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He cups the back of my neck and kisses me, and he pours everything into it, the fear and the longing and the love he has no other words for. It is not a decorous kiss, careful and exploratory, testing its ground. It is the kiss a man gives only when he has finally, at long last, been granted permission.

I grab a fistful of his collar as his breathing turns heavier, and his free hand tightens at my waist. The whole world outside the glass recedes to nothing, and I’m lost to pleasure. He catches my lower lip between his teeth, and I feel the last of the ice between us cracking apart and falling away.

We are not questioning love anymore, or issuing commands, or keeping score. We have simply chosen each other, here, hundreds of feet above the valley, and it feels less like falling and more like finally setting something down. The car slows as it nears the upper station.

Neither of us lets go until a small fist knocks hard against the glass.

“Are you two done?” Milo greets us, grinning through the window.

I shove Lev back by the shoulder to find Milo beaming and Maksim standing behind him looking like he has aged a decade, exhausted, wrung out. Lev calmly straightens my wrinkled collar, his thumb grazing the corner of my soft mouth.

Milo launches himself into my arms the second the doors open, and Lev’s hand catches the small of my back before I can rock off balance.

“Careful,” both brothers say at the exact same instant.

This time, neither of them argues about it.

I take Milo’s hand and lead him ahead down the mountain path while the two men fall in behind us. Their low voices carry forward on the wind.

“I don’t have a chance, do I,” Maksim says, his voice rough with defeat.

“You had one,” Lev answers, flat as a closing door.

“Don’t stand there acting like the victor,” Maksim says, and his voice has a sullen bite.

“I’m not,” Lev says, a curt response, though I would bet the look on his face says otherwise.

“I’m out,” Maksim says, and under the words there is real regret and a bone-deep desolation. “She chose you. I’m not blind, podonok. But don’t make her cry again, or I will tear your spine out with my bare hands,” Maksim warns him.

Lev takes a beat too long to answer, and my heart hangs suspended in the pause. “She will not cry because of me again,” Lev says. “I will burn this city down to do right by her.”

“That is a very confident thing to promise,” Maksim says, eyeing him up sourly.

“It is not confidence,” Lev says. “It is a promise.”

My eyes go hot, brimming and spilling over, and Milo peers quizzically up at me. “Uh, are you crying?” he asks.

“It’s the wind,” I say.

“There’s no wind right now,” Milo points out.

“Adults and their secrets,” Milo sighs, and I pinch his cheek until he lets out a surprised squeak and the whole mood lifts.

The rafting itself is calm and slow, the water barely more than a lazy, shimmering drift. Lev sits directly behind me to steady me with a hand on either side of my waist, and Maksim and Milo take the paddles up front in their life jackets.

Milo’s paddle mostly slaps the surface, throwing water back over all of us. “The current did that,” Milo says solemnly after a wave catches Maksim in the face.

I laugh so hard the raft rocks, and Lev steadies me by the hips. “Don’t,” he murmurs.

“Do you control laughing now too?” I ask, throwing him a glare over my shoulder.

“Suggesting,” he says.

“I think I have earned a reward, malen’kiy volk,” he says, his lips brushing the shell of my ear.

“You’re greedy,” I say, with that naughty sparkle in my eye.

“Only with you,” he says. “I’m never done with you.”