For a few minutes, I didn't think at all.
I justfelt.
Felt the water.
Felt the heat.
Felt the softness of the towel at my back.
Felt alive.
But gradually, like a tide creeping back to shore, my thoughts returned. The last forty-eight hours unraveled in my mind like a reel of film:
Gideon's voice—I love you.
His knee hitting the cobblestones.
The ring.
I lifted my hand out of the water and stared at it. The diamond caught the lamplight overhead and threw tiny stars across the tiled wall. It was so beautiful. So impossibly beautiful.
I turned my fingers, watching thesparkles dance.
"Is this really mine?" I whispered to myself.
The ring felt heavy and delicate all at once, like a promise I was terrified to hold. Then my chest tightened.
Klaus.
Axel's terrified face as he'd told me the Russians had dragged him away.
My father's letter.
Him standing in the villa doorway like a resurrected ghost. Alive! After all these years. Then the suffocating realization thathehadn't come back to us; he had become something else entirely. My Vati had died long ago in Russia.
My breath caught.
The water lapped gently at my collarbones. What had he called my mother's death?Bedauerliche Opfer—Regrettable casualties?
I clenched my jaw, heat prickling behind my eyes. How could the man who had tucked me into bed and taught me how to draw flowers say that? How could he sit in luxury while children starved in the street?
A shiver ran through me despite the warmth.
And then?—
Gideon.
My heart softened.
Gideon, shifting in a burst of heat and light, scales shimmering like hammered gold. His eyes—those same gold-flecked eyes—looking at me from a dragon's face. I squeezed my eyes shut, letting the water lap over my shoulders. That should have terrified me. It should have made me scream.
Or question my sanity.
But instead…
I had known. The moment I saw him—sawit—I had recognized him. Not with logic. Not with reason. With something older, deeper, instinctive.
"Gideon," I whispered, the name trembling on my lips like a prayer.
