I don’t think. I move off the lounge chair, across the ground, to him. My hands find his face and I hold it, tilt it toward me, search those cognac eyes that have always looked at me like I was something worth burning the world down for.
And I see it. Something I have never once seen in Nico’s eyes.
Grief.
Raw, unguarded, unashamed grief.
“Nico, I’m so sorry,” I breathe. “So- so sorry.”
“He’d been with me for years.” His voice fractures on the last word. Just barely. But I catch it.
I pull him into me, wrap my arms around shoulders that have carried so much for so long, and hold him the way you hold someone who doesn’t know how to ask for it. The most powerful, feared, untouchable man I’ve ever known — and he is trembling, quietly, against me.
“I feel sick knowing he died in a war that was mine to fight,” I whisper into his hair.
“Reacher wanted me to pass something along.” He pulls back just enough to look at me, and there are tears tracking silently down his face — unashamed, unwiped. “Lune said he knew you were the one for me.”
Something breaks open in my chest.
“I’m forever grateful,” I manage, though the words feel pitifully small against the weight of what his bodyguard gave.
Then Nico says it, softly, the way you say something that still terrifies you even in the past tense.
“I was dying, Serenity.”
I pull back, staring at him. “What?”
“I was in a coma for a month.”
My hands go to my stomach. Nausea rolls through me.
“Nico.” My voice is barely sound. “You should never have gone to war for me. That was my fight.”
He moves fast, both hands cupping my face, thumbs pressing into my jaw, eyes blazing and wild and certain.
“No.” The word is iron. “You are my woman. That makes itmywar.”
“If you would’ve died—” I clutch his lapels like I’m drowning.
“Then that was my choice,” he cuts in, cold and final.
My eyes squeeze shut.
“They know you’re back,” he says then, quieter. “And they’re coming.”
I open my eyes. Let that settle into my bones, where it belongs.
“Good.” My voice steadies. “That’s exactly why I came back. To finish this. Alone, Nico. I won’t let you bleed for me again.”
The corner of his mouth curves. Slow and devastatingly familiar. That devilish smirk that has always meant he’s already three steps ahead of me.
“Wife.” The word is velvet over stone. “We’re a package deal now. You go to war, I go to war. I go to war, you go to war.” He tilts his head slightly. “That’s not negotiable.”
He pulls his hand away from my face, and immediately I yearn to feel his touch again. His hands on me make me feel truly alive.
I want them back the moment they’re gone.
This man has never stopped. Not once. Through years of silence and distance and everything in between. He never stopped loving me. There’s still a small voice in my head that wants to ask about all the other women, all those years. Whether any of it meant anything.
