He didn’t.
Because the truth, if it was what he thought it was, would require him to hear her say it. And he could survive many things, had survived many things, had survived the annihilation of his entire race, had survived decades of solitude in a fortress that echoed with nothing, but he could not survive hearing Zia say that she wanted someone else.
So instead he lied.
The Bellecourts. A Sunday negotiation. He kissed her forehead, not her mouth, because if he kissed her mouth he would not leave, and he needed to leave, because Billy Stein’s scent was on the road to his home and the boy deserved the chance to come to her without the obstacle of a husband who could break him in half.
If she wanted Billy, Alexei would not be the wall between them.
He would be the door she could walk through.
His chest ached.
He ignored it.
Twenty minutes after leaving the fortress, he accessed the surveillance system.
The fortress had cameras in every public space: hallways, the main rooms, the grounds. Not the private quarters. Never the private quarters. The system was a security measure, installed decades ago, and Alexei had used it exactly twice in all that time, both for external threats.
This was not an external threat.
This was the worst kind of threat, the kind that came from inside the walls, from inside his own marriage, from a boy with dark eyes and a voice that cracked on Zia’s name.
He found Billy in the living room. The wolf shifter was standing by the window, looking around the space with an expression that Alexei recognized because he had worn it himself, once, from the back of a car across from a coffeehouse.
Longing.
The boy was longing for what he saw.
Alexei watched Zia enter the room. Watched Billy move toward her, reaching for her face. Watched Zia step back, quick, sharp, and something in his chest lurched with a hope he immediately crushed.
She stepped back because he was watching. Because the boy had shown up uninvited and she was startled. It meant nothing.
He watched the conversation. Billy’s apologies, the declarations, theI waited for him to leavethat confirmed what Alexei had already known. Zia’s face, cycling through shock and anger and something he couldn’t name.
Then Zia excused herself. Left Billy in the living room. Walked down the hallway toward the library.
Alexei switched cameras.
The library. Zia was alone. Pacing. Her phone pressed to her ear.
Maryah. She was calling Maryah. He could hear the tinny warmth of Maryah Celestini’s voice coming through the speaker, and Zia was pacing the way she paced when she was working through a problem, quick and tight, her free hand gripping her elbow.
“I don’t know how to break the truth to him,” Zia said.
Alexei’s hand went still on the screen.
I don’t know how to break the truth to him.
Him.
Not Billy. Him. Her husband. The man she’d married two weeks ago in a hidden garden, the man whose chest hummed for her, the man who had knelt on her bedroom floor and told herI love youand meant it with every molecule of his being.
She didn’t know how to break the truth to him.
He terminated the feed.
The screen went dark.
