Chapter 40
The house was quiet in the way only a truly lived-in home could be. The kind of quiet that came after laughter had drifted down the halls, after dishes had been washed, after doors had shut softly and the people inside them had gone to bed knowing they were all safe and sound.
Bea stood barefoot on the balcony just outside the bedroom she now shared with Dimitri, Killian, and Nico, one hand wrapped around a mug of tea she had forgotten to drink. The night air brushed cool against her skin, but she didn’t go back inside yet.
She wanted this moment.
Wanted to stand here and feel it, to take all of it in.
The estate stretched out before her in dark shapes and silver moonlight, the gardens quiet, the trees still, the world at last not asking anything from her.
Behind her, through the open balcony doors, warm lamplight spilled across the bedroom floor.
One of the men had left a shirt tossed over the back of a chair.
Another had left a book half open on the table.
Someone had forgotten to turn off the bathroom light.
Evidence. Of life. Of love. Of belonging.
Bea closed her eyes for a moment and let herself breathe. There had been a time when she thought this kind of peace only existed for other people.
For women who had grown up wanted. For girls who had fathers who lived and mothers who stayed soft. For people who had learned early in life, that home was something safe to go back to.
Bea had learned the opposite, she had learned that home could turn on you. That grief could rot a person from the inside out. That a father could die and take the whole shape of a life with him. She had been too young when everything broke.
Way too young when her father died and her mother stopped being someone who knew how to love anything louder than a bottle.
Just a child when men started drifting in and out of the house like bad weather, each one meaner than the last, each one teaching her something new about fear.
Then came the last man, her mother thought fit to be a stepfather.
The one who broke things with his hands and with his mouth.
The one who made her flinch at footsteps and door handles and sudden silence.
Who taught her that surviving sometimes looked a lot like becoming something sharp enough to cut your way free.
And she had. God, she had. She had survived. She had survived him. She had survived the years after. She had survived hunger and loneliness and the sick, heavy certainty that no one was coming to save her.
Then Barb had. Not like a miracle, more like a door opening in a wall Bea had spent years convinced was solid stone.
Barb had given her a place to breathe. A place to sleep.
A place to be angry and ugly and exhausted and still be loved anyway.
She had fed her. Yelled at her. Made her laugh when laughing felt impossible.
She had become the closest thing Bea had to a mother, not because she was soft, but because she stayed.
And Marco…
Bea smiled into the dark.
Marco had been chaos and whiskey and bad ideas in a very expensive stupid suit.
He had been flirtation when she needed distraction, comfort when she needed warmth, friendship when she could not bear the weight of anything more serious.
He had known her in the in-between version of herself, before the Marchettis, before love had turned into something terrifyingly real.
He had shown up when it mattered. He had protected her when he did not have to.
And when the moment came, he had loved her enough to hand her back to the men she belonged with.
That mattered too.
Every strange, broken, beautiful piece of it mattered.
Bea opened her eyes and looked back into the bedroom.
Dimitri was asleep on his back, one arm flung across Killian’s side like he had passed out mid-argument.
Killian was half on his stomach, half on top of the blankets, huge and careless and somehow still keeping one hand stretched toward Bea’s side of the bed even in sleep.
Nico, of course, was the only one who looked remotely civilized, even unconscious, though his glasses were crooked on the nightstand and one ankle was currently trapped beneath Killian’s leg.
They looked nothing like kings right now. They looked like men. Her men. The thought still hit her sometimes, soft and startling.
Mine. Not in ownership or in possession but in love, in choice, and in the way they had built space around her in their lives and then invited her into the center of it.
They loved her. Not despite what she had survived. Not despite her sharp tongue or her soft body or the damage she still carried in her bones.
Just…her. The girl who had lost everything at the age of seven. The woman who had learned to weaponize every weakness before anyone else could use it first. The survivor. The brat.
The woman who still, somehow, cried at fictional men in trench coats.
A laugh escaped her at that.
Of course, after everything, after betrayal, attempted murder, a stupid masquerade, a public confession, public execution, and three mafia brothers on their knees, she still ended up with a life where one of the biggest domestic arguments in the house last week had been whether Dean Winchester was more attractive than Castiel.
For the record, Bea was right. The answer was both.
