Epilogue
Ordinary Time: After the high feast comes the long green stretch the church calls Ordinary Time, the unhurried season where the real living happens. No mask, no screen, no secret, just two people and a yard gone to weeds, learning to plant.
One Year Later
I wake before her, which, after a year, I've stopped expecting and never stopped being grateful for.
Her bedroom is small enough that the morning gets into all of it at once, gray light through a window that looks out over the rooftops toward the river two blocks down.
The bed is secondhand, the dresser doesn't match it, and a crack runs up one corner of the ceiling that she's decided gives the room character.
I have a penthouse thirty floors over the same river with a bed that cost more than this entire building, and I sleep here, in the narrow room she chose, because this is where she is and because she has never once asked me for the other thing.
That's the part I keep turning over even now.
I've spent my life watching people do the math the second they learn the name and the money behind it.
Cera did the opposite. She traded things for her thrift-store dresser and her one good chair.
When I offered her the world on a plate, she looked at it like a trick, because for her it always had been.
The woman who once clawed to hold onto a life she hated sold all of it for India and came back wanting almost nothing.
She doesn't fill the empty space with me either, nor is she in any rush to move me in or take my name. We're here together because she lets me be here, and we're going slow, even a year in, because slow is the thing neither of us ever got to have.
She stirs against me, back to my chest, and makes the small sound she makes before she's all the way awake.
"You're staring," she says, eyes still shut, mouth curving. It's what she said to me through a mask a lifetime ago, and she knows it. We can joke about it now, but it's a constant reminder that there's no place for secrecy or lies in our life.
"I can actually do it now. Making up for lost time."
She rolls over to face me, and there's the thing I never get used to. No mask, no wig, no blue over the brown. Just her, no screen between us, looking at me like I'm the safe one in the room.
I kiss her slowly, because we have nowhere to be for an hour and because slow is its own kind of greed with her. She hums into it and slides a leg over mine, and the sheet goes somewhere neither of us cares about.
My hand maps the dip of her waist, the curve under it, skin still warm from sleep, and she arches into my palm, her body just answering mine because it wants to.
When I roll her under me, she goes easy, thighs opening around my hips, and I take my time with her throat. The soft skin over her collarbone, where her breath stutters when I drag my teeth across it, is my favorite part of her body.
She's already wet when my fingers find her, slick for me. The sound she makes when I stroke into her is one I earned in the dark a hundred times and never get tired of watching land on her open face in the daylight.
"Wells." My name on her lips increases my drive into her.
She catches my wrist before I can line us up. "Wait. Sit up."
"That sounds like instruction."
"It is. Against the headboard."
I do what she says because doing what she says is rarely a mistake.
She climbs into my lap and settles her knees on either side of me, chest to chest, close enough that her forehead nearly rests on mine.
She reaches down and takes my cock in her hand and guides me into her slow, sinking until she's flush against me, and we're as close as two people can physically get, her arms looped over my shoulders, my hands spread on her back.
"Is this a pose?" I manage.
"It is now." Her breath is uneven against my mouth. "Don't move yet. Just breathe with me."
"You're going to kill me."
"Breathe, Wells."
So I breathe, and she rocks against me slow, no space between us anywhere, and it's nothing like the frantic half-clothed nights against my desk when neither of us could say what we were. This is every wall down at once. She moves, and I move with her, and we pull the same breath.
Her eyes stay open on mine the whole time, and I understand what she's doing. She's making me stay. Stay present, stay seen, stay in the one place I spent thirty years inventing ways to leave.
The slow doesn't last, because it never does with us. Her breath breaks first, her hips lose the patient rhythm, and she fists a hand in my hair and rides me harder.
I grip her hips and meet her, driving up into her while she gasps my name into my mouth.
"There," she breathes, "right there, don't stop."
I couldn't if the building came down around us. When she comes, she keeps her eyes locked on mine and doesn't hide a second of it. That look is what tips me over, and I follow her with my face in her neck and her skin in my teeth.
