Etienne Hirsche rechecked the numbers.
Etienne Hirsche, whose technology is legendary, whose name carries the weight of absolute authority in the preter world. If Etienne Hirsche says the numbers don’t work, then the numbers don’t work, and the marriage that felt like the truest thing I’d ever known was built on a statistical error.
Except.
Except it didn’t feel like an error. It felt like breathing. It felt like the humming in his chest and the way he said my name in his sleep and the collar he straightened every morning and the espresso war he let me fight for a week because he found it informative.
How can that be an error?
How can a man who gets on his knees and saysI love youlike the words have never existed before, how can that be the product of a number that didn’t add up?
Unless it was never about the number.
Unless it was about Billy.
The thought hits me so hard I can’t breathe. He knows. Somehow, some way, he found out about Billy’s visit, and this is his response. Not rage, not confrontation, not the possessive fury of a man who found another man in his home. This is Alexei’s version of letting go. Cold. Clinical. Dressed in the language of science and compatibility scores because his pride would never let him say:I saw him, and I think you want him, and I’m setting you free.
He’s setting me free.
The man who told mewe will make it, little oneis setting me free because he thinks I don’t want to stay.
A sob tears out of me. Raw, ugly, from deep in the chest. And then another. And another. And I’m driving and crying and I can’t see the road, and the mountains are blurring into shapes I can’t process, and I need to stop, I need to pull over, I need to...
I slam the brakes.
Not because I decided to.
Because there is something in the road.
Something enormous. Something that shouldn’t exist outside of mythology and the deepest, oldest corners of the preter world. Something standing in the center of the private road with its hooves planted and its head raised and its body blocking every inch of asphalt like a wall made of muscle and midnight.
A stallion.
Not a horse. Not anything that could be mistaken for a horse by anyone who has ever seen a horse. This is something else entirely. Something from the bottom of the ocean. Something that radiates power the way a storm radiates electricity, visible, physical, a force that changes the composition of the air.
He is massive. Taller than any horse, broader, built with musculature that speaks of a body designed not for beauty but for war, though beauty came anyway, uninvited and absolute. His coat is blue-black, the same shade as his hair, and it shimmers in the afternoon light with an iridescence that is not of this world. Oceanic. Like light refracted through deep water. His mane falls like dark silk. His eyes...
His eyes are pale blue.
The car is skidding. The road is gravel and the tires have lost traction and the vehicle is spinning and I’m going to hit him, I’m going to...
He moves.
Faster than anything that size should be able to move. One second he is in the center of the road and the next he is beside the car, his massive body pressed against the driver’s side, absorbing the spin, slowing the momentum with a controlled force that brings the vehicle to a shuddering stop without a single point of impact.
The car is still.
I am still.
The engine ticks. My hands are white on the steering wheel. My heart is somewhere in the vicinity of my throat. And outside the driver’s window, so close I could touch him if I reached out, is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.
Alexei.
This is what the changing sheds were for.
The day he showed me the fortress, the library, the conservatory, the garden that only appeared when he touched the stone, we passed a row of small stone structures on the grounds, and when I asked what they were, he said, “For changing.” I’d assumed he meant clothes. Riding gear. Something mundane. I’d been too shy about my preter ignorance to ask, and he’d moved on, and I’d filed it away.
This is what he meant.
