I didn't sleep.
How could I? She was thirty feet away, in my guest room, wearing my sweater. She'd called me Maksim like she was learning to trust the shape of it. She'd let me touch her face, and she hadn't pulled away, and when I'd let go she'd looked at me like I was something precious she wasn't sure she could keep.
I sat on the couch where she'd been sitting. The leather was still warm from her body. The plate was still on the coffee table, empty, evidence of the small care I'd been allowed to give her.
I thought about the war coming. About Anton and the Deshnevs and the bodies on the pavement tonight. About my brothers, who would need to know everything tomorrow. About the dozens of ways this could end badly—for the family, for the alliance, for the fragile thing building between me and the woman sleeping in my guest room.
But mostly, I thought about her.
Auralia. Ptichka. My little bird.
I was in love with her.
Had been for months, probably, without allowing myself to name it. The feeling was vast and terrifying and absolutely certain, the kind of love that didn't ask permission or wait for convenient timing.
I sat in the dark and let myself feel it. The full weight of it. The particular joy and terror of loving someone you would kill for, die for, burn the world for.
Tomorrow we would work. Tomorrow we would plan. Tomorrow we would begin the process of dismantling Anton's network piece by careful piece.
But tonight—tonight I sat in my living room and watched the city lights and let myself imagine a future where she stayed.
Where she chose me.
Where my little bird decided, finally, that she was home.
Chapter 9
Auralia
Iwoketothewrongangle of light.
For a disoriented moment, I couldn't place myself. The sheets were too smooth—high thread count, the kind I'd never bothered to buy for my own bed. The pillow smelled like nothing, which was wrong. My pillow smelled like lavender and Ghost and the particular musty sweetness of my building's ancient heating system.
Then it all came back.
Maks's apartment. The violence. Two men on the pavement, and the sound—that sound—of something essential being broken. The conversation on the couch that had lasted until three in the morning. His thumb tracing my cheekbone like I was something precious he was afraid to damage.
My chest did something complicated. Part relief, part terror, part a wanting so sharp it felt like a physical wound.
I was wearing his sweater.
The realization arrived slowly, my sleep-foggy brain catching up to what my body already knew. Soft charcoal cashmere, too big for me, the sleeves hanging past my fingertips. I'd put it on last night because it was there, because he'd left it for me, because some desperate part of me had needed to be wrapped in something that belonged to him.
Now, in the thin morning light, I buried my nose in the collar like a child seeking comfort.
He smelled like cedar and something else. Something warm and slightly sharp that I couldn't name but recognized instantly—the scent that had wrapped around me when I'd fallen into his arms at the gallery. The scent I'd been trying not to think about for three days, and failing.
I breathed him in. Let my eyes close. Let myself have this one small, private moment of weakness.
The apartment was alive with sensation.
Coffee—I could smell it now, rich and dark, bleeding through the walls from somewhere beyond the guest room door. Something cooking. Eggs, maybe, or bacon. The particular sizzle of fat in a pan. And underneath it all, barely audible, the soft shuffle of someone moving in a kitchen with the unhurried confidence of a person who belonged there.
Maks was awake. Maks was cooking breakfast. Maks was out there, thirty feet away, doing something domestic and ordinary while I lay in his guest bed wearing his sweater and trying to remember how to be a person.
Not just Maks. Victor Harmin. Lis, too.
Ghost wasn't in the room.
