"I don't want us to destroy each other."
Something shifted in his face. "If you leave, it will destroy me, Addie."
Outside, the city was doing its indifferent thing: taxis and sirens and the low machinery of eight million people moving through their ordinary days. Inside, there was just the empty bowl and the card on the bed and a man who had been awake all night and was sitting on the edge of my mattress, having given me, in his way, everything.
"Just give me a reason to stay," I said.
Vidar looked at me, lost.
"I thought all I wanted was recognition; to be seen as someone worth something. To have a seat at the table and be allowed to use my brain and not be someone's property. I want more than that. I want what your father has with your mother. I want that. Love me like that."
I watched my husband think. Watched him work through the problem. "You mean the PDA in every room of the house. In front of our children, which means I'd need to get you pregnant first. That will take some lead time. Before that. I can touch you constantly. Tell you I love you. Watch you like a hawk whenever you're in a room. I watched my father do stuff like that for my mother my entire life. Is that what you want?"
I managed to swallow past the lump in my throat. "Yes, please."
He nodded as if the problem had been solved. "I can do those things. I know how to do those things."
Something cracked open in my chest. "That's a good start."
The expression that moved across his face then was not the smile from the morning after he made love to me for the firsttime. This was something newer and less controlled. It took up more of his face. It reached his eyes.
He leaned forward and kissed me.
It wasn't urgent. It wasn't the claiming pressure of the last week. It was slow and careful and warm. It tasted like his mother's soup and something else underneath it that I was finally willing to name. It was love. My husband, the man who forced me to marry him and then made me fall in love with him, loved me.
I broke the kiss.
Vidar made a low sound of protest.
"Nell," I said. "Nell stays. In New York. Running Sterling."
A muscle moved in his jaw. His eye did something complicated — a twitch, suppressed immediately, the specific micro expression of a man absorbing a condition he had not fully made peace with yet. Might not ever. But he nodded.
"Good," I said.
I kissed him this time. He made a different sound — lower, warmer, his hands coming up to frame my face with a gentleness that was still new enough to catch me off guard. We moved together in the gray morning light with none of the desperation of before, just the steady, unhurried warmth of two people who had finally found the same page and were taking their time on it.
After he fucked me hard and the swell of his knot went down, he held me loosely. But I wasn't fooled. If I shifted, his hold would become two manacles.
When the light through the curtains shifted from gray to gold and his heartbeat had slowed under my ear to its deep, steady rhythm, he shifted beside me. His hand moved to the back of my neck. Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head and pressed my face to the side of his throat.
The skin was warm under my lips. His pulse beat against them, steady and unhurried, and alive.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He just held me there — not forcing, not demanding, just offering the space, telling me without words that this was mine if I wanted it. That he was mine if I wanted him.
I opened my mouth. My teeth found the curve of his neck.
His whole body went still; the stillness of a long-held breath finally released.
I bit down, the claiming instinct rising through me, clean and absolute. The sound he made was low and broken and private; the sound of a vault that had been locked for twenty years finally opening all the way.
I licked the mark clean. Pressed my lips to it once.
Vidar exhaled. His arms tightened around me. He tucked my head into the hollow of his chest and pulled me close. My ear over his heart. His chin resting on my hair. The mark on his throat pulsed in time with the one on mine.
EPILOGUE
MAGNUS
