It’s not a promise. We’re not foolish enough for those tonight.
But he keeps one hand tangled lightly in my shirt and the other on my back, and I keep my ear over his heart. Outside the villa,the sea moves against the shore of the island he bought for a future we had to destroy ourselves to reach.
Free.
Guilty.
Alive.
Here, in his arms, where the grief can see both of us and know it has not won.
Epilogue
Vincenzo
Thebeachlooksdifferentwhen no one is trying to resurrect a dead man on it.
That is a cruel thought, maybe, but it’s the first one that comes to mind as Nikolaj and I walk along the shoreline at sunset, our footprints trailing behind us in the damp sand until the waves creep up and erase them one by one.
The air is warm, but the wind off the water has cooled enough to raise goosebumps along my arms where my linen shirt is rolled up to the elbows. The sky has gone soft at the edges, gold bleeding into bruised purple, the horizon cut clean and dark where the sun lowers toward the sea.
Isle Lucia wears evening well. Too well, perhaps. It has a talent for making grief look cinematic, which feels personally insulting after everything it has witnessed.
Two weeks ago, I stood on this sand and broke Nikolaj’s heart all over again by being alive.
That’s how long it’s been since I came back from the dead and found Nikolaj on this beach with my ring in his hand and devastation carved into his face.
Two weeks since he screamed at me until his voice cracked, and I stood there taking it because there was nothing else to do.
Two weeks since I touched his cheek and apologized for hurting him, for breaking his heart, for forcing him to mourn a body I knew wasn’t mine while telling myself the plan needed his grief to be believable.
Two weeks since he held my wrists and felt my pulse like he was trying to decide whether love could be trusted after I used it as part of a lie.
We haven’t kissed since I came back.
There have been touches. His mouth on my hair in the dark, rough and barely there. My lips against his knuckles when his hand trembled once while changing the bandage on my side.
His forehead against my shoulder when the nightmares came but didn’t take him all the way under. Small things. Careful things. The kind of intimacy that might look like restraint from the outside and feels, from the inside, like learning to handle a blade without cutting ourselves open every time.
We haven’t been sexually intimate either.
My body is still healing, though that’s only part of it. The bigger part sits between us without needing to be named every hour.
He wants me, I know he does. Nikolaj has never been subtle where I’m concerned, even now, even through anger and grief and caution.
I feel it in the way his eyes move over me some mornings when my shirt slips off one shoulder. I feel it in the way his hands pause at my waist before he lets go.
I feel it in the way he turns away sometimes, jaw tight, as if wanting me and being angry with me at the same time still confuses something in him.
I want him too.God, I want him.
But wanting isn’t the problem. Wanting has always been the easiest thing between us. We wanted when we were enemies, when we were stupid boys at Vintermoor carving hate beneath each other’s skin and pretending hunger was another form of violence.
We wanted through blood, through lies, through memory loss, through marriage and crowns and eight years of absence.
Wanting never saved us. Wanting never asked whether the ground underneath could hold. This time, we’re trying to build the ground first. It’s slow, ugly in places, and some days it works.
Nikolaj has stopped waking up calling for me.
