This is what he is.
I’m staring at him through the window, tears still wet on my face, and he is so beautiful it breaks my heart. Not the human kind of beauty, not the cheekbones and the jaw and the blue-black hair that I’ve spent two weeks memorizing. This is something deeper. The beauty of a creature that was never meant to be seen by human eyes, standing on a gravel road in the Colorado Rockies, blocking a stolen car driven by a crying woman who doesn’t know how to stop loving him.
And then I hear it.
Not with my ears. Inside. In the center of my mind, in the place where thoughts are born before they become words, a voice that I would recognize anywhere.
I’m sorry, Zia.
My breath stops.
I had it all wrong.
The voice is his. Unmistakably his, the same low, precise timbre, the same cadence, but stripped of everything the spoken version carries. No composure. No mask. No prince. Just him, raw and unguarded, speaking directly into my mind with a vulnerability that the Prince of Atlantis would never, ever allow his mouth to produce.
I detected Billy’s scent near the fortress. I knew he was coming. I left so you could see him without me in the way.
Oh gosh.
I accessed the surveillance. I saw you in the library, on the phone with Maryah. You said you didn’t know how to break the truth to me, and I...
A pause. In my mind, the pause has the texture of a man swallowing something that hurts.
I thought you meant me. I thought you were trying to find a way to tell me you wanted him. I terminated the feed before I heard the rest.
The tears are falling again. Silently this time. Running down my cheeks and dripping off my jaw and I don’t wipe them because my hands are still on the wheel and my body has forgotten how to do anything except sit here and listen to the man I love explain how he destroyed us because he was afraid of exactly the same thing I was afraid of.
Being left.
He was afraid of being left. The last of his kind. The man who lost his entire race in childhood and built a fortress in a mountain and filled it with silence and books no one read and a piano no one played. He was afraid that the woman who named his espresso machine and talked to his plants would choose a boy from her past over the life they were building.
And so he let her go before she could leave.
Because in his mind, everyone leaves.
I watched the full footage after you left the room.His voice in my mind is shaking. I didn’t know a voice inside your head could shake, but his does.I heard what you said to him. I heard everything.
I love you, Zia.
The words land inside me and bloom.
Forgive my foolishness. Forgive me for breaking my promise not to hurt you. Please...
I’m out of the car.
I don’t decide to open the door. My body moves before my brain has finished processing, the same way it moved on the plane when the turbulence hit and my hand found his arm, the same way it moved in the elevator when his lips met mine. My body knows things my mind hasn’t caught up to yet, and what it knows right now is that the man I love is standing in the road apologizing inside my head and I can’t be separated from him by a car door for one more second.
I throw my arms around his head.
His massive, beautiful head. My arms wrap around it, and his mane is softer than it looks, like silk, like dark water, like something from the bottom of an ocean I’ve never seen, and I press my face against his neck and he smells like Alexei, like mountain air and still water, and I’m sobbing into the coat of an Atlantean stallion on a gravel road in the Rockies and this is the most insane moment of my entire life and I don’t care.
“I forgive you,” I whisper. Out loud. With my mouth against his neck and my tears in his mane and my arms holding him as tightly as a human woman can hold something that could level a building if it wanted to. “I love you.”
I love you.
His voice in my mind, and the sound of it, the relief, the anguish, the raw and shattered gratitude, is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.
I hold his head. I hold it and I don’t let go. The afternoon light pours over us and the mountains are silent witnesses and his mane is warm against my face and the humming starts again, low and deep, vibrating through his entire body and into mine, and I feel it in my bones, in my teeth, in the spaces between my ribs where the wordsI love youhave been living for days.
