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“I do not flinch! I am a grown man. I was merely… monitoring its tactical movements. Either way… you… you didn’t have to give him away just because of me, Kento. I would have gotten used to him. Eventually. Maybe in ten years.”

“Rei loves him,” I reassure him, catching his chin with my thumb and forefinger to lift his face. “My brother has been feeding him crickets with tweezers and talking to him in baby voices. The spider is living like royalty at Dimitri’s estate. And I can visit him whenever I go see Rei.”

Ilya searches my eyes, making sure I’m not harboring some secret resentment. When he sees only warmth, the tension leaves his shoulders again.

“Besides,” I add, nodding toward the end of the sofa, “we already have our hands full.”

Curled up at the edge of the leather cushion, fast asleep in a fluffy circle of tortoiseshell fur, is our little cat.

“Cookies,” Ilya murmurs, his mouth curling into a fond smile.

“Cookies,” I agree softly.

He shifts on my lap, winding his arms loosely around my neck.

Then he kisses me.

Kento

Marco invites everyone to his home, and Ilya, of course, brings me along.

I feel a bit out of place, but Ilya insists I have to come, so now I sit back in the deep armchair near the window.

“Kento!”

The shout comes from Yuma. Before I can even put my glass down on the side table, they cross the floor in a dead sprint.

Yuma throws himself entirely across my chest, his arms looping tight around my neck, nearly knocking the breath straight out of my healing lungs as his face mashes into my shoulder. Akira collides with my right side, scowling even as his knuckles turn white where he grips the fabric of my shirt, his forehead pressing against my ribs.

“Careful—easy, you two,” I grunt, my voice catching on an intake of air as I drop the glass onto the table and haul both of them against me.

I wrap my arms around them, pulling them down until I’m holding both of their shivering shoulders against my chest.

Since waking up in that hospital bed, I had only managed to see the twins once. They both cried when they saw me. I also found out the two of them had tried to break out of the compound three separate times to see me, but Kenji didn’t let them out.

“How did you both get here?” I ease myself back a little.

“I invited them,” Rei says quietly. “Dimitri helped me get in touch with their private quarters,” he adds smoothly.

I look past Rei to Dimitri. “You breached the Kazuma inner communications grid for a social call?”

“What my fairy wants, my fairy gets,” he shrugs.

I turn back to Rei, my forehead creasing deeper. “And Kenji? Kenji just let them walk out?”

Rei bites his lower lip to keep from laughing out loud, his brown eyes crinkling at the corners. “Well… Ilya’s grandfather helped.”

Beside Dimitri, Ilya lets out a small, highly satisfied hum. His grandfather has been strangely supportive, including about Ilya being gay. I mean, I guess that’s not strange considering him and Kenji.

“Mikhail called him three hours ago,” Ilya says. “Demanded an emergency bilateral summit to renegotiate the northern maritime toll structures. Grandfather brought an eighty-page audit from 1994. Kenji will be trapped in that room listening to him complain about port tariffs until midnight.”

A coordinated tactical diversion executed by the Solovyov patriarch just so two fifteen-year-old boys could come over to Marco’s house. It is completely absurd and wildly reckless.

And then I remember something, and a knot of dread ties itself tight around my heart. I look at Rei standing there, then down at the two boys clinging to me.

For years, my existence was violently fractured down the middle. On one side was Rei, my blood, the boy I was torn away from and forced to love in secret from across the city. On the other side were Akira and Yuma, the two sick children I grew to care for.

Seeing them in the same room makes me panic a little. What if Rei looks at them and sees the years I wasn’t there? What if he thinks I replaced him with them?