For a while, we stay tangled like that, her in my lap, her heart slamming against my chest and slowing by degrees. She pulls back enough to look at me, hair wild, cheeks flushed, that lazy smile she gets.
"New pose," she says. "I'm claiming it."
"How do you think that will go over in class?"
"I'm pretty sure the middle-aged women at Om will eat it up."
I kiss the corner of her smile. "I love you."
"I know." She presses the next part into my mouth. "I love you, too."
We lie together, me holding her, her breath tickling my chest.
"I take it back. That'd traumatize them." She laughs into my skin. "If they're diligent in their practice like we are, they'll figure it out."
"Are you glad you've decided to keep teaching two classes at Om?"
She runs Sol House now as the permanent general manager, but still does a few classes at Om. Lin was only ever the acting director, the steady hand to get the doors open and the program standing. The day it was standing, he was the one who came to her, not me, and asked her to take it for good.
"Yes. They each fill me in different ways."
The whole operation is hers, the schedule and the staff and the kids and the building she once pointed at through a chain-link fence.
I'm still the chairman of the foundation arm under Argentum, which means my name is on the paperwork and I sign what the Stone lawyers tell me to sign. Otherwise, I stay the hell out of how she runs her house.
I love how confident she's become. I knew her as Peoria once, behind a mask, fumbling, trying to carry a life that was meant to fill her.
Eighteen months on, she's a woman who knows exactly what she wants and doesn't perform for anyone anymore.
I learn from her every day how to live out in the open.
"Those kids love you more than they love me, and I'm the one who runs the place." She says it with no jealousy in it, and it still undoes me. It isn't true, but she loves setting me up as a play prop for the kids, and I've come to look forward to those afternoons more than anything in my week.
She stretches against me, not getting up, just folding in closer. "I have to swing by Sol later. Now that school's back in, the schedule is a mess. Those new intake forms are going to be the death of me."
She tips her face up. "Come with me. You can carry things and look good while I organize them."
"Can't. I'm going into the office to meet Ridge."
"On a Sunday?"
"Yeah. Something came up. I need to walk him through."
She doesn't ask what. A year with me has taught her there's still work I do for the family that doesn't belong in this bed, and she lets me keep it without turning it into a wall.
The something has been dead ten days. The trace I've kept quiet on Vin went still, and when I pulled the thread, it ended in a rented room in a town an hour outside London.
He died there alone with nothing left to his name.
I could find out exactly how if I wanted to.
Whether the body he'd run into the ground finally quit, or whether one of my brothers decided a leash wasn't enough, or whether one of the men he used to be so much smarter than caught up to him in the end.
Reeves never did forgive me for the bullet I didn't fire.
Ridge told me whatever came after was on my watch.
Any one of them could be true. I closed the file without chasing a single one, because for the first time in my life, I don't need to know.
A year ago, not knowing would have eaten me to the bone. Now I know the only part that matters. He committed the ultimate betrayal, and he died with no one in the room who knew his name.
The hunger that used to scare me never actually went anywhere. I spent thirty years pointing it at the whole world, at every threat and every angle, at everyone who might cost me something. Now it points one direction, at her, at this, at the narrow room and the woman in it.
I'd still take apart anyone who came for her and never lose a minute of sleep, and the file I keep on a dead man is proof I haven't gone soft, only quiet.
The difference is that the screen is gone.
She has seen exactly what I am and what I'm capable of, and she chose me with all of it on the table, which is the one thing the old me never let anyone do.
I'll hand the rest to Ridge this afternoon, in a quiet office where that kind of thing belongs, and then I'll come home to this. It isn't a secret I'm keeping. It's just a dead man I have no more use for, and I won't spend her morning on him.
I tip my head down and press my mouth to her hair, and the smell of her shampoo settles the room around me again.
She draws a slow line down my sternum and goes quiet.
"I found a house," I say.
She goes still. We've talked about finding something for the both of us, something that blends what we both want, to make it ours. She wants simple, minimalist, and I've never understood minimalism. We've looked at a few things, but nothing has ever checked all of the boxes.
"A house," I say.
"Oh?"