“Where is the villa?”
“On the island.”
“Ian.”
“Sophia.”
“You’re incorrigible.” I look out the window. Lemnos unfolds in the evening light—golden hills, dark cypress, the Aegean appearing in flashes between the rises. Everything looks like it's been painted rather than built. It’s extraordinary, and I’m no longer annoyed with Ian for dragging my ass here.
I don't tell him that.
The drive starts with the usual bickering, but somewhere along the coast road, Ian goes quiet.
Not his usual quiet—not the comfortable silence we've built over months of shared space and balcony dinners. This is different. Deliberate. The quiet of someone managing something they haven't decided to share yet.
I glance at him. He keeps his eyes on the road. I look back out the window.
The Aegean flashes between the hills, darkening now as the sun drops, the water going from gold to deep blue to something almost black at the edges. Beautiful and indifferent and vast. While I take it all in, I feel something I haven’t in weeks. Months.
Something that isn't waiting.
Ian slows, and I notice his knuckles going white as he grips the steering wheel.
Ahead on the road, pulled to the side, there’s a black SUV. Just sitting there. No hazard lights. Nobody visible through the windows.
“What are you doing?”
Ian stops behind it, stares out in front of him.
“Ian. What's?—”
He turns to me, and the expression on his face is one I’ve only seen in the middle of night when he comes into my room because he heard me cry.
“I, ah…” His gaze cuts to mine. “I told him you wouldn’t suspect a thing.”
The world stops.
I know before I finish processing it. The way you know things that bypass thought entirely and land straight in the body—warm and certain and completely without question.
The front door of the car in front of us opens.
A hooded figure. Masked. Broad shoulders and dark fabric and that specific unhurried way of moving that I would know in any crowd, in any dark, in any version of any life I could possibly live.
I’m out the car before I decided to move.
“Nazareth.”
My feet hit the road and I’m running and he’s turning and I crash into him so hard it should hurt. But it doesn’t. It’s the exact opposite of hurt. It’s every ache I’ve been carrying for weeks dissolving on contact the second his arms close around me.
I don't even make it to him properly before the tears are already happening, before my face is buried in his chest and his arms are closing around me and I'm making sounds I'll be embarrassed about later but don't care about right now.
His hand finds my hair. His other arm presses me into him so hard it should be uncomfortable but isn’t. For me, it’s not tight enough, not close enough.
My arms are around his neck before I register what I’m doing, and when the realization hits a second later, I instinctively pull back, only to have him lock me in place.
“Don’t let go,” he rasps against my ear, and I swear my heart beats one, three, seventeen times faster than normal. Everything in my chest rearranging to accommodate the message in those words.
I pull back just enough to find his face. My hands go to the buff immediately—shaking, not quite coordinated, fingers fumbling with the fabric—and he lets me pull it down, lets me find his mouth, and I kiss him before I've finished finding it, before either of us is quite ready, and it doesn't matter because he's already kissing me back.
