"Look at me."
He turned his head. His eyes were wide, almost frightened, and something in my chest clenched at the sight.
"You don't have to do anything," I said. "There's nothing to manage here. Nothing to anticipate. Just sleep."
"I don't know how to do this." The confession came out barely above a whisper. "Without... I don't know what you want from me."
"Nothing. That's the point."
His brow furrowed.
"Close your eyes," I said, giving him something to hold on to.
He obeyed. His breathing remained uneven, his body still taut with tension, but the simple act of following an instruction seemed to settle something in him.
The lamplight caught the bruises on his face, the lines that age had carved around his eyes and mouth, the gray at his temples that hadn't been there when we'd started this, when we'd been young and hungry and building something neither of us fully understood.
He'd spent decades sleeping alone in this mausoleum of a house. I'd spent decades surrounded by security details and locked doors and the ever-present awareness that someone might be coming to kill me. Neither of us had learned how to share a bed without purpose.
His breathing began to slow. The tension in his shoulders softened incrementally, and then sleep finally claimed him: the subtle release in his jaw, the way his lips parted slightly, the small unconscious sound he made as he surrendered to it.
I reached over and turned off the lamp. Darkness settled over the room, and I lay there listening to him breathe across the small distance that separated us.
The boy who'd learned to sleep with one eye open in an Oklahoma trailer, listening for Shane's footsteps, should not have been able to relax. The man who'd built an empire on paranoia and control should not have been able to close his eyes in an unfamiliar bed.
And yet.
I let my own eyes drift shut. The last thing I registered before sleep took me was the sound of Maxime's breathing, steady and slow, and the knowledge that for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn't alone in the dark.
Pain woke me at5:03 AM. Not the sharp, immediate agony of fresh injury but the persistent throb where surgical pins met bone in my damaged leg. I blinked at an unfamiliar ceiling, momentarily disoriented by shadows that weren't mine. The bedside clock cast a faint green glow across a strange terrain.
This wasn't my bed, my penthouse, my territory.
I turned my head carefully, muscles tightening against the movement. Maxime slept beside me, face half-buried in a pillow, breath steady and deep. In the dim light, the bruises from his encounter with Xander stood stark against his skin, purple-black across his temple, yellowish along his jaw. His split lip was still raw, a dark line bisecting the lower half.
I lifted my hand, reaching toward his face. I stopped before touching him. The urge to press my thumb against that split lip, to reopen it and suck until I tasted copper on my tongue, surprised me with its intensity.
That kind of damage had no place on Maxime's skin, not unless I put it there, not unless he'd earned it. The factthat Xander had marked him without my permission ignited something primal in my chest. Maxime was mine to protect, mine to shield, mine to hurt if necessary, and I had failed in the most fundamental way.
That failure ached worse than any surgical reconstruction.
I studied him in the half-light. Silver threaded through his dark hair. Lines marked the corners of his eyes, deeper in sleep without his careful control to smooth them away. The sheet had slipped to his waist, exposing his chest where shadows of violence marred his skin. His right hand curled against the pillow as if still holding his ever-present tablet.
The paper crown from last night sat dented on the nightstand, and I kept catching it in my periphery. A cheap cardboard token, meaningless to anyone else, and it shouldn't have mattered, but it did.
We had been side by side all these years, and never once shared a bed until now. I had never woken up to the sight of him in the early morning light. I'd kept that boundary solid as concrete for decades, convinced that true intimacy would compromise the empire we were building.
So many years wasted, years I could have had him like this, years I could have woken with him beside me, watched his face in morning light, felt his skin against mine. All of it thrown away for what? Power? Money? An empire built on empty beds and careful distance.
Maxime stirred, tensing before his eyelids fluttered open. Confusion gave way to recognition.
I reached out then and cupped his cheek.
"Al?" His voice was rough with sleep, surprise coloring my name.
"Who else?" I kept my voice low, unwilling to shatter the quiet.
A small smile touched the corner of his mouth. "You stayed."
