I huddle up against Sebastian in the back of the car. His heavy, warm arm around my shoulders is the only thing keeping me sane right now.
I can’t get the sight of my brother out of my mind—his handsome face burned so badly all down the right side, and even worse than that, the hatred in his eyes when he looked up at me. I never, never, never would have thought that he and I would find ourselves on opposite sides of a battle. But that was my father’s last act—to wedge between us, as he always tried to do when he was alive.
I saw his dead body lying in the street.
Unlike with Adrian, seeing my father bloody and battered raised no sympathy at all. I didn’t feel the relief I expected, either. Instead, it felt like closing a book. The end of him, at last.
I press my face against Sebastian’s shoulder. He smells of smoke and blood. Beneath that, I find the scent of his skin.
He strokes my hair gently, not caring how dirty or tangled it’s become.
“Where are you going?” he says to Callum, as the car makes a turn.
“The hospital,” Cal says. “Nero should be out of surgery soon. And it looks like you two might need a doctor as well . . .”
“I’m fine,” Sebastian says, stubbornly. I really doubt that’s the case. He had to lean on me heavily just to get to the car. His knee is injured again, I think.
Callum drives us over to Midtown Medical. He pauses, confused, when he sees that the entire road is cordoned off.
“What’s going on here?” he says.
“Something on that side of the street . . .” Aida says, peering out the passenger side window. “I can’t see what it is . . .”
“Someone fell off the roof of that apartment complex,” I tell them.
They all turn to stare at me.
“Who fell off?” Callum demands.
“Rodion,” I say, mostly to Seb.
“Ro—how do you . . .” he looks at me in confusion, and then I see both understanding and horror sweep over his face. “Yelena,” he says. “Were you up there?”
I nod, suddenly finding myself unable to speak.
“But how . . . why did you . . .”
I see him look back and forth from the apartment complex to the hospital, right across from one another, and I see the color bleach out of his face.
“Oh my god,” he says.
My heart is racing, as those moments up on the roof rush back to me all too vividly. The feeling of Rodion’s hand around my throat, and my feet dangling in the air as he carried me over to the ledge . . .
Callum and Aida can’t put the pieces together quite as well.
“Who’s Rodion?” Aida asks.
“He’s Yenin’s top lieutenant,” Sebastian explains. “He was here to kill Nero, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” I say, quietly.
“And you stopped him?” Aida says.
“You saved Nero’s life,” Sebastian says, looking at me in amazement.
“I meant to follow Adrian,” I admit to Seb. “That’s why I left this morning. I hoped to find my brother before . . .” I have to swallow back a sob. “Before anything could happen to him. I hoped I could convince him to leave. To abandon our father.”
Sebastian’s mouth is open. I can see that he understands the decision I made, here on this street, between my brother and his. This time I chose Sebastian’s family instead of my own. I did what I could to make up for my mistakes. But it was Adrian who paid the price.
Sebastian throws his arms around me and hugs me hard. A little too hard, quite honestly, because my shoulder is still burning and aching where Rodion hit it, opening up the stitches again. But I don’t care—I’d rather feel the pain, if it comes along with the warmth of his arms.
“Thank you,” Sebastian says, in my ear.
“How did you do it?” Aida asks, curiously. “Did you knock him over the ledge? Did you shoot him?”
Seeing me wince, Sebastian says, “Leave her alone if she doesn’t want to talk about it.”
I still feel like I owe Aida a hell of a lot for forgiving me so easily, so I answer anyway.
“I shot him,” I say. “But it was close. It was almost me that went over the edge.”
I can see the fear in Sebastian’s face. He holds me tighter than ever, as if the fight on the roof is something he can still protect me from now, and not something finished and in the past.
“I can’t fucking believe that,” he says. “I mean, I guess I can. I’ve seen you when you’re mad. But Jesus Christ Yelena, he’s a fucking ogre . . .”
“It wasn’t my favorite afternoon,” I say.
As we enter the hospital, the nurse seems highly suspicious that we’re just there as visitors, considering the state of us all. Even Callum and Aida look disheveled and dirty, despite the fact that we arrived when the fighting was almost over.
Reluctantly, the nurse gives us our badges and lets us go up to the top floor. Two of Sebastian’s men are guarding the elevator and the hallway. The taller one tells Seb, “He’s out of surgery. He’s in the room with Camille.”
We all hurry down the hall, trying to be quiet in case Nero is still asleep.
But when we peek in the door, he’s sitting up in bed, pale and thin, but surprisingly alert.
“Why do you all look worse than I do?” he says.
“Yenin’s dead,” Seb says, by way of explanation. “He burned the house down.”
“Our house?” Nero says.