And Killian, that menace, had leaned against the kitchen counter with a coffee in hand and said, with full seriousness, “I still don’t understand why you needed three fictional men when you were clearly destined for three real ones.”
To which Nico had replied, dry as dust, “Because apparently she has a type. Emotionally damaged, irrationally devoted, and in desperate need of therapy.”
Dimitri had looked up from his newspaper and muttered, “Then why does she need us when you are clearly all three.”
Bea had laughed so hard she nearly spilled orange juice all over the breakfast table.
Her smile lingered now, warm and private, maybe that was what healing really was, and not forgetting or erasing. Maybe it was this.
Standing in the quiet after midnight with old grief in your bones and new love in your chest and realizing that, for once, hope hurt less than fear.
Maybe it was letting yourself believe that the next chapter of your life would not be written in survival alone.
That you could have softness without losing your edge, that you could be loved without being owned and that you could build a home and still leave the door open for the people who loved you before this new found life.
Barb would always have a key. Marco would always be family in his own impossible way.
And these three men…
Bea looked at them again. Dimitri, who had learned that power did not mean speaking loudest. Killian, who loved like a storm and held her like something precious. Nico, who had finally stopped hiding behind certainty long enough to let himself be known. They were not perfect, but neither was she.
Maybe perfection had never been the point, the point was being chosen and choosing back.
Building something from the wreckage and looking at it one day in the lamplight and realizing it was beautiful not because it had never been broken, but because it had survived being broken and still became a home.
A floorboard creaked behind her.
Bea didn’t turn right away. She just smiled into the dark as arms slid around her waist from behind, warm and familiar. Dimitri.
“You disappeared,” he murmured against her hair.
“I’m on the balcony, not the run.”
“With you it could mean the same thing,” Killian’s sleepy voice came from the doorway.
Nico appeared a second later, hair a mess, shirt half-buttoned wrong, glasses finally back on. “He’s not entirely wrong.”
Bea laughed softly and leaned back into Dimitri’s chest. “I was just thinking.”
“That’s always a dangerous thing in this house,” Nico said.
Killian came up beside her and rested his forearms on the balcony railing. “Thinking about what?”
Bea looked out over the dark grounds one last time. Then she turned in Dimitri’s arms and looked at all three of them. “At how weirdly lucky I got.”
All three brothers were tuned in now, letting her continue without interrupting.
Bea smiled, small and real. “My dad died,” she said quietly.
“My mother stopped loving me and chose men and alcohol over her own daughter. Most of my life felt like one long lesson in how easy it was to be unwanted.” Killian’s face tightened instantly and Nico looked like he wanted to argue with the very concept.
Dimitri just held her.
Bea reached out and touched Killian’s hand first, then Nico’s, then Dimitri’s chest.
“And then I got Barb,” she said. “And Marco. And somehow…” She laughed softly, eyes stinging. “Somehow I got the three of you.”
Nico’s throat worked. Killian looked down for a second, blinking too hard.
Dimitri touched her face with impossible gentleness. “You didn’t get lucky, Beatrice,” he said. “You survived long enough for the world to finally give you what it owed you.”
That one nearly ruined her, Bea inhaled shakily and nodded.
Then she wiped under one eye and said, because she refused to let the moment get too beautiful without ruining it a little, “Just so we’re clear, surviving all that and ending up with three mafia men, means I have officially outdone every episode of Supernatural.”
Killian frowned. “That feels false. Didn’t one of them literally come back from Hell?”
“Yes,” Bea said, deadpan. “And I came back from a masquerade ball, where I had to wear a fucking ball gown, with all three of you still alive, so I’d say we’re even.” Nico snorted.
Dimitri actually laughed.
Killian muttered, “I still say I could take that trench coat guy in a fight.”
Bea gasped. “Do not disrespect Castiel in front of me.”
“See?” Nico said to his brothers. “This is what our life is now. Murder, trauma, and weekly arguments about fictional men.”
Bea smiled, looked at the three of them, and thought: Yes. Exactly. For the first time in her life, that future felt less like a dream and more like something solid beneath her feet.
Hope.
Home.
Love.
Not perfect.
But hers none the less.
And this time, when she stepped back inside, the people waiting for her did not disappear. They opened their arms and Bea went willingly.