His lips are feather-soft when he kisses me. “Nothing a strong cup of coffee won’t cure.”
“Tristan—”
Fénix stirs and makes a disgruntled gurgle in his sleep when Hendrix’s shouts from downstairs carry into the bedroom.
“Syn! T! Let’s fucking go! We got a location!”
Tristan doesn’t get a chance to take two steps before I yank him back. “Do you trust me?”
“A thousand fucking percent,” he replies.
I jump into his arms and soundly kiss him. “I’m holding you to that.”
Pyotr said that Viktor wants me.
And that’s exactly who he’s going to get.
Is i mbás amháin a éireoidh mé.
Forty-Three
Slouching backin the deck chair, cool air brushes against my face, and I breathe in the scent of pine and damp earth as the leaves shift and rustle around me like nature’s wind chimes. Waiting for Syn to come out, I gaze up at the night blanketing the sky. It looks like a snow globe made from dark-indigo glass. I enjoy nights like this, where every star in the Milky Way and beyond shimmers their light from millions of miles away.
Stargazing out on the back patio after dinner has become our thing. It’s something I look forward to every time I come over for dinner. Just me and Syn and the quiet expanse of the universe above us. It reminds me of the times when Mama and I would sneak out of the house late at night and sit in the gardens. She would regale me with every constellation’s story from the boastful warrior Orion who was killed by a scorpion to the magnificent, winged horse Pegasus who was born from the blood of Medusa.
The back door creaks open, then closes, and familiar footsteps beat across the wood plank boards.
“Thought I’d find you out here.” Aleksei drops into the chair beside me.
My chest tightens with loss and hope and a million other emotions I can’t quantify, tangling so tightly together, I’m unable to separate them. It’s been over a year since I last saw him, and the ache of missing him is suffocating. I know I’m imagining things. I know he’s not real. But it’s a beautiful fiction I don’t want to wake up from.
He kicks his feet up onto the deck railing and folds his hands on his lap, a picture of absolute relaxation. Looking up, he says, “From this perspective, the universe looks so small, but it’s really us who are tiny in comparison.”
“You were never one to contemplate humanity’s existence or its place within the grander cosmos.”
He chuckles. “I’ve been learning some new things.”
We sit in silence for a moment, the night thick with so many unspoken things I want to tell him.
“Is Mama happy?”
Aleksei’s head lolls in my direction, the corners of his mouth upturned in a serene smile. “Happier than she ever was here.”
I try to swallow down the heartache that has wedged itself in my throat. “God, I miss her. I miss you.”
Aleksei reaches across the two feet of distance between our chairs and covers my hand with his. “We miss you just as much. She’s worried about you.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“I’m always here. Can’t get rid of me. Kind of like that rash you had.”
“It was poison ivy. And I was five.”
No one had told me about “leaves of three, let it be” yet. Worst two weeks of my life. With all the Calamine lotion Mama slathered on me, I looked like a pink sausage with hair.
“So, how’s that love pentagon thing going?” he asks.
“I have no idea what that means.”
