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“I’m not going to argue with that. It still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
She clapped me on the arm. “Did you think my little brother, a fucking Volkov, would be allowed to get married without me first approving of his woman?”
I would pay good money to see Harlow square off against my sister, but, “I’m a Kincaid,” is what I told her firmly.
“Fignya,” she spat, and I didn’t need to understand Russian to get the gist. “You are a Volkov.”
“The point is fucking moot. We have a long road ahead of us before anyone’s getting married.” I didn’t bother mentioning at that point that there was still a very real chance that Harlow would be forced to marry Apollo.
“So I hear. How can I help?”
Is that why she was here? To help? I may as well send her straight home now.
“Help?” I scoffed. “Unless you can fuck up centuries of misogynistic arseholes’ laws, you can’t.”
She winked at me. “Da zdravstvuyet revolyutsiya,” she said, and I blinked slowly in reminder that I didn’t speak Russian. “Long live the revolution, little brother.”
MEN & MONSTERS: Harlow Trilogy Book 3 coming soon
MORNINGSTAR: Book 4: Valen’s POV coming soon
Epilogue 2: Apollo
I was a broken, fractured version of the man, the God, I used to be. One fiery woman had brought me to my knees and turned my world upside down and inside out.
She’d left me a hollow carcass of a man, disconnected from his kingdom and all those who still worshipped in it. I was left not knowing who I was, who I wanted to be, who I could be. It felt like everything I’d ever been told was a lie, and the only person I could trust was the woman who’d secured my downfall.
Because Harlow Vanguard had ruined me.
I’d failed her.
I’d failed her. I’d failed me. I’d failed our parents.
My father was yet to know about the monumental failure, but hers knew all about it and I knew my esteem had somehow both tanked and soared in his eyes. I lost all respect in every way that counted for a member of the Nameless. But in the eyes of a father, he could see the amends I was willing to make, and he appreciated that. It was too bad that our world were Nameless members first and fathers second.
I didn’t know how long it would take to get Harlow the happy ending she deserved, but I would do everything in my power to make sure she got it. Even if that meant I had to spend the foreseeable future pretending I wasn’t in love with the woman pretending to be my fiancée.
They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, and it was true in my case. Or at least it took losing what I had to realise what it meant to me. What I’d dismissed as something far more platonic very quickly became anything but. While Harlow was busy comparing me to a brother, everything in me ached for her, for some reparations to the mess I made.
But the only reparations I could make now was to make sure that she and my closest friend lived their happily ever after. Or at least their happy for now. Even if it killed me inside. But it was a small price to pay and I knew, without a shred of doubt, that it was exactly how Valk had felt for the past few months. Maybe even longer.
So, I wore my mask, and I played my part to perfection. We’d only been practising for the previous four years. It was second nature by now. Even as I was crumbling to dust on the inside. Even as everything that had made up Apollo Callahan seemed to have been carved out of me and I wasn’t sure how to start replacing it, or what to replace it with.
The one thing that made it bearable was something I’d never have seen coming in a million years.
No strings.
No contract.
Just pleasure.
Desire.
Fun.
An unlikely friendship with spectacular benefits I’d never even imagined possible.
It was new territory.
New Apollo. New territory.
Between her and Harlow, I was sure that I’d be able to rebuild myself as a man not just they but I could be proud of. It wouldn’t be easy, not while I’m fighting for my throne, the people I love, and preparing to unleash full-scale war on my own father. But who said the high road was the easy road?
“Come back to bed, Apollo,” came the grumbled murmur from behind me.
I looked back to her and felt my heart soften. I wouldn’t fall into the trap of mistaking friendship and love again, but she had the power to make me forget where the line between lust and hate ran. Or at the very least, friendship and lust.
