Page 157

Maybe, there at the bottom of all the other emotions she’d allowed herself over the past two years, it was just that simple a truth.

Just a fact.

Another wave of emotion that she deeply did not wish to identify crashed over her then, and Aeryn simply…turned around and leaned into it.

She leaned into it and she leaned into him, pressing her face into the crook of his neck and sighing as his arms went around her. He held her, and then, after a while, he lifted her up. And her legs seemed to wrap around him of their own accord. She twined her arms around his neck too, and then she was the one who leaned down and kissed him.

Because it was that or give in to all the messy things she felt inside.

Aeryn didn’t have any idea how long they stayed like that, there in the kitchen with him holding her up, displaying that marvelous strength of his that she’d missed too. Not only because he could tote her around, but that sense that he would always hold her.

That when she was in his arms, nothing in the world could hurt her—not even him.

She’d missed all of this. And she had finished being entirely foolish two years ago, so she had the very clear understanding that having all of this again, so unexpectedly, and likely only for this one long night, was going to damage her in ways she was quite certain she was not going to like.

But with his mouth on hers, and her entire body intertwined with his, she didn’t have it in her to care.

On the contrary, she loved it. She loved all of this. She loved when he shifted them and moved back, still holding her as he began to walk her through the house, back up the stairs, and all the way toward the front of the house again as he found his way back to her bedroom.

Where he laid her down on her bed and covered her body with his, and then proceeded to act out his apology with his hands. His mouth. The slide of his skin against hers.

His powerful slide between her legs, and then, better yet, the way he worked himself deep inside of her until he fit all the way, and they both groaned.

And then everything was heat and need. Everything was that wild, dark glory.

Aeryn shattered so many times that she forgot how to count, and they fell asleep the way they always had—wrapped so tightly around each other that there was no ending and no beginning.

Just the two of them, like the Gordian knot they’d always said they were.

Another betrayal she shoved aside, and let unconsciousness claim her at last.

She could have slept like that until morning—if not half the day—but they were jolted awake too soon. There was more pounding on the door downstairs and this time, it sounded even more intense than when Vesuvius had done it.

Aeryn sat up with a jolt, her heart pounding wildly, but he was already moving. She followed, thinking that he was simply acting on instinct as he yanked on his sweatpants, then strode down the hall and made his way down the stairs.

She waited on the landing in case this was some kind of home invasion and she needed to call the police. Because this was a city, and even in weather like this, you could never be too careful.

At the bottom of the stairs he paused and looked back at her, and she could swear that she finally saw all that regret, all that concern, on his face at last—

But then he threw open the door, and she saw a pack of men standing there, braced against the cold. Clearly officials.

“Your plane crashed,” one of the men said, brazenly and loudly. “Your Majesty, you were thought dead.”

“I am no longer Your Majesty, Lazlo,” Vesuvius replied, and he sounded…like himself. Like a man who had every last scrap of memory, she thought, feeling her belly sink. “And as you can see, reports of my death were overstated. But you had better come in. I imagine there are matters of state to attend to. And you look as if you have traveled a very long way.”

He could be faking, she told herself, perhaps a little desperately. He could simply be putting on an act and working with what she told him.

But he didn’t only say the first man’s name.

He greeted all the rest of them by name too, and when he closed the door behind them he looked up again to where she stood, frozen, on the landing.

And she saw the truth written all over him.

Vesuvius remembered exactly who he was.

Which meant that he knew, as she did too now, that in addition to being a betrayer and an absentee father, he was also a fucking liar.

Chapter Seven