“The photos are from three years ago.” His voice is even but there’s a fracture running through it. “Lauren Ashford. We were involved briefly, before That Day. It was never—” He stops. Starts again. “It was proximity. Strategy. Two preters who understood each other’s world when the world didn’t know ours existed. It ended before That Day, and it ended because there was nothing to sustain.”
“Then why—”
“Because she saw the engagement announcement and decided the world should see what it lost.” A muscle works in hisjaw. “The event in the photos was a Lyccan territorial summit. Three years ago. I’ve already had Ruby contact every outlet. The retraction will run by morning.”
I’m gripping my blanket so hard my knuckles ache. The rational part of me, the part that Trish was trying to activate withlook at his hair, it’s longer,hears him and believes him. The photos are old. Lauren is bitter. It’s a setup.
But the Billy part of me, the part that lives in my chest like scar tissue, is screaming.
“You should go.”
“No.”
“Alexei—”
“I love you, Zia Morgan.”
The bedroom goes silent.
Not quiet. Silent. Silence that has weight, that presses against your eardrums, that makes you aware of your own heartbeat that borders on painful.
He’s still by the window. He hasn’t moved toward me. Hasn’t crossed the room. He’s giving me all the space in the world, and he’s standing in the moonlight that’s coming through my cracked window, and his eyes are on mine, and what I see in them isn’t composure or control or any of the things I’ve come to associate with the Prince of Atlantis.
It’s fear.
He’s afraid.
The man who walked through the Convergence Expo and made alphas bow. The man who announced our engagement to the entire preter world without asking. The man who climbed my building ten minutes ago. He is standing in my bedroom and he is afraid, because a twenty-two-year-old human in a tear-stained T-shirt sent him a text, and it had the power to terrify him.
“I’ve never said that to anyone.” His voice is barely above a whisper. “My family was taken from me when I was a child. The Sceleri saw to that. I’ve been alone since then. Everything I built, every wall, every company, every alliance, I built from that emptiness.” He pauses. “And I never said those words. Not once. Until you.”
A tear rolls down my face. I don’t wipe it.
“I’m not that boy, Zia. I won’t ever be that boy. And I’ll spend whatever time you give me proving it.”
I look at him. Standing in my bedroom. Moonlight and fear and rolled sleeves and the faint windburn of a man who climbed a building for me.
“The photos really are old?”
“Three years.”
“And Lauren—”
“Means nothing. Meant nothing.”
“And you climbed my building.”
The ghost of something crosses his face. Not a smile. But close.
“The fire escape. Mostly.”
I let go of the blanket.
“Come here,” I whisper.
He crosses the room. And when he reaches me, when his hands find my face and his thumbs trace the mascara tracks on my cheeks, the gentleness of it cracks something inside me that I’ve been holding together with determination and duct tape for seven months.
“Yes,” I say.
