Mila was smiling.
I stopped at the edge of the doorway, half-hidden in shadow, watching her. She looked different today. Lighter, somehow. She was wearing a soft cream sweater that made her skin glow, and her hair was loose around her shoulders in waves that I remembered tangling my fingers through just hours ago.
When Anya said something particularly outrageous—I couldn’t hear what, but I knew my sister—Mila laughed. The sound was soft and disarming. It was completely unguarded, hitting me like a fist to the sternum.
I’d seen Mila frightened. I’d seen her wary, angry, and defiant. I’d seen her come apart beneath me with my name on her lips. But this—this ease, this moment of genuine happiness—was something new. Something she was giving, not something I was taking.
And it was that realization, more than anything else, that made me understand just how dangerous this was becoming. Somewhere between the gunfire at the engagement party and the way she’d curled into me last night like she belonged there, I’d lost my footing entirely. And now I was standing at the mouth of a cliff, looking down into something terrifying and inevitable.
This wasn’t what I planned.
But fate, I’d come to learn, doesn’t care about plans.
Anya spotted me first. “Alexei! Done hiding in your cave?”
Mila’s head turned, and our eyes met.
The laughter died on her lips, replaced by something else. Something that coiled between us like smoke—heat and a fragile awareness that neither of us had named yet. She didn’t look away. Didn’t retreat into the careful distance she’d maintained during our first days of marriage.
As I approached, she chuckled at something Anya said as she stood. I swallowed, tamping down my surprise as she started walking towards me. She met me halfway.
Her quiet defiance—that refusal to pretend last night didn’t happen, that willingness to face whatever it was between us—sealed something inside me that I couldn’t admit out loud.
“Mila,” I uttered, my voice low and my tone reverent.
“Alexei.” Her voice was steady, but I could see the color rising in her cheeks.
“Well. I should probably go check on… literally anything else. The flowers. The hedges. That very interesting rock over there,” Anya remarked from where she stood a few feet away from us.
“Anya—” Mila started, but my sister was already turning to the side, shooting me a look that clearly said ‘don’t be an idiot’before she swept back toward the house with all the subtlety of a freight train.
And then we were alone.
Carefully but deliberately, I brought my hands to her waist. It was the first time I held her like this. It was intimate and casual at the same time. I liked it. Too much. Which explained my pulling her into my chest and pressing a kiss to her cheek. I could feel the rapid beating of her heart, and I would have been surprised if mine weren’t doing something similar.
I didn’t know how to say any of the things crowding my throat.
I watched you dream.
You’re beginning to terrify me.
“Last night,” she started, stepping back to look up at me. Then she stopped. And then started again. “Last night wasn’t about protection.”
It was not a question. But I answered anyway.
“No,” I uttered, patting her hair down as my eyes gazed into her warm ones.
“Then what was it about?”
I could lie now. I could wrap this in pretty words or cold dismissals, could give her the version of myself that I’d spent years perfecting—the one that kept women at a safe distance. But when I looked at Mila, at the way she was watching me with that devastating honesty, I found I didn’t want to.
“You,” I said simply. “It was about you.”
Her breath caught. “Alexei—”
“I don’t know how to do this,” I continued, the admission feeling like pulling shrapnel from a wound. “I don’t know how to be… anything close to what you deserve. I’ve spent my entire life building walls, Mila. And then you—” I stopped, my jaw tight. “Hell, I don’t know… but I do know that you… you matter. To me. A lot.”
For a long moment, Mila didn’t speak. She just looked at me, making me feel more exposed than I’d ever felt with my clothes off. Then, slowly, she blinked.
