One word.
His eyes close. Just for a second. And in that second, the mask, the composure, the iron calm, all of it falls away, and what’s left is just a man who has been waiting for a very long time to hear one syllable.
He kisses me.
And this kiss is nothing like the others. The stolen kisses were claims. The desk kiss was hunger. This is relief. This is him cradling my face, his forehead pressed against mine and his breath unsteady against my lips, and I’m crying and kissing him at the same time, which should be unattractive but I don’t care because he’s whispering my name between kisses like it’s the only word he knows.
“Zia. Zia.Zia.”
His hands move down. Not stealing this time. Not claiming. Asking. His fingers trace the hem of my T-shirt, and he pauses, and in that pause is a question that he waits for me to answer.
I answer by pulling him closer.
His fingers slide under the fabric, and there is no phone to interrupt. No Ruby with impeccable timing. There is only his mouth on my neck and his hands, warm, slow, achingly patient, moving over my skin like he’s learning me by touch alone, committing me to a memory he intends to keep forever.
He takes me apart slowly.
Not with urgency. Not with the desperate, fumbling heat that I associated with intimacy before him. With care. With the attention of a man who has waited fourteen months and is not going to rush the first time he gets to touch me without an interruption or a deadline or a wall between us.
I never wanted this with Billy. That thought surfaces, clear and startling, in the middle of everything. Two years, and I never once felt this pull to cross the line. Billy respected that, and I told myself it was because I wasn’t ready. But that wasn’t it. It was never about readiness.
It was abouthim.
This pull. This compatibility that goes deeper than attraction, deeper than choice, all the way down to whatever it is in my blood that his system identified at 97.2%. My body knew before my brain did. My body was waiting for this specific person.
His mouth finds the curve of my shoulder. He finds the places that make me gasp, that make me grip his shirt, that make sounds come out of me I didn’t know I could make. And through all of it, he’s gentle. Touching me like I’m precious, like I’m something he’s afraid of breaking even though I’m the one who’s already broken and he’s the one putting me back together.
He whispers my name against my skin. Once. Twice. Like a prayer, like a confirmation, like the word itself is something sacred he’s only now been given permission to say out loud.
When I come undone, it’s with his name on my lips and his arms around me, and the sound I make is not desire.
It’s release.
The kind that comes from holding on so tight, for so long, to a version of yourself that was built for survival and not for living. The kind that comes when someone sees all of you, the scared parts and the scarred parts and the parts that still flinch when someone says “I love you,” and stays anyway.
I cry.
Not delicately. Not prettily. I cry the way you cry when something inside you that’s been locked for seven months finally opens, and everything you stored in there comes flooding out at once. I cry into his shirt while he holds me, and he doesn’t tell me to stop, doesn’t ask what’s wrong, doesn’t do any of the things people usually do when someone falls apart in their arms.
He just holds me.
Like he was made for this.
THE WEDDING IS TWOdays later, and it is small, and it is nothing like what I imagined a royal wedding would be.
It’s held in a garden on the Lykaios estate, a space I didn’t know existed, tucked behind the fortress and accessible through a door that appears only when Alexei touches the stone beside it. The garden is wild and intentional-looking, full of flowers Ican’t name and trees that seem to hum with something old, and the sky above is the deep blue of late afternoon shifting toward evening.
On the walk through the grounds, I notice small stone structures dotted along the tree line. Low, weathered, like ancient changing rooms.
“For changing,” Alexei says when he catches me looking.
I assume he means riding gear. The estate has stables; I’ve seen them from the upper windows. I don’t ask more, because I’m still learning the rhythms of preter life and I’d rather not reveal the full depth of my ignorance on my wedding day.
My mom cries through the entire ceremony. She’s wearing a dress she bought three days ago and shoes she’s already complained about twice, and she’s holding Trish’s hand for support because Trish, who has cried exactly once in the two months I’ve known her, and that was when the man she’s dating sent her flowers at work and she had to hide in the server room, is also crying.
Nicolo Celestini stands to Alexei’s left. The man I’ve heard so much about, the brooding alpha, the perpetual glare, is smiling. Not a polite smile. A real one. The sort that transforms his face from intimidating to almost boyish, and he keeps looking at Alexei with an expression I can only describe as recognition.
Takes one to know one,his smile says.
