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“Anything.”

“That lullaby.” His voice was drowsy. “The one you hummed. What’s it really about?”

I looked at the dark beams overhead.

“I told you the short version, the first night,” I said. “The whole song is about a small bird who could not sleep. Because he had lost his mother, and did not know where to find her. And an old owl, in a tree, who said: sleep, little one. She has not gone. She has only flown ahead.” I swallowed. “It was my mother’s song. I have not sung it in a thousand years, because it was too much.”

“And now?”

“Now,” I said, “I think I understand the ending.”

“What is it?”

“The bird wakes in the morning. And there is a fire. And a house. And a small warm voice, saying: I am here. “ I kissed his hair. “It seems that she flew ahead, and made a home, and waited.”

He was silent.

“That’s the saddest, best thing I’ve ever heard,” he mumbled.

“Go to sleep, husband.”

“Say it in Russian.”

“ Spi, moya lyubov, “ I said. “ Ya zdes. “

“Mm.”

“It means: sleep, my love. I am here.”

He was already breathing slowly. His hand had gone loose on my chest.

And I lay awake, as I do, and watched the light change on the ceiling, and listened to the wind and the fire and the beating of his heart, and mine, keeping time. For the first time in eleven hundred years, I did not count.

Chapter 39

LEX

Poison Kiss

“And that’s Pendleton, going in on the forecheck, and here comes Volkov, and folks, I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but this is the most married rivalry in professional hockey!”

“Rick.”

“I’m just saying, Dave, those two are legally wed, and they’ve been trying to knock each other’s teeth out since the opening face-off.”

“It’s a professional respect.”

“It’s a domestic dispute! “

The crowd roared. I skated hard along the boards with my stick low and my eyes on the puck, grinning so wide it hurt. It was home ice in October, the first game of the season, and the Brookhaven Kings were playing the Novgorod Ravens in front of a sellout crowd, and the whole world smelled of popcorn and Zamboni fluid and cold.

I loved it. I loved every second. I’d been waiting for this since the last time we’d stood on the ice together.

They hadn’t taken it away from us.

That’s the thing nobody told me, in those first frightened weeks, lying awake in the guest room while the tabloids ran wild. That the league would look at us and blink. That some suit in a glass tower would call an emergency meeting to discuss what to do about “the Pendleton-Volkov situation” and reach the reasonable conclusion that a hockey team and a hockey team were, in fact, two different hockey teams. That there wasn’t a rule against it. That there never had been.

No one would accept two rivals being lovers and playing for the same team. That’s what I’d said, in my head, for years. I’d been wrong. It turned out nobody was asking us to play for the same team. We played against each other twice a season, sixty minutes of pure war, and then we went home to the same bed.