“Yeah,” Seb nods. “Sorry. I kind of let him.”
“Well, fuck,” Nero says.
He sounds stunned and disbelieving, which I can understand, since that house had been in their family a hundred years. It is baffling that something that stood so long could be destroyed in a matter of hours.
“Did you at least move my cars?” Nero asks.
“No,” Seb winces.
Nero glowers at him, and I see that his temper is still alive and well, however weak his body might be.
Camille squeezes Nero’s thigh through the bedding. “It’s alright,” she says. “Your favorites are at our shop.”
“Some people died too,” Callum reminds him.
Nero shrugs, not caring nearly as much about that. “People are more common than a 1930 Indian Scout Motorcycle.” But after a moment, his curiosity gets the better of him. “Who’s dead?” he asks.
“Bosco Bianchi, for one,” Seb says.
“Pfft,” Nero snorts. “He’s barely worth a gasket.”
I’m lurking in the doorway, embarrassed and thinking I shouldn’t be here. I doubt Nero wants to see me, or Camille either.
Before I can think of an excuse to sneak out, Nero fixes me with his sharp gray eyes and says, “Don’t be so twitchy—if your dad’s dead then we can all relax.”
“I’m really sorry—” I begin, but he waves me off.
“Ah, save it. Your wedding did suck ass, though, just so you know. I’m glad I only got you the two-slice toaster and not the four.”
Aida snorts, and I see that this is Nero’s idea of a joke. Or perhaps his idea of forgiveness. Either way, I’ll take it.
Camille looks utterly exhausted from all her hours at the hospital, but she’s smiling while she rests her chin on her palm, leaning against Nero’s bed. She’s obviously thrilled to have him fully awake and talking like this—like what I assume is his usual self.
“We can’t stay long,” Cal says. “We left Miles at my parents’ house.”
“If we don’t get back soon, Imogen will probably have bought him twenty more outfits and tried to cut his hair,” Aida says.
“It is a little crazy,” Cal says.
“He’s a baby,” Aida rolls her eyes. “Just be glad he’s not bald as an egg like you were ‘till you were three years old.”
“It grew in eventually,” Cal says, rubbing his head self-consciously.
“Anyway, goodbye all,” Aida says, giving us a little wave. “Glad you’re alive, big brother.”
“Me, too,” Nero says. He’s looking at Camille as he answers, not at Aida.
“We’d better go, too,” Seb says.
We head back down to the elevator, letting Callum and Aida go on ahead of us because Sebastian and I are both stiff and slow. On the way out, Seb bribes a PA to take a look at my shoulder. For $600, the guy puts a couple more stitches in the wound, then slips me an extra dose of antibiotics and a couple sample packets of painkillers.
Whatever he gave me, it takes effect almost immediately. I feel warm and relaxed, and the aching of my shoulder dies down to a gentle twinge. Seb swallows a couple himself, so he won’t have to lean on me so heavily to walk.
By the time we’ve hobbled a few blocks down from the hospital, so we can catch an Uber where the road isn’t blocked off any longer, all the lights in the buildings look bright and twinkly. A breeze is blowing in from the lake, making the air smell clean and fresh.
Sebastian has his arm around me.
“Should we take a car back to our apartment?” he asks me.
I hadn’t even thought about where we would go. We can’t go back to Sebastian’s family home, obviously. There’s no way in hell I’d go to my father’s house. So it makes sense that we’d go where we were meant to go directly after our wedding: to the beautiful loft that Seb and I picked out together, when nothing awful had happened yet, when our future seemed bright and full of promise.
I want to go there now, more than anything.
I want to recover that feeling that everything will be alright. That Sebastian and I can build a life together, the two of us, and shape it to be whatever we want.
He’s watching my face closely.
He’s not just asking where we should sleep tonight. He’s asking if we can try again—if we can try to bring that dream to reality, to put the train back on the tracks.
“Yes,” I tell him. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
Sebastian stops on the sidewalk. He grabs me and he kisses me.
I can taste the smoke on his lips. It’s not unpleasant.
Fire doesn’t always mean death and destruction. Sometimes it clears away the old and rotten brush so that new things can grow.
We take the Uber back to our apartment building.
It seems like forever since we picked this place out together, and sent over the few furnishings that we had time to purchase.
When we open the door, it smells clean and new inside, not like Sebastian or me. It’s antiseptic and anonymous—no hint of his soap or cologne, or of my favorite brand of coffee beans.
I barely recognize the gleaming modern kitchen and the wide-open living room with no couch, only the beautiful piano that Enzo gave me as his last gift.
It’s not home yet.
But it will be. It will be very soon.
Every hour we spend here will imprint a little more of our personalities on this space. We’ll laugh and talk here, building memories and experiences.
