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But when he kissed her this time, it was softer.
He broke away from her, pain lancing his chest, and he turned and walked away, out onto the expansive balcony that ran from the nursery along the side of the estate. It overlooked that place where she usually lay out with Soriya. Where he usually stood over them and watched, but didn’t partake, because he held himself back.
And it was raining.
He looked back at her, and she stepped out onto the terrace with him.
“Why is it always raining?” he asked.
When he met her.
When she left him.
When she’d remembered.
“Maybe it’s trying to tell us something,” she said.
And she walked toward him, the sky truly broken open now, beginning to go from light to downpour.
But she didn’t flinch.
Instead, she put her hand on his face. “Maybe it’s trying to grow something new. That’s what rain does. It creates new life.”
He swept her up into his arms, lifting her up off of the balcony, and kissed her.
Kissed her without end, as the water washed them both clean. He carried her down those stairs of the balcony, to the place that he had watched her, but not joined her before. The place that he had held himself back from.
So much holding himself back.
She stripped his clothes from him, he from her.
And they were naked, down on the blanket that she kept there, raindrops sliding down their skin, as his hands skimmed over her body.
She was beautiful and wild, delicate and strong all at once.
She was everything in a way no one else ever had been.
And she had been from the beginning.
Krav was a person who had spent his life in isolation.
He had held onto a dream about where he was from. About his mother. But they were disconnected. He had visited her often, but they had never felt like mother and son. And in the end she was so ill he wasn’t even certain she knew it was him who was there.
And he had attended that funeral in that same isolation. Sitting in the front with everyone around him giving him a wide berth, because even if they were family in a distant sense, they didn’t know him.
He had been robbed of that. Not just his mother, but a community.
He had been brought to Italy where he hadn’t been given one. And yes, he had wild success.
Money. People flocked around him because of that. Because he had power.
Women wanted him because they thought he was handsome, but most of all because they thought he could give them something.
There were a great many men who didn’t look like him, who had any number of feminine acolytes because they could write a check and make the world’s problems seem that much smaller.
None of what he had, none of what he’d built had anything to do with him.
But Riot had been there. She had been with him. She had seen him.
