“Yes!” I cry out. “Like that. Just like that.”
The next thrust is harder. The one after that is harder still. Soon, he’sfuckingme, pistoning me into the mattress like he can fuck me right out of my thoughts. I cling to his shoulders and keep begging him for more.
His hands grab mine and cage them to the mattress. “Right there,” I beg. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
“Never,” he promises against my throat. “I’m never stopping again.”
Tears prick my eyes as the beginnings of the orgasm start to accrue. I’m so wet, so full, and he’s so hard and so big. I’m filled with him in every way that could ever possibly matter, and as long as he stays here for five more thrusts, we’ll make it to our happily-ever-after.
Four more. I’m sweating.
Three more. So’s he.
Two more. I’m tightening all over, my nipples puckered, mouth wide open, gasps winging out from somewhere deep in my throat.
One more. Bastian is a rumbling roar, like distant thunder coming closer and closer, and closer and closer, and I’m close, and he’s close, and then?—
The final one takes us both there.
I break. Bastian breaks.
We fall to pieces together.
He unleashes in me just as I gush around him, the two of us matching each other spasm for spasm. It lasts longer than any climax I’ve ever had before. I almost start to think that this is how the rest of my life will be: just coming with my love, locked together, unbreakable, inseparable.
But all good things must eventually come to an end, and this orgasm, as heaven-sent as it is, ends, too. We stay sealed together hip-to-hip until all the shudders are gone and the sweat has cooled. Then he adjusts his weight to land beside me.
Bastian and I lie alongside each other as our breath goes silent. His heartbeat thunders beneath my ear like a two-note reminder—alive, alive, alive. The more I hear it, the more a tiny knot in me can unclench.
After a while, he reaches out to graze the arc of my belly. “Still can’t believe there’s a whole person in there,” he murmurs.
“Your person,” I remind him. “Ourperson.”
“I like that,” he says. “Ours.”
Sleep is circling around me, ready when I am, but I don’t want to let go of this moment, even though my eyelids are heavy and my limbs are made of peanut butter. These past few days, I’ve slept as much as I can, because dreams were better than reality. But the difference between dreams and real life no longer seems so important. I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of right here, don’t I?
His hand stays plastered over the swell where our child sleeps, and then—so quietly I almost miss it—he begins to sing.
“Spi, mladenets moy prekrasny, bayushki bayu…”
The Russian words roll off his tongue like honey dripping from a tasting spoon, low and hoarse, barely above a whisper. It’s haunted me for weeks, surfacing in dreams I couldn’t explain and memories I couldn’t quite hold onto.
But this is different.
He’s not singing to me.
He’s singing tous.
His palm presses against my belly as the lullaby continues. I think of all the mothers and fathers over the centuries who’ve sang these same words to their own children in the dark, and I feel like I’m part of a great human tradition in a way I haven’t ever felt before.
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop from making a sound. The tears come anyway, sliding silent and hot down my temples and into my hair. I don’t try to stop them. Some moments are too sacred for pride.
I stay perfectly still, eyes closed, heart breaking open in the best possible way. The lullaby goes on, verse after verse. Bastian’s voice starts to waver on certain syllables in a way that tells me he’s crying, too. After everything he’s done and everything that’s been done to him, after the blood and the bullets and the brother who tried to kill him, Bastian Hale is lying in the dark and singing a lullaby to a baby who hasn’t even been born yet.
He needs this as much as we do.
It’s not that we’ve solved it all. There are so many things left to say, and so many obstacles yet to overcome. Aleksei is still out there. The world is still dangerous. Nothing has actually been fixed.
