Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
I drag myself to bed. I don’t change. I don’t wash my face. I just lie there with mascara on my pillowcase and my phone abandoned on the bathroom floor and the taste of salt in my mouth, and I fall asleep the way you fall when you’ve run out of everything: all at once, without choosing to.
I WAKE UP BECAUSE THE air is different.
Not wrong. Not dangerous. Just...different. Warmer. Charged. That specific shift in atmospheric pressure that my body has learned to recognize in the space of five days, the one that means—
I sit up.
He’s standing by my window.
My third-floor window, which I leave cracked because the building doesn’t have central air and it’s June in Colorado and the landlord’s idea of climate control is a suggestion to “buy a fan.” The window is open wider than I left it, and the curtain is pushed aside, and Alexei is standing in my bedroom in a dark shirt with his sleeves rolled and his hair slightly windblown and an expression on his face that I have never, in five days of stolen kisses and quiet intensity, seen before.
He looks wrecked.
Not angry. Not composed. Not wearing the mask. Wrecked, the way a man looks when something he thought was indestructible has just been threatened, and he crossed a city and climbed three stories of brick facade to get to it.
“Did you climb my building?”
My voice comes out hoarse and swollen and I’m suddenly, horribly aware that I’m in a T-shirt and shorts with last night’s makeup streaked down my face and my hair in a state that could only be described as hostile.
“The fire escape,” he says. “Mostly.”
Mostly.
“You can’t be here.” I pull my blanket up like it’s armor. “I sent you a text. I was very clear.”
“You sent me Billy’s text.”
The words land like a slap. Not because they’re cruel. Because they’re true. He recognized it. He read my four sentences and he knew exactly what I’d done, where I’d copied from, what it meant that in my worst moment I’d reached for the same template that destroyed me.
“The photos are from three years ago.” His voice is even but there’s a fracture running through it. “Lauren Ashford. We were involved briefly, before That Day. It was never—” He stops. Starts again. “It was proximity. Strategy. Two preters who understood each other’s world when the world didn’t know ours existed. It ended before That Day, and it ended because there was nothing to sustain.”
“Then why—”
“Because she saw the engagement announcement and decided the world should see what it lost.” A muscle works in his jaw. “The event in the photos was a Lyccan territorial summit. Three years ago. I’ve already had Ruby contact every outlet. The retraction will run by morning.”
I’m gripping my blanket so hard my knuckles ache. The rational part of me, the part that Trish was trying to activate with look at his hair, it’s longer, hears him and believes him. The photos are old. Lauren is bitter. It’s a setup.
But the Billy part of me, the part that lives in my chest like scar tissue, is screaming.
“You should go.”
“No.”
“Alexei—”
“I love you, Zia Morgan.”
The bedroom goes silent.
Not quiet. Silent. Silence that has weight, that presses against your eardrums, that makes you aware of your own heartbeat that borders on painful.
He’s still by the window. He hasn’t moved toward me. Hasn’t crossed the room. He’s giving me all the space in the world, and he’s standing in the moonlight that’s coming through my cracked window, and his eyes are on mine, and what I see in them isn’t composure or control or any of the things I’ve come to associate with the Prince of Atlantis.
It’s fear.
He’s afraid.
The man who walked through the Convergence Expo and made alphas bow. The man who announced our engagement to the entire preter world without asking. The man who climbed my building ten minutes ago. He is standing in my bedroom and he is afraid, because a twenty-two-year-old human in a tear-stained T-shirt sent him a text, and it had the power to terrify him.
“I’ve never said that to anyone.” His voice is barely above a whisper. “My family was taken from me when I was a child. The Sceleri saw to that. I’ve been alone since then. Everything I built, every wall, every company, every alliance, I built from that emptiness.” He pauses. “And I never said those words. Not once. Until you.”
A tear rolls down my face. I don’t wipe it.
“I’m not that boy, Zia. I won’t ever be that boy. And I’ll spend whatever time you give me proving it.”
I look at him. Standing in my bedroom. Moonlight and fear and rolled sleeves and the faint windburn of a man who climbed a building for me.
“The photos really are old?”
“Three years.”