"For what?"
For everything, I wanted to say. For seeing me. For keeping me. For making me believe I deserved to be seen.
But the words were too big. So I just pressed closer, and breathed him in, and let the silence say what I couldn't.
Afterward, we lay tangled together.
My head rested on his chest, rising and falling with his breath. His fingers traced lazy patterns on my shoulder—abstract shapes, maybe letters, maybe nothing at all. The collar pressed between us, warm with the heat of two bodies, the particular weight of belonging.
The city glowed beyond the windows.
I watched it without really seeing—the familiar architecture of light and shadow, the particular way New York looked at this hour. Not quite sleeping, never quite sleeping, but settled into something calmer than its daytime frenzy.
"I have something for you," Maks said quietly.
His voice was soft. Careful, in that way he got when he was about to reveal something vulnerable.
"You've given me enough." I meant it. The show, the family, the life I'd never imagined having—all of it felt like more than I deserved. More than I'd ever thought to ask for.
"Not this."
He shifted beneath me.
I lifted my head, watching as he reached toward the nightstand. The drawer slid open with a soft sound, and when he turned back, there was something in his hand.
A small velvet box.
The world stopped.
I forgot how to breathe. Forgot how to think. Forgot everything except the particular shape of that box, the particular weight of what it might contain.
"I was going to wait."
His voice had roughened. Lost some of its smooth control. The Fox, allowing himself to be vulnerable.
"I had plans. Dinner at Duprés—that place you live. Roses, because you said once that you thought they were cliché but you secretly loved them anyway. Some grand gesture, something elaborate, something you could remember and tell people about."
He paused.
Swallowed.
"But lying here with you, after watching you shine tonight—"
His eyes found mine. Held them with the particular intensity that had first captured me, back when I was just a woman on a forum and he was just a username who saw me more clearly than anyone ever had.
"I don't want to wait." The words came out fierce. Certain. "I want you to be my wife, Auralia."
The breath I'd been holding escaped.
"My partner," he continued. "My little bird. Forever."
Forever.
Such a simple word for something so enormous. For the particular commitment of choosing someone not just for tonight, not just for now, but for every night and every now that stretched into an unknowable future.
I was crying.
Of course I was crying. The tears had started before he finished speaking, tracking down my cheeks the way they always did when emotions got too big for my body to contain. I couldn't have stopped them if I'd tried, and I didn't try.
