring into shapes I can’t process, and I need to stop, I need to pull over, I need to...
I slam the brakes.
Not because I decided to.
Because there is something in the road.
Something enormous. Something that shouldn’t exist outside of mythology and the deepest, oldest corners of the preter world.
Something standing in the center of the private road with its hooves planted and its head raised and its body blocking every inch of asphalt like a wall made of muscle and midnight.
A stallion.
Not a horse. Not anything that could be mistaken for a horse by anyone who has ever seen a horse.
This is something else entirely. Something from the bottom of the ocean.
Something that radiates power the way a storm radiates electricity, visible, physical, a force that changes the composition of the air.
He is massive. Taller than any horse, broader, built with musculature that speaks of a body designed not for beauty but for war, though beauty came anyway, uninvited and absolute.
His coat is blue-black, the same shade as his hair, and it shimmers in the afternoon light with an iridescence that is not of this world.
Oceanic. Like light refracted through deep water.
His mane falls like dark silk. His eyes. ..
His eyes are pale blue.
The car is skidding. The road is gravel and the tires have lost traction and the vehicle is spinning and I’m going to hit him, I’m going to...
He moves.
Faster than anything that size should be able to move.
One second he is in the center of the road and the next he is beside the car, his massive body pressed against the driver’s side, absorbing the spin, slowing the momentum with a controlled force that brings the vehicle to a shuddering stop without a single point of impact.
The car is still.
I am still.
The engine ticks. My hands are white on the steering wheel. My heart is somewhere in the vicinity of my throat. And outside the driver’s window, so close I could touch him if I reached out, is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.
Alexei.
This is what the changing sheds were for.
The day he showed me the fortress, the library, the conservatory, the garden that only appeared when he touched the stone, we passed a row of small stone structures on the grounds, and when I asked what they were, he said, “For changing.” I’d assumed he meant clothes.
Riding gear. Something mundane. I’d been too shy about my preter ignorance to ask, and he’d moved on, and I’d filed it away.
This is what he meant.
This is what he is.
I’m staring at him through the window, tears still wet on my face, and he is so beautiful it breaks my heart.
Not the human kind of beauty, not the cheekbones and the jaw and the blue-black hair that I’ve spent two weeks memorizing.
This is something deeper. The beauty of a creature that was never meant to be seen by human eyes, standing on a gravel road in the Colorado Rockies, blocking a stolen car driven by a crying woman who doesn’t know how to stop loving him.
And then I hear it.
Not with my ears. Inside. In the center of my mind, in the place where thoughts are born before they become words, a voice that I would recognize anywhere.
I’m sorry, Zia.
My breath stops.
I had it all wrong.
The voice is his. Unmistakably his, the same low, precise timbre, the same cadence, but stripped of everything the spoken version carries.
No composure. No mask. No prince. Just him, raw and unguarded, speaking directly into my mind with a vulnerability that the Prince of Atlantis would never, ever allow his mouth to produce.
I detected Billy’s scent near the fortress. I knew he was coming. I left so you could see him without me in the way.
Oh gosh.
I accessed the surveillance. I saw you in the library, on the phone with Maryah. You said you didn’t know how to break the truth to me, and I...
A pause. In my mind, the pause has the texture of a man swallowing something that hurts.
I thought you meant me. I thought you were trying to find a way to tell me you wanted him. I terminated the feed before I heard the rest.
The tears are falling again. Silently this time.
Running down my cheeks and dripping off my jaw and I don’t wipe them because my hands are still on the wheel and my body has forgotten how to do anything except sit here and listen to the man I love explain how he destroyed us because he was afraid of exactly the same thing I was afraid of.
Being left.
He was afraid of being left. The last of his kind.
The man who lost his entire race in childhood and built a fortress in a mountain and filled it with silence and books no one read and a piano no one played.
He was afraid that the woman who named his espresso machine and talked to his plants would choose a boy from her past over the life they were building.
And so he let her go before she could leave.
Because in his mind, everyone leaves.
I watched the full footage after you left the room. His voice in my mind is shaking. I didn’t know a voice inside your head could shake, but his does. I heard what you said to him. I heard everything.
I love you, Zia.
The words land inside me and bloom.
Forgive my foolishness. Forgive me for breaking my promise not to hurt you. Please...
I’m out of the car.
I don’t decide to open the door. My body moves before my brain has finished processing, the same way it moved on the plane when the turbulence hit and my hand found his arm, the same way it moved in the elevator when his lips met mine.
