He bends down.
Lowers his body, his massive frame folding with a grace that shouldn’t be possible for something his size, and I realize what he’s doing and I laugh. I’m crying and laughing at the same time, which should be physically contradictory but apparently isn’t, because the Prince of Atlantis, in stallion form, on a gravel road, is kneeling so that his wife can climb onto his back.
“I’ve never been on a horse,” I say, and the absurdity of the sentence in this context makes me laugh harder.
Hold on.
I hold on.
And then we’re moving, and oh...
Flying.
Not literally. His hooves are on the ground. But the speed, the wind-tearing, breath-stealing speed, makes the world dissolve into streaks of color on either side of us. Trees become green blurs. The road becomes a grey river. The mountains, which have been the backdrop of my life since I moved to Colorado,rush past like scenery from a train that has forgotten how to slow down.
He is faster than the cars on the highway. Faster than anything I’ve ever experienced. The wind tears my hair loose and steals the tears from my cheeks and fills my lungs with cold, sharp mountain air, and I’m gripping his mane with both hands and pressing my body against his back and laughing,laughing,because this is terrifying and the most free I have ever felt in my life.
The fortress appears. The road that shouldn’t exist delivers us to the grounds, and he slows, from that blinding speed to a canter to a walk, and brings us to a stop outside one of the small stone structures I’d asked about on the tour.
The changing sheds.
He kneels again. I slide off his back on legs that have forgotten their purpose, and I’m standing on solid ground for the first time in what feels like hours, and my hair is a disaster and my face is tear-streaked and my hands are shaking and I’m looking at the most beautiful creature in the world.
He shifts.
It happens fast. A ripple of movement, a blur of dark light, and then the stallion is gone and Alexei is there, and he is...
Naked.
Like, obviously naked, because that’s how shifting works, and I knew this, I understood this intellectually when I saw the changing sheds, but understanding it intellectually and standing three feet from the Prince of Atlantis in the afternoon light with absolutely nothing between us are two completely differentexperiences, and my brain just. Stops. Working. Because the human version of him is just as extraordinary as the stallion version, and I’m blushing so hard I can feel it in my ears, and I can’t stop staring, and oh my gosh,oh my gosh.
He moves.
Three strides. The same three strides that crossed my bedroom when he dropped to his knees. That same completely inevitable forward motion of a man who has decided something and will not be stopped.
His arms close around me. He lifts me like I weigh nothing. My back meets the stone wall of the shed and the impact pushes a gasp out of me that he swallows with his mouth, because he’s kissing me, and every kiss before this one was a conversation. This one is a confession. Desperate and raw and bruising, the kiss of a man who came within minutes of losing everything and knows it, and his hands are pulling at my dress and the fabric gives way and I don’t care, I don’t care about anything except his skin against mine and his mouth on my neck and the sound he’s making, low, broken, animal, that tells me the composure isn’t cracked.
It’s gone.
My back is against cold stone and his body is furnace-hot against mine, and I’m lost in him, completely lost, and he pulls back just enough to look at me, and his eyes...
Those pale, extraordinary eyes.
They are wrecked.
“I love you, Zia,” he says. Not in my mind. Out loud. With his voice and his mouth and his breath against my lips. “Forever.”
“I love...”
He enters me in one swift stroke, and the word dissolves.
...you,I finish in my mind, in the silence, in the place where his voice lives now, and I can’t think after that.
EPILOGUE
THE COFFEE LINE ATPreTEx is twelve people deep, and I don’t mind.
A month ago, I would have. A month ago, standing in a crowd of preters at a Bellecourt-hosted technology exchange would have made my palms sweat and my stomach clench and my brain produce a running commentary of every reason I didn’t belong here.You’re human. You’re nobody. You’re the girl who got dumped by text and married by accident and you are standing in a room full of people who can smell your insecurity.
