She asked about his business one evening, sitting with her feet in his lap on the terrace with the stars coming out.
"Do you regret it?" she asked. "The violence. The life you've built."
He was quiet for a moment—genuinely considering, not deflecting.
"No," he said. "It's who I am. What I was built for. I'm not going to pretend to regret the competence." He met her eyes. "I regret specific things. Specific moments when I chose fear over humanity. But the work—the part of it that's about protecting what's mine, holding lines other people are too afraid to hold—no."
She nodded.
"Does it trouble you?" he asked.
"The violence?" She considered it honestly. "The idea of it doesn't. The reality of it—sometimes. When I see the blood." She paused. "But I've never once been afraid of you. I want you to know that."
"I know."
"Even in the beginning, when you were at your coldest. You were never frightening to me." She touched his jaw. "The rest of the world fears you. I never did."
"Bruno told you that made you strange."
"Bruno has no room to talk. He once growled at a houseplant."
"It was suspicious."
"It was a fern."
Bruno, lying across their feet, exhaled in a way that suggested the fern had been asking for it.
"I love all of you," she said, returning to what mattered. "The part that runs an empire and the part that reads my romance novels and argues with the heroes. The monster and the beast." She leaned in and pressed her lips to his jaw. "Especially the beast."
He caught her face and kissed her properly.
Bruno stood up, walked six feet away, and lay back down.
He had standards.
The Last Night - Under Stars
They'd been lying on the beach for an hour, watching the sky, when he sat up.
She looked at him.
He had the expression she'd come to recognize as him deciding to do something before he could think too hard about it.
"I want to rewrite our story," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"The beginning. I want a different beginning." He shifted, turning toward her. "We were given a bad start. Forced into it. Neither of us chose it." He reached into the pocket of his linen shirt—she hadn't noticed he'd been careful to wear the shirt with the pocket all evening—and produced a box. "I want to choose it now. Properly."
She sat up.
He opened the box.
The ring was not the family heirloom she'd been given at their first wedding—a heavy traditional piece chosen by Saroj, worn without affection. This was something else entirely. A slender band of rose gold set with a single square-cut emerald flanked by small diamonds—clean lines, modern, exactly the kind of thing she would have pointed to in a window and admired without expecting to receive.
He knew that because he'd watched her look at jewelry for months.
He'd been paying attention.
