She laughs and nips at my lower lip. “Let go for once. Stop strategizing and justfeel.”
So I do.
I press her back against the tile wall—careful, always careful not to use too much strength—and worship her with my hands and my mouth, my whole attention focused on nothing but her pleasure.
The water beats down on us. Steam billows all around. She gasps my name—myname, “Romulus!”—and I’ve never heard anything more beautiful.
When I finally slide into her, she wraps her legs around my waist and holds on tight. The glow from her chest pulses in time with her heartbeat, brighter with each thrust, and I can feel the divine spark we gave her resonating in an infinity loop with our own power.
“I love you,” she breathes against my neck. “God, Romulus, I love you so much.”
For five thousand years, I’ve believed love was a zero-sum game. That if anyone lovedhim, they couldn’t loveme.
That sharing would mean losing.
But here, now, with her looking at me like I hung the stars just for her?
I understand what Remus realized in space.
Love multiplies when you feed it.
I love you,” I tell her, and my voice cracks on the words. “My brilliant, stubborn, impossible woman. I love you more than I thought myself ever capable.”
She kisses me as she comes, and I follow her over the edge, losing myself in the perfect rightness of this moment.
That night,I’m awake while Remus sleeps, and I find myself thinking about Father.
He pitted us against each other from the beginning. He told me I was the responsible, smart one who had to contain Remus’s chaos. Then he told Remus he was the weapon, a force of nature that could never be controlled.
He crafted us to be War by creating a dynamic inside the territory of our ownfleshwhere we couldnever both win.
And we believed him.
Forfive thousand years, we believed the lie that we were fundamentally incompatible and that one of us had to lose for the other to win.
Lo-Ren shifts in her sleep, murmuring something I can’t quite catch. I tuck the blanket more securely around her shoulders and press a kiss to her hair.
She smells like the soap we used in the shower. Like home.
I never had a home before her.
Just a series of prisons—the dungeon, this shared body, the eternal conflict with my brother. Everywhere I went, I was trapped.
But now?
Now I’m exactly where I choose to be.
With her. With him. With both of them.
It’s not perfect. We still argue about the schedule. Remus still does impulsive things that make me want to shake him. I still try to control situations that would be better left to chaos.
But we’retrying. We’re communicating. We’re choosing cooperation over competition.
And that’s enough.
More than enough.
It’s everything.
