The screen glows for a few seconds in the empty garden.
Then it goes dark.
CHAPTER SIX
I WAKE UP IN A ROOMI don’t recognize, in sheets that smell like mountain air and still water, and the first thing I see is his hand.
It’s resting on the pillow between us, palm up, fingers slightly curled. Relaxed in a way I’ve never seen him relaxed before. Asleep, the composure is gone, not replaced by vulnerability exactly, but by a stillness that’s different from his waking stillness. Softer. Like the difference between a lake frozen over and a lake at rest.
His face is turned toward me. Even in sleep, even with his hair falling across his forehead and the early morning light catching the sharp planes of his jaw and the dark sweep of his lashes, he is the most breathtakingly beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
And he’s my husband.
That word hasn’t landed yet. It’s been hovering somewhere above me since the ceremony, floating just out of reach, too enormous and too strange to absorb. Husband. The Prince of Atlantis is my husband. I’m lying in his bed in his fortress in the Colorado Rockies and my body is sore in places I didn’t know could be sore and every inch of my skin remembers his hands.
Last night.
Last night was...
I close my eyes and the memory washes over me like warm water.
He carried me. Through the door, down the hallway of midnight blue with its constellation maps, into this room with its wide windows and its view of peaks I couldn’t see because the sky was dark and the only light was him. He set me down like I was made of something that could shatter, and then he stood there, looking at me, and I understood for the first time what it means to be seen.
Not looked at. Not observed. Seen.
Like every part of me, the scared parts and the wanting parts and the parts that still flinched when good things happened because I’d learned that good things left, was visible to him, and none of it made him turn away.
He undressed me slowly. Each button, each layer, each reveal met with the same reverence, the same patient attention he brought to everything. And when I stood before him with nothing left to hide behind, he said my name.
Just my name.
And how he said it told me everything his composure wouldn’t let him show on his face.
What followed was...I don’t have words for it. Not the sort that fit in sentences, anyway. I have impressions. Fragments. The warmth of his skin against mine. The sound he made, low, raw, almost pained, the first time there was nothing between us. Those hands I’d spent a four-hour plane ride trying not to stare at, learning every curve and hollow of my body like I was a language he’d waited his whole life to speak.
He was gentle.
Not careful. Careful implies fragility, implies something that might break. Gentle the way rain is gentle. Thorough and everywhere at once, and when I gasped, he paused. When I pulled him closer, he gave me more. When I whispered his name, not Your Highness, not sir, justAlexei,something in his eyes went dark and deep and endless, and he kissed me like the word had undone him.
And when he whispered mine back, against my shoulder, against the hollow of my throat, against the skin behind my ear, I understood, finally, what all those romance novels on my windowsill were trying to describe. The thing that sounded like fantasy when you read it in paperback but felt like physics when it was happening to you. Two bodies becoming a single system, synchronized, orbiting something neither of them can see but both of them can feel.
After, when the world came back and my heartbeat slowed to something resembling human, he pulled me against his chest and pressed his lips to my hair and said nothing.
He didn’t need to.
I fell asleep listening to his heartbeat beneath my ear, and it sounded like the most honest thing anyone had ever told me.
Now, in the morning light, I watch his sleeping hand and I think about Billy.
Not with longing. Not with pain. With the strange, clear-eyed perspective that comes from standing on the other side of something you thought would destroy you and realizing it didn’t.
Billy sent me four sentences and called it a breakup. He kept me in the dark for two years and called it love. He chosehis inheritance over a girl who would have chosen him over everything, and he didn’t even have the courage to do it to her face.
Alexei knelt on the floor of my bedroom and told me the ugliest truth about himself, that he watched and waited and didn’t stop my heart from breaking, and then he told meI love youlike the words had never existed before he spoke them.
Billy’s love was a secret he kept.
Alexei’s love is a fact he announced to the entire preter world before I’d even chosen yes.
