“Yougaveme a week. There’s a difference.”
He leans across the counter and kisses me. It tastes like basil and the almost-smile, and when he pulls back, there’s somethingin his eyes that I’ve been seeing more and more this week, the warmth that lives behind the composure, the tenderness that a lifetime of solitude couldn’t kill.
“There isn’t,” he says softly.
And the humming starts.
That low, barely audible vibration in his chest that I’ve learned is a stallion trait. A sound he makes when he’s settled. Content. He doesn’t know he’s doing it, or maybe he does and doesn’t care anymore, and either way, the sound of it, warm and constant, makes me want to crawl inside his chest and live there.
I haven’t said it yet.
I love you.
The words have been pressing against my ribs for days. Getting bigger. Getting louder. They climb my throat when he hums. They fill my mouth when he fixes my collar. They nearly escape when he says my name in his sleep, which he does, every night, a whisperedZiain the dark that makes me lie very still and hold my breath and feel things so enormous they don’t fit inside a human body.
Tonight. I’m going to say it tonight.
We’re on the couch. His arm is around me. I’m reading one of the novels I brought from my apartment, he sent someone to collect my things on the second day, including every book from the windowsill, arranged by color, exactly as I had them, and his fingers are tracing absent patterns on my shoulder while he reads something on his tablet.
I set my book down. I turn to face him. I open my mouth.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table.
I glance at it. The screen lights up with a notification, and the preview text is visible for just a second before it goes dark.
One second.
But Alexei’s eyes are faster than mine.
I see it in the shift of his attention. How his gaze moves from his tablet to the phone on the table and then to my face, all in one fluid motion. How something in his expression changes, not dramatically, not visibly to anyone who hasn’t spent a week memorizing the micro-movements of his composure, but I’ve spent that week, and I see it.
“Who is that?”
His voice is casual. Light. The voice of a man asking an idle question.
But his eyes aren’t idle.
“N-nothing.” The stammer comes before I can stop it, and I feel my cheeks warm, and I hate myself for it because there is nothing to stammer about and nothing to blush about. Billy is nothing to me now. A closed door. A forgiven ghost. I blocked every number and deleted every message and I’m sitting on a couch with the man I love and the boy I used to love is nothing.
I pick up the phone. I swipe the notification away. I set it back down.
“Just spam,” I say.
I know Billy means nothing to me now, but why does it feel like I’m hiding something?
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE WAS PLEADING WITHthe espresso machine.
Not the one from the coffeehouse, a different machine, same war. This one was Italian, chrome-and-steel, installed in the fortress kitchen by Ruby three years ago, and Alexei had used it exactly twice. But Zia had discovered it on their second morning, and a relationship had formed: one-sided, emotional, and endlessly entertaining.
“Okay, Mariano. I know we had a rough start yesterday, but I believe in us.” She was standing in his kitchen in bare feet and one of his shirts, her hair a catastrophe, her hands hovering over the machine with the gentle, encouraging energy of a woman trying to talk a frightened animal down from a ledge. “I’m going to press the button now. And you’re going to make coffee. And it’s going to be beautiful. I have faith in you.”
The machine hissed.
“No, no, no. Mariano, please. We talked about this.” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I know you can do this. You’re Italian. Coffee is in your blood. Just...cooperate. For me. Please?”
Alexei leaned against the kitchen doorframe and watched. He was already dressed, meetings with the Blood Oval didn’t wait for coffee, but he had come downstairs early for precisely this reason. The espresso negotiation was the highlight of his morning. It had been the highlight of every morning since thesecond day of their marriage, and he was not above rearranging his schedule to ensure he never missed it.
