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“Would you have been happy like that?” I ask him, my voice low.
He’s quiet for a moment, breathing in slowly while he gathers his thoughts.
“I thought I could be,” he admits after a while. “I thought that was what I wanted. Or at least, I thought I would be content like that. No one ever made me want anything different. Until you. You made me feel things that I’d never felt before for anyone.”
“I still say I’m not that special,” I mumble.
“You are though.” He squeezes my hand. “No one else has ever gotten close, butterfly. No one else has ever made mewantbefore. I saw how easy things were between you and my brothers, and I was so sure that it was never going to be like that for us. That I would want you—need you—and never be able to cross the gap. Never be able to even touch you the way I wanted to, without it being a horrible thing that made you realize how broken I am.”
“You’re not—”
He smiles, cutting me off as his thumb rubs gently over my knuckles. “I know that now. Thanks to you. Because yousawme, and you never once shied away. You kept trying, even when I didn’t give you a reason to.”
“The thought of being close to you was reason enough,” I whisper. “I just wanted that so badly. You made me feel like I wasn’t alone, even in the times I felt most lost and afraid.” More tears well in my eyes, and I blink a few times, letting them fall. “Every time we talked, even in the early days when it was just by text, I felt better. You filled up a part of my heart that had always been empty, and the more full it got, the more I felt the bad shit being chipped away. I just wanted more and more of that.”
He swallows, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, his blue eyes find mine as if he never wants to look anywhere else.
“I wanted to be that for you,” he says softly. “I wanted to help, even though I never felt like I knew how.”
“You did. You helped so much.”
I pause, holding on to this moment as a bubble seems to surround us on the bed. Part of me wants to pull back so that I can look him in the eyes more easily, but another, bigger part of me can’t stand the idea of losing this connection with him right now. So I stay right where I am, letting the warmth of his palm and the light pressure of his forehead against mine ground me.
“I love you, Vic,” I say, blinking again because I don’t want my freely flowing tears to obscure my view of his beautiful eyes. “I love you so much. I love that you let me in and let me see you—even the parts of you that you thought would scare me away. I love that you trust me to push you a little. I love that you work so hard to make sure we’re all safe, and that you never stop trying. I love your organizational systems, and that we both feel the same way about peanut butter.”
That last bit makes him chuckle, and he closes his eyes again, like he’s savoring my words.
“I should have known right then that there was no way I could keep myself from falling for you,” he says, something warm and fond in his voice. “I’ve never bonded over peanut butter with anyone else before.”
“Of course not. Because your brothers are both crunchy peanut butter loving heathens,” I murmur back, and he laughs again.
It’s funny that we’re barely touching, only our foreheads and our linked fingers, but this moment feels even deeper than the first time we had sex. It’s so intimate, like we’re baring our souls to each other and they’re reaching out to touch as well.
“You saved me too,” I whisper to him after a beat of silence. “When I was… when Troy had me, I just kept thinking of all of you. Thinking about how Malice said I was strong and how Ransom told me I could do anything and how you made me feel grounded. It kept me sane in there, when everything was so bad.”
Vic’s fingers spasm a little around mine, and there’s something deep and unreadable in his eyes.
“What did you think about?” he asks.
“I had such clear images of you counting and measuring your breathing. When I was trying not to panic or go insane in there, I would do that. It made me feel closer to you, and it kept my head clear.”
I don’t go into more detail than that. The last thing I want right now is to start thinking about being locked in that little crawl space under the floor in Troy’s house. My heart rate speeds up just thinking about it, and as if he knows, Vic squeezes my hand again. His thumb resumes its slow and steady movement over the backs of my knuckles, and the touch is soothing, grounding me in this moment.
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding and breathe in Vic’s familiar scent, reminding myself all over again that I’m safe now. He has me.
“I hate that you needed to use any of the coping tools I use.”
Vic’s voice is heavy, and for a second, I can so clearly pick up on the fact that he and Malice are twins. Malice keeps his rage closer to the surface, but Vic has it in him too—and they’ll both gladly unleash it on anyone who hurts someone they love.
“I’m glad we could be there for you,” he adds. “Even when we weren’t there physically. We’re always going to be there for you. I hope you know that. No matter what it takes.”
“I know.”
The certainty of it is soothing. Almost everyone I’ve ever had in my life has let me down in the end, abandoning me or betraying me to serve their own ends. But the Voronin brothers will never do that. The bond we share is deeper than that, and it feels good to have one thing in my life that I can trust implicitly.
We stay like that for a moment longer, just breathing each other in, soaking up the closeness. It feels like we’re breathing in tandem, our hearts on the same rhythm. Like we’re so in sync that nothing in the world could break us apart.
Even when we finally move away from each other, straightening up and letting go of each other’s hands, that connection remains, tethering us like an invisible cord.
