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So I lean down, cradle his face between my hands, and kiss him with all the tenderness I’ve been choking back for years, because Kento deserves softness too. My tears slip onto his cheeks, and I kiss him deeper, because I need him to understand what my frightened mouth couldn’t say before.

Yes. Yes. I want you. I need you.

And this time, I’m not running.

Kento

I took two hollow-points, went through sixty feet of freezing water, and woke up in paradise because Ilya Solovyov has completely lost his mind over me.

Every time my heart rate blips half a beat faster on the screen, he checks the oxygen line and touches the back of my hand with two fingers just to make sure the pulse is still thumping against the bone.

Beside him, Rei is running a one-man catering operation.

The rolling tray table across my knees is buried under plastic containers. Steamed rice packed into perfect triangles, tamagoyaki, and an insulated flask of miso soup that smells like home.

“Hospital food is salted water and cardboard,” Rei announces, cracking apart a pair of wooden chopsticks. “You lost three units of blood. You need real nutrients, not gray paste made by strangers.”

I lean back against the raised pillows. I look between the spread of food and my brother’s determined face. “Who’s cooking all this?” I ask, my voice still rough from the intubation tube.

Rei lifts his chin proudly. “Me.”

A smirk pulls at the dry corner of my mouth. I shift my gaze past the foot of the bed to the far corner of the room, where Dimitri is slouched in an armchair, arms crossed over his chest like an angry gargoyle.

“Has he ever cooked for you?” I ask.

Dimitri’s cheeks puff out with irritation, looking like an oversized, pouty squirrel that just had its acorn stolen.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Dimitri snaps.

Before the last syllable even clears his teeth, Ilya is on his feet. He leans across the mattress, pointing a finger straight at Dimitri’s face.

“You watch how you speak to my man, Dima,” Ilya snarls, his green eyes crammed with anger, “or I’m sending you into the atmosphere.”

My man.

I’m in heaven. I want to tear the IV out of my arm, drag him into this narrow hospital cot, and make him say it against my mouth until sunrise.

Rei rounds on Dimitri too, scowling with fraternal indignation. “Can’t you see he’s sick? Stop being loud. He almost died, and you’re picking fights.”

From the window side of the room, Marco is perched neatly on Alexei’s lap. Alexei has both arms wrapped around the boy’s waist, his chin resting against dark curls, completely unbothered by the domestic chaos. “It’s not nice to speak badly to patients,” Marco says, his voice terribly earnest. “He needs peace to heal.”

Dimitri throws both hands in the air, glaring at the ceiling. “Okay! So you’re all ganging up on me? No one’s on my side?!”

Ilya scoffs, not even bothering to look back at him. “Shut up, Dima. You’re dramatic.”

“I’m dramatic?!” Dimitri barks, but Alexei just reaches out with one broad foot and nudges Dimitri’s shin to shut him up.

Ilya ignores them entirely. The feral hostility drains out of his posture the second he turns back to face me, replaced by that high-strung vulnerability he tries so desperately to hide. A stubborn pink blush begins to creep up the column of his throat, spreading across his cheekbones.

He clears his throat, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“I can’t cook like your brother can,” Ilya mutters, keeping his eyes fixed somewhere around the second button of my hospital gown. “I’d probably burn the kitchen down. But… I brought you something else.”

He reaches down to the floor beside his chair and straightens back up. In his hands is a slightly bruised bouquet of dark red peonies. From the corner, Dimitri makes a retching sound. “I’m going to gag.”

Rei says something to him but I don’t hear much of it because the entire room narrows down to the beautiful bundle of stems in Ilya’s fingers.

I look up at him, my mouth curving into a genuine smile. “You brought me flowers?”