The irony is almost offensive.
Not that Vincenzo isn’t currently doing the same thing, because he is. He’s in my bed while his wife sleeps elsewhere, and his tongue is still on my skin in places neither of us will be able to ignore tomorrow.
Morally, none of us has the fucking high ground here, but there’s a difference in weight. Arabella’s betrayal has been running under the marriage while he’s spent eight years half dead over me.
And something in me, mean and territorial and still angry over seeing her under his hand tonight, wants him to know exactly what kind of arrangement she’s been building on her side while he’s been dutifully playing king beside her.
Also, I’m petty when it comes to him. That remains true no matter how full my heart feels right now. My thumb hovers over the screen for one second, then I type back with care not to jostle the mattress.
Me: Have him walk into evidence of Arabella’s betrayal.
I pause, but decide not to add anything else because Kai will understand the specifics well enough. He always does. Not that evidence should be too hard to arrange if the affair is already active. Lucien is reckless in polished ways, the kind of man who thinks discretion means choosing better hotels. Arabella is probably no different. Rich people always think privacy is something bought by thread count and NDAs.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand again and look back at Vincenzo, at the line of his mouth softened by sleep, at the dark sweep of lashes on his cheek, at the complete vulnerability of a king who trusts exactly one person in the room enough to pass out half-draped over his body.
“Your wife’s unfaithful,” I murmur to the top of his head, voice too low to wake him. “Which is rich, considering where you are.”
A faint smile threatens at the corner of my mouth despite myself. The difference, I think, is that what sits between us was there long before the ring, the gala, the wife, and the crowns.That doesn’t make it clean. It doesn’t make it noble. But it makes it real in a way that the rest of his marriage clearly isn’t.
I should feel guilty for that text, but I don’t. Maybe I will tomorrow, in the colder light of morning, after coffee and clarity and the long list of practical problems still waiting for us outside this bed. Maybe I’ll decide it was cruel. Maybe it was.
But cruelty has never bothered me much when it serves the truth, and if Vincenzo is going to keep standing beside a wife who calls him husband while sleeping with his second, then he deserves to know exactly how false the ground under his feet has become.
The whole mess makes me want to laugh and break things in equal measure.
Vincenzo shifts against me again, dragging me back out of thought immediately. His lashes flutter once but do not open. He exhales a little harder this time, as if he’s swimming near the surface of sleep and hasn’t decided whether the world is worth waking to yet. His hand over my heart flexes once against my skin, fingers spreading almost unconsciously.
“Stay,” he murmurs.
The word is half asleep, barely formed, but it goes through me like a bullet all the same.
I lower my head and press a kiss to his hairline. “I’m never leaving.”
He settles again with a tiny sound of relief that is so soft no one else would hear it for what it is.
I close my eyes for one second and let the fullness in my chest hurt. Let it burn. Let it remind me that whatever disaster this becomes, whatever blood, scandal, and fury still wait down the road, this part is real.
I don’t know how this works. I don’t know how we survive being kings, men, enemies on paper, and this in truth. I don’tknow what happens when he finds out Arabella is unfaithful, and I’m the bastard who arranged for him to walk in on it.
I don’t know whether our families will burn, bow, or do both as the truth of us becomes harder to hide. I don’t know whether we get a future or just a prettier version of the same catastrophe we always were.
Whatever happens next, I’m done letting other people decide what gets buried.
I bend and press my mouth lightly to his hairline once more. He doesn’t wake again, but his fingers curl once against my chest, the hand over my heart tightening in sleep as if even unconscious, he knows exactly where he belongs.
For tonight, that’s enough to keep me awake and grateful until dawn.
twenty
Vincenzo
Iwakeuptoteeth.
Not enough to hurt, just the slow press of teeth at the back of my neck, followed by the warm drag of a mouth that has apparently decided sleep was a temporary inconvenience, and I’m far more interesting awake.
My eyes remain closed for one blissful second longer while I let the sensation settle into me. Nikolaj is behind me, all heat and weight and impossible solidness, one heavy arm banded around my waist, his chest pressed to my back, his breath warm where his mouth moves over the marks he left there hours ago.
Another kiss lands low on my neck, then another just under my ear, slower this time, as if he’s cataloging what’s his with his mouth.