My body knows things my mind hasn’t caught up to yet, and what it knows right now is that the man I love is standing in the road apologizing inside my head and I can’t be separated from him by a car door for one more second.
I throw my arms around his head.
His massive, beautiful head. My arms wrap around it, and his mane is softer than it looks, like silk, like dark water, like something from the bottom of an ocean I’ve never seen, and I press my face against his neck and he smells like Alexei, like mountain air and still water, and I’m sobbing into the coat of an Atlantean stallion on a gravel road in the Rockies and this is the most insane moment of my entire life and I don’t care.
“I forgive you,” I whisper. Out loud. With my mouth against his neck and my tears in his mane and my arms holding him as tightly as a human woman can hold something that could level a building if it wanted to. “I love you.”
I love you.
His voice in my mind, and the sound of it, the relief, the anguish, the raw and shattered gratitude, is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.
I hold his head. I hold it and I don’t let go.
The afternoon light pours over us and the mountains are silent witnesses and his mane is warm against my face and the humming starts again, low and deep, vibrating through his entire body and into mine, and I feel it in my bones, in my teeth, in the spaces between my ribs where the words I love you have been living for days.
He bends down.
Lowers his body, his massive frame folding with a grace that shouldn’t be possible for something his size, and I realize what he’s doing and I laugh.
I’m crying and laughing at the same time, which should be physically contradictory but apparently isn’t, because the Prince of Atlantis, in stallion form, on a gravel road, is kneeling so that his wife can climb onto his back.
“I’ve never been on a horse,” I say, and the absurdity of the sentence in this context makes me laugh harder.
Hold on.
I hold on.
And then we’re moving, and oh...
Flying.
Not literally. His hooves are on the ground.
But the speed, the wind-tearing, breath-stealing speed, makes the world dissolve into streaks of color on either side of us.
Trees become green blurs. The road becomes a grey river.
The mountains, which have been the backdrop of my life since I moved to Colorado, rush past like scenery from a train that has forgotten how to slow down.
He is faster than the cars on the highway.
Faster than anything I’ve ever experienced.
The wind tears my hair loose and steals the tears from my cheeks and fills my lungs with cold, sharp mountain air, and I’m gripping his mane with both hands and pressing my body against his back and laughing, laughing, because this is terrifying and the most free I have ever felt in my life.
The fortress appears. The road that shouldn’t exist delivers us to the grounds, and he slows, from that blinding speed to a canter to a walk, and brings us to a stop outside one of the small stone structures I’d asked about on the tour.
The changing sheds.
He kneels again. I slide off his back on legs that have forgotten their purpose, and I’m standing on solid ground for the first time in what feels like hours, and my hair is a disaster and my face is tear-streaked and my hands are shaking and I’m looking at the most beautiful creature in the world.
He shifts.
It happens fast. A ripple of movement, a blur of dark light, and then the stallion is gone and Alexei is there, and he is...
Naked.
Like, obviously naked, because that’s how shifting works, and I knew this, I understood this intellectually when I saw the changing sheds, but understanding it intellectually and standing three feet from the Prince of Atlantis in the afternoon light with absolutely nothing between us are two completely different experiences, and my brain just. Stops.
Working. Because the human version of him is just as extraordinary as the stallion version, and I’m blushing so hard I can feel it in my ears, and I can’t stop staring, and oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
He moves.
Three strides. The same three strides that crossed my bedroom when he dropped to his knees. That same completely inevitable forward motion of a man who has decided something and will not be stopped.
His arms close around me. He lifts me like I weigh nothing.
My back meets the stone wall of the shed and the impact pushes a gasp out of me that he swallows with his mouth, because he’s kissing me, and every kiss before this one was a conversation.
This one is a confession. Desperate and raw and bruising, the kiss of a man who came within minutes of losing everything and knows it, and his hands are pulling at my dress and the fabric gives way and I don’t care, I don’t care about anything except his skin against mine and his mouth on my neck and the sound he’s making, low, broken, animal, that tells me the composure isn’t cracked.
It’s gone.
My back is against cold stone and his body is furnace-hot against mine, and I’m lost in him, completely lost, and he pulls back just enough to look at me, and his eyes...
Those pale, extraordinary eyes.
They are wrecked.
“I love you, Zia,” he says. Not in my mind. Out loud. With his voice and his mouth and his breath against my lips. “Forever.”
“I love...”
He enters me in one swift stroke, and the word dissolves.
...you, I finish in my mind, in the silence, in the place where his voice lives now, and I can’t think after that.