“And what did you say?” I ask.
His mouth twitches faintly, not quite a smile. “I showed her my neck.”
The answer hits with a low pulse of satisfaction so immediate, it’s almost embarrassing. Mine. The marks are long faded now,but I know exactly where they were. I can still taste the skin there if I let myself be gone enough to follow the memory all the way down.
“And?”
“And I told her I had the same problem.”
I lean down and press my mouth once to his temple, mostly because I need to touch him right then and because speaking before I do feels impossible. He closes his eyes for a second under the contact and exhales into the heat between us.
“She knows about me,” I say.
“She knows enough.”
I pull back to look at the side of his face. “That’s not dangerous?”
“It is.” He lifts one shoulder slightly in the water. “But less dangerous than forcing her to live the rest of her life beside a man she doesn’t want while pretending loneliness makes her respectable.”
“You pity her,” I say.
Vincenzo is quiet long enough that I know I’ve hit truth instead of theory. “Yes,” he says finally. “And I don’t like that I understand her better now.”
“Because of me?”
He leans his head back against me again, eyes on the windows and the black sea beyond them. “Because of us.”
That should be enough to satisfy something in me. It does, partly. The rest of me stays alert around it, because understanding and peace aren’t the same thing, and I’m still learning what it means to share anything with him that isn’t immediately under threat.
He reaches for his whisky again and takes a sip. The line of his throat works, and water beads and rolls down the curve of his shoulder.
I slide my hand slowly over his stomach once more, because the touch calms me and because some selfish part of me likes that it calms him, too.
“And Lucien,” I say, and brush my thumb lightly over his navel under the water.
His hand comes down to mine briefly, fingers covering the back of it, not stopping the movement so much as acknowledging it. He’s always been good at that with me. Making contact feel like an answer instead of an interruption.
“I should’ve seen it sooner,” he says.
“No.”
His fingers stop moving on my hand. “Nikolaj.”
“No,” I say again, and this time I make him hear it by tightening my arm and tipping my head enough that my mouth nearly grazes his ear. “You don’t get to sit in my bath and tell me that betrayal is your fault because you trusted the wrong snake. That’s not leadership failure, that’s just what snakes do.”
He laughs softly under his breath. “That sounded almost comforting.”
“I can be very fucking comforting when I have to be.”
“You’re doing an excellent job.” His voice dips lower, more private, and I feel the ripple of it along my skin. “Terrifyingly so.”
I ignore that because if I engage, he’ll start smiling like he’s won something, and I’m trying very hard to keep this evening on the softer side of dangerous until he has to leave again. I’m already failing. He makes failure feel too much like instinct.
“So, tell me,” I say. “How long?”
His face changes.
There. That shift. The one I’m learning to hate because it means the answer cuts deeper than the question did.
