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)
It lasts a second. Less than a second. Then his arm tightens around me and he turns and kisses me properly, and the kiss is thorough, warm, extraordinary, and I decide that the second of hesitation was nothing.
Exhaustion.
Stress.
Bellecourts.
Not distance.
This is what I tell myself on Sunday morning when Alexei comes into the kitchen where I’m losing a war with Mariano and says, “I need to go in to the office.”
Sunday.
He doesn’t work on Sundays. Sundays are ours. Sundays are breakfast in the kitchen and the couch and the library and the long, slow afternoons where he reads and I read and the humming fills the space between us like a third heartbeat. Ruby doesn’t call. The Blood Oval doesn’t summon. Sundays are sacred in the way that only two people who are still learning how to be together can make something sacred, by showing up, by being present, by choosing each other over everything else.
But he’s standing in the kitchen doorway in a suit on a Sunday, and his expression is the composed, unreadable one, the prince, not the husband, and he’s saying he needs to go.
“The Bellecourt negotiations,” he says. “A development that requires my attention.”
“On a Sunday?”
“The Bellecourts don’t observe weekends.”
This is true. I know this is true because I’ve heard him say it before, and because vampires are nocturnal and their relationship to the human calendar is at best adversarial. And he’s looking at me with those pale eyes, and his voice is even, and nothing about this moment is wrong.
One degree.
I smile. “Okay. I’ll be here.”
He crosses the kitchen. He kisses my forehead. Not my mouth. My forehead. And the kiss is gentle and brief and it lands on my skin like an apology for something I don’t know about yet.
“I won’t be long,” he says.
And then he’s gone, and the kitchen is quiet, and Mariano hisses at me from the counter, and I stand there with my mug in my hands and tell myself: see? He’s busy. The Bellecourts. Negotiations. Sunday is an inconvenience, not a pattern. Nothing is wrong.
The forehead kiss sits on my skin like a fingerprint.
He kissed my forehead, not my mouth. And I know this means nothing. People kiss foreheads all the time, it’s tender, it’s sweet, it’s what a man does when he’s in a hurry and his wife has coffee breath. But Alexei has never once been too hurried to kiss me properly. Not when we were late for work. Not when Ruby was calling. Not when the Blood Oval was waiting.
Stop it.
I take a breath.
I let it out.
I take my coffee to the library and I’m going to have a normal, peaceful Sunday and I’m not going to spiral about forehead kisses and missing hums and one-degree temperature changes that probably only exist inside my own anxious, overthinking, still-healing head.
Because that’s what this is. This is Billy’s legacy, the part of me that was trained to look for signs of leaving, to measure affection in millimeters, to interpret every small silence as a prelude to abandonment. Billy taught me that love could vanish overnight, and now my stupid, scarred brain is applying that lesson to a man who knelt on my bedroom floor and told me I love you like the words had never existed before he spoke them.
Alexei is not Billy.
Nothing is wrong.
I take my coffee to the library. I curl up in the leather chair that has become mine, the one by the tall window, where the morning light falls in long golden strips and the silence has a quality I’ve come to love, deep and old and full of peace.
I read. I drink my coffee. I text Trish about Saturday’s dinner plans. I call Joni, who has opinions about tablecloths and is not afraid to share them. I talk to Gerald, the fern in the conservatory, the one I named on our third day because he looked like a Gerald, and ask him if I’m overthinking things, and Gerald, as always, offers no comment.
It’s a normal Sunday.
Alexei has been gone for maybe twenty minutes when a staff member appears in the library doorway. I don’t know her name. The fortress has a small team that maintains the grounds and the interior, all preters, all so discreet they’re practically invisible.
“Mrs. Lykaios?”
I’m still not used to that. Mrs. Lykaios. Every time I hear it, my brain does a small, bewildered reset, like a GPS that keeps recalculating a route it didn’t expect to be on.
“Yes?”
“You have a visitor.”
A visitor. On a Sunday. At a fortress in the Rocky Mountains that exists in a pocket dimension and doesn’t appear on any map.
“Who?”
The staff member’s expression gives nothing away, but something in how she holds herself, a slight stiffness, a careful blankness, tells me she knows this name carries weight.