“Nadia,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“I love you.”
She went still.
The words had come out calmly. Too calmly, maybe, for what they did to me. I’d ordered men killed with more air in my lungs.
Nadia lifted her head from my chest and looked at me.
Her eyes were wet again.
“You don’t have to say it back tonight,” I said.
“I know.” She touched my jaw. “That isn’t why I’m quiet.”
I waited.
She kissed me once. Soft. Slow. Certain enough to hurt.
“I love you too,” she said. “I think I started falling for you before I was ready to admit it, and that’s terrifying, so don’t look smug.”
“I’m going to look smug later.”
“I assumed.”
“Right now, I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Holding my future wife and the mother of my children.”
Her expression softened. “That’s a lot of titles.”
“You’ll wear all of them well.”
“Possessive.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She laid her cheek on my chest again and closed her eyes.
I stayed on my back in my bed with Nadia warm against my side, one arm around her waist, and the blanket pulled overboth of us. The tea cooled on the table beside us. Rain marked the windows. Her breathing slowed against my skin, steady and alive.
No debt waited outside the door. No auctioneer called her lot number. No Kask man owned a second of her future.
Only Nadia, safe under my roof because she’d chosen to stay.
Only my woman, sleeping in my arms while the city finally learned her price had never been theirs to name.
Epilogue
Three months after I walked into an auction believing my life had narrowed to a price, I stood barefoot in Vadim’s penthouse while two Sorin household attendants debated whether the champagne roses belonged beside the ivory orchids or the tower of sugared pears.
No one asked me to carry a tray.
