She laughs under her breath and rests her head lightly against my shoulder. I don’t move for a long moment, afraid the cold will snap the fragile peace forming around us.
Eventually, we continue down the path. We walk until the estate falls quiet behind us, until even the lamp glow becomes a distant constellation.
It’s late when we return to our room. Everyone has left long ago, and the faint hum of their chatter isn’t there. It’s not a painful or eerie silence, but something I’ve long ago gotten accustomed to.
The walls of our room are pale stone; the bed is wider; the windows overlook the courtyard instead of the training grounds. Everything feels different, unfamiliar, waiting.
She closes the door behind us. The click echoes softly.
Her hands slide up my arms and mine find her waist. The moment folds inward, slow and warm, a quiet reconciliation written in the language of touch rather than words.
The world softens around the edges as I grip my wife, the one my heart seems to beat for. The one who has held me through dark and dawn, thin and thick, and made an honest man out of me.
I press her gently and reverently back against the bedsheets. My hands skim her waist, her hips, tracing lines as if committing them to memory. I find her mouth again, softer but still hungry.
Time becomes a heartbeat stretched thin.
The heat crescendos. Touches, whispers, the rough sound of her wanton breath against my lips, the heady closeness that steals my balance and replaces it with something molten and shattering.
The world narrows to sensation—her mouth, her hands, the press of bodies in a space that’s wholly ours, the rhythm of heat and want and breath catching on breath.
Everything dissolves into shadow and warmth and the unbearable pleasure of losing control.
Who would have fucking thought Harper Quinn would have been the one for me?
Her body responds to me like a finely tuned instrument. She responds to my touches the same way, breathes my name like a prayer when my mouth is between her legs, bringing her closer to heaven.
Inside her, I find my salvation and my undoing. With her fingers interlaced with mine, her breath mingling with mine, we become the same soul but in different bodies.
She has possessed me, soul and body, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t give up to her.
When we both climax together, sweat coating our bodies, she gleams at me.
“Christened the room. Now only the kitchen, garden, and veranda are left.”
I drink her in greedily.
“Mrs. Ignatov, you’re one nasty woman,” I comment as I press a soft kiss against her nose.
She grins in that endearing Harper way of hers and says, “You’ve always liked it that way.”
“Guilty as charged,” I murmur into her skin as we roll around in the bed.
Dawn finds us at the desk, wrapped in blankets, the dim light turning Harper’s hair into a river of molten fire. As she lays in my arms, asleep, and when she’s awake, humming a song in her throat as she wanders out into the garden to watch the birdfeeder she has put up, my heart pulses in a beat that sounds like her name.
“We should go somewhere,” she proposes when she comes back inside, breadcrumbs lining the corner of her lips.
“Go somewhere?” I echo.
“Yeah. Travel, maybe. Istanbul was very pretty, but I barely got to see it.”
She’s offering me an olive branch.
We could disappear for a bit is what she means. Discover parts of us we don’t know exist yet, chase the dawn—all the stuff that Damian Ignatov was never afforded.
I squeeze her hand.
Epilogue - Harper
