EPILOGUE
THE COFFEE LINE AT PreTEx is twelve people deep, and I don’t mind.
A month ago, I would have. A month ago, standing in a crowd of preters at a Bellecourt-hosted technology exchange would have made my palms sweat and my stomach clench and my brain produce a running commentary of every reason I didn’t belong here.
You’re human. You’re nobody. You’re the girl who got dumped by text and married by accident and you are standing in a room full of people who can smell your insecurity.
That girl feels like someone I used to know.
I shift my weight, glance at the program in my hand.
PreTEx. Preter Technology Exchange. The Bellecourts host it twice a year, rotating cities, and this one is in Denver, which means home turf, which means I actually know where the bathrooms are, and that small geographic victory shouldn’t feel as significant as it does but here we are.
The line moves. I move with it.
The woman in front of me is a Fae delegate I met at last week’s Blood Oval reception, the one where Alexei presented the new cross-species trade framework and I stood beside him and didn’t flinch when three hundred preters turned to look at the human wife of the stallion prince.
She catches my eye and smiles, warm and genuine, and I smile back, and the ease of it still surprises me.
I’m making friends.
Not performing friendships, not enduring introductions with a fixed smile and a racing heart, but actually making friends.
Ada texts me memes at 2 a.m. Maryah and I talk every day, sometimes twice, and our conversations have developed the comfortable rhythm of two women who have decided they’re family without needing anyone’s permission.
Last Thursday, a Panthera councilwoman named Isla invited me to lunch and spent two hours telling me about her daughter’s obsession with human pop music, and I laughed so hard I snorted sparkling water out of my nose, and she laughed too, and nobody looked at me like I was a curiosity or a novelty or a political statement.
I’m just Zia now.
Zia, who is married to the prince. Zia, who works on the V-Series and argues with espresso machines and has opinions about polymer casings. Zia, who belongs here.
The confidence didn’t come from nowhere. It came from him.
Not in grand gestures. Not in declarations or public displays or sweeping romantic theater that makes for good social media content.
In small things. Quiet things. The things that Alexei does without thinking because showing love is as natural to him as breathing, and he doesn’t know how to do it any other way.
Like last week, at the Blood Oval reception.
I was talking to Isla and her husband when I noticed Alexei across the room, mid-conversation with two Lyccan territory leaders, and his bowtie was crooked.
Not dramatically crooked. Just slightly off-center, something nobody else in the room would have noticed or cared about, but I noticed because I have spent the last month memorizing every detail of this man and his bowtie was wrong.
I excused myself. Crossed the room. Reached up and straightened it, my fingers adjusting the fabric the way his fingers adjust my collar every morning, and I didn’t think about it.
I didn’t consider the three hundred preters in the room or the delegates watching or the fact that I was publicly fussing over the Prince of Atlantis like he was mine.
Because he is mine.
And the look he gave me, that slow, quiet warmth that lived behind his composure, the almost-smile that meant more than any smile could, made my chest ache in the best possible way.
Or the hair thing. He does this thing where he tucks loose strands of hair behind my ear, and he does it everywhere.
In meetings. At dinners. Walking through the lobby of his own building with three hundred employees watching.
His fingers find the strand and tuck it back with this absent, tender precision, like it’s a reflex, like keeping my hair out of my face is simply part of his operating system, and every single time he does it, I forget how to breathe for a second.
Or the tickets.
Two weeks ago, I mentioned, in passing, while stealing his basil and telling him about my day, that Trish’s boyfriend might be Caro royalty.
That Trish was losing her mind about it.
That there was a Caro film premiering in New York next month and Trish was convinced her boyfriend would be attending and she was desperate to go but couldn’t figure out how to bring it up without revealing that she’d been doing extensive research into Caro social calendars.
Alexei listened. He did the almost-smile. He went back to his fettuccine.
Three days later, Trish called me screaming.
Two tickets to the Caro premiere. Front row. With a handwritten note on Lykaios Enterprises stationery that read: Ms. Morgan’s guest and companion. Regards, A. Lykaios.
Trish cried. I cried. Alexei, when I threw my arms around him and told him he was the most wonderful man alive, looked mildly confused and said, “You mentioned she wanted to go.”
Like it was obvious. Like hearing his wife mention something in passing and then quietly making it happen was simply what husbands did.
That’s who he is.
That’s who he’s always been. The man who bought my toothbrush before the wedding.
The man who let me argue with Mariano for a week because he found it informative.
The man who memorizes the name of Kirsten’s coffee order and Trish’s boyfriend’s texting habits and every small, ordinary detail I share, because it came from me, and anything that comes from me matters.
Billy taught me that love was conditional. That I was something to be hidden. That my worth was determined by someone else’s willingness to claim me.
Alexei unteaches me every day.
The line inches forward. Two people ahead of me now. I’m deciding between a cortado and an espresso when a voice behind me says:
“Zia?”
I turn.
Billy Stein is standing three feet away.