“I should have carried you over the threshold,” Seb says.
“No offense my love, but you can hardly carry yourself at the moment,” I say.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of energy left,” he says, with a half-smile. “After all . . . technically we’re still on our honeymoon.”
That smile makes him look boyish again, and ridiculously handsome. He looks like the man who tried to save me from a kidnapper. The one who beat me at pool, and was too much of a gentleman to take his prize.
Grabbing his hand, I pull him toward the bedroom.
Carefully, gently, we strip off each other’s clothes. We shower together, taking turns scrubbing the blood and mud and smoke off each other’s skin. It’s hard to tell what’s dirt and what’s bruises. Each of us is cut and battered to a ridiculous degree, all over our bodies.
It doesn’t matter, though. It’s all evidence of what we went through to be together. In a strange way it makes me happy. Because if none of that could kill us, if none of that could tear us apart, then nothing can.
When we’re completely clean and still slightly damp, we roll onto the bed, onto crisp new sheets that have never yet been slept on.
Sebastian lays on his stomach between my legs. He licks my pussy with long, slow strokes. His mouth feels incredibly warm, and his lips and tongue are soft, since he just shaved his face in the shower.
I lay back against the pillow, feeling like I’m floating and drifting along, like I’m half in this world and half out of it.
The other day I needed rough sex, I craved it, I couldn’t get enough of it. And today I need this gentleness, this care.
Sebastian always knows what I need. He already seems to know my body better than I do. He touches me better than I could touch myself, sending surge after surge of pleasure up through my belly and down through my legs.
The more he touches me, the more sensitive I become. My pussy is throbbing. I can feel every millimeter of skin, every nerve ending igniting in response to his tongue.
The sensation rises to such a fever pitch that I hardly realize it when I start to cum. I sink down into an orgasm that is deep, and sensual, and seems to go on forever.
Sebastian keeps lapping away at my clit, not speeding up or slowing down, just dragging out the climax as long as possible.
When it’s finally over, he climbs on top of me and thrusts inside me, his cock already hard from the arousal of eating me out.
I’m so swollen and sensitive that the thrusts are wildly intense, even though he’s being careful. After a few minutes I can tell that our position is putting too much pressure on his knee, so I climb on top of him instead, letting him take his turn laying back against the pillows while I ride him.
The moonlight is streaming in through the thin curtains, highlighting every line and curve of Sebastian’s face. His eyes look more gold than brown, intent and serious as he looks up at me.
I slowly roll my hips, taking long strokes up and down on his cock. He reaches up to caress my breasts, then sits up on the pillow so he can take one in his mouth and suckle while I ride him.
I think he might be obsessed with my tits, because he’s constantly touching or sucking on them while we fuck. I’m becoming addicted in turn. Every time he does it, they’re more and more sensitive, and that sensation is becoming linked to how good his cock feels inside of me.
Like any good athlete, Sebastian is ridiculously coordinated. He can suck my tits and fuck me and finger my ass all at the same time. Having so many erogenous zones stimulated simultaneously is—simply put—fucking phenomenal.
It makes my whole body thrum with pleasure. It makes me greedy and drunk with lust. I can already feel another orgasm building. I try to slow my pace so that I can ride him longer—it all feels so good that I don’t even want to cum, I just want to keep doing exactly what we’re doing.
But there’s no holding it back.
I throw my head back and I cry out, my pussy clenched tight around his cock, clenching and squeezing every inch of his shaft.
Sebastian grabs my hips hard, his fingers digging into my ass-cheeks. He thrusts up into me, his cock erupting. Greedily I keep riding, wanting all of his cum inside me, every drop. I love how his orgasm triggers mine, and mine triggers his. For each of us, there’s nothing more erotic than making the other person cum.
When we’re finished, we lay side by side on the bed, our long legs tangled up together, and my face pressed up against his neck. Every breath I take fills my lungs with his scent.
Today was the worst day of my life in some ways. In others, it was the best.
Because I’m finally home with my husband. We’re sleeping in our own bed for the very first time.
I hope we’ll have thousands more nights like this, until we’re gray and old. I hope to spend my last night on earth wrapped up in his arms.
As I’m drifting off, Sebastian says, “It’s you and me now, Yelena. Thank you for saving my brother today. But I want you to know . . . your safety is more important to me than anyone’s. I love you more than anyone. I’ll love you and protect you and adore you all our lives. I’ll never stop.”
“I’ll never let you down again,” I tell him. “I’ll never be selfish, or keep anything from you. You’re everything to me Sebastian. I’ll show you that, every minute of every day.”
“I know you will,” he says, kissing me softly where my face meets my ear.
I lift my chin so he can kiss my lips as well.