He looks...better. The shadows under his eyes are lighter. His hair is pulled back in the same ponytail, but he’s standing straighter, and there’s something in his expression that wasn’t there the last time I saw him. Not hope. Not longing. Something quieter. Something that looks almost like peace.
“Hey,” he says. Awkward. Unsure. His hands in his pockets, his eyes flickering between my face and the floor. “I didn’t...I saw you in line and I just wanted to say hi. I’m, uh. I’m working with one of the Bellecourt startups now. Human outreach.”
“Billy, that’s great,” I tell him, and I mean it. “I’m really glad you’re...”
I feel it before I see him.
That shift in the crowd. That particular frequency of awareness that ripples through a room when someone important enters it, like a current passing through water.
Women straighten. Conversations dip. Eyes track sideways without turning.
Not fear. Something closer to magnetism, the involuntary response of every body in the room to the presence of a man who changes the composition of the air just by walking through it.
And then his arm curves around my waist.
Warm. Familiar. His hand settling on my hip with the easy, possessive certainty of a man who has held this woman ten thousand times and will hold her ten thousand more.
I lean into him without thinking, the way I always do, the way my body has learned to respond to his proximity like a compass finding north.
I hold my breath.
Because Billy is standing right there, and Billy looks like he might actually pass out, and I’m terrified that Alexei is going to say something that will make this worse, something cutting, something princely, something that will remind Billy of the vast, unbridgeable distance between a wolf shifter from a foothill pack and the last stallion prince of Atlantis.
But Alexei extends his free hand.
“Her husband,” he says simply. “I have heard a great deal about you.”
Billy’s face goes through about six expressions in two seconds, none of which he manages to land on. He takes Alexei’s hand. Shakes it. His grip is limp and his smile is the most uncomfortable thing I have ever witnessed on a human face.
“I...yeah. It’s, uh. Nice to meet you. Sir. Your Highness. I...” He withdraws his hand. Gestures vaguely behind him. “I should actually...I have a panel. So. It was good seeing you, Zia.”
He leaves. Quickly. Without looking back.
I exhale.
We step up to the booth. Alexei orders without consulting me, a cortado for me and a black espresso for himself, because he knows, because of course he knows, because this man has my coffee order filed away with the same precision he applies to Blood Oval intelligence briefings.
We collect our cups. We turn. We walk.
“You’re welcome,” he murmurs.
I look up at him. “What?”
“I know you worry about the boy’s sensitive ego, and being the exemplary husband that I am...”
I choke back a laugh.
“...I took care of the problem.”
A small laugh escapes me this time, because the way he phrases things in that silky, bone-dry tone, like he’s narrating a diplomatic briefing about his own marriage...
“...so that you will have no reason to think of another man.”
Oh, Alexei.
I look up at him, helpless, hopeless, completely and irrevocably in love with this impossible man. “I love you.”
He falters.
Just for a second. A blink. The composure ripples, and what surfaces beneath it is something I’ve seen before but will never get tired of seeing: surprise.
Genuine, unguarded surprise, like a man who has been told he is loved a hundred times and still can’t quite believe it on the hundred and first.
It’s the most endearing expression I’ve ever seen on his face.
And then it changes.
His gaze narrows. Sharpens. That particular focus that I’ve learned to recognize, the one that means the prince has receded and something older, something with hooves and instinct and a possessive streak wider than the Rocky Mountains, has taken his place.
I take a step back.
“You should’ve known better than to say that while we’re in public, wife.”
Oh, how my heart sings to hear him call me that. Wife. Even now, even after a month of hearing it, the word in his mouth makes my entire body hum.
But I also know that look.
I take another step back.
He takes a step forward, and that’s enough.
I turn and bolt, which is ridiculous, which is laughable, which is a twenty-two-year-old human woman trying to outrun a stallion shifter prince in a convention center full of preters and delegates and Bellecourt executives, and I’m laughing, I can’t help it, I’m laughing as I run because I know exactly how this ends.
His arm catches my waist. Smooth. Effortless.
One arm pulling me back against his chest while the other pushes open a door I didn’t even see, and then we’re inside, alone, in what appears to be an unused conference room with a long table and a whiteboard and fluorescent lighting that has no business illuminating what is about to happen in here.
“A-Alexei...”
My back meets the wall. His mouth covers mine.
I try, I truly try to push him away, conscious of the entire assembly of preters and humans just outside that door, conscious of the fact that anyone could walk in, conscious of the fact that this is a professional event and I am the wife of a Blood Oval member and this is absolutely, categorically not. ..
He catches my wrists. Pins them above my head. Leans in close, his lips brushing my ear, his breath warm against my skin.
“Like I said, my love. You should’ve known better.”
I can’t say anything else after that, because my husband is teaching me a lesson, and it’s a lesson that has me hastily pressing my hand over my mouth to keep from crying out.
Oh, Alexei!
The End
Thank you for reading Rejected by the Stallion Prince.