This man. I had stopped seeking to understand him. Loving him was enough and it always had been.
Besides, I had places of my own to be.
With Cam safe on the compound in a meeting I did not care to attend, I stole his car and drove north-east out of Devon and all the way to London.
I parked on the street outside a townhouse that screamed wealth and taste. Forwent the front door in favour of a skylight. Broad daylight home invasions were my favourite, and I would never grow tired of the shock on my cousin’s face as I landed at his feet.
Or his long-suffering sigh. “Did you bring my car?”
“No.”
“My childhood pocketknife?”
“No.”
Amusement danced in Sacha’s hazel eyes. Sacha Ivanov-Gray. “Jonah is beginning to believe these things never existed.”
“Maybe they didn’t.”
“I can live with that.” Sacha studied me from where he drank coffee at his marble kitchen counter. “I would ask if you are well, but I know you are.”
“How?” I asked the question because I liked how the answer made me feel.
“Cam told me when I spoke to him yesterday. He sounded well too. You are being nice to him, I trust?”
“Sometimes.”
“You would like coffee?”
“No.”
“And your other lover?” Sacha never said Saint’s name—he wouldn’t until they’d met. “How is he?”
I searched for the words to describe Saint as I’d last seen him, treading barefoot on dew-damp grass, studying every branch and needle of the tree he’d planted in the dead of night, his forest-green gaze alive with intelligence and empathy you could not teach. “He is everything.”
Sacha smiled. “Jonah is that to me. And he left you something, when I said you might come. Wait there. I will know if you move.”
He would not, but I obeyed anyway. Sacha and I had not grown up close, but until Cam, he had been the only kindness I’d ever known.
Sacha eased from his stool with sinuous grace and left the kitchen. He came back with a gold-wrapped gift and stood close enough that I smelled coffee and the cigarettes he only smoked when Jonah wasn’t around. “I do not know what it is. Just that he wanted you to have it.”
“I have something for you too.”
Sacha arched a brow.
I removed an unwrapped object from my pocket and placed it on the counter—a crystal tumbler I’d stolen from this place when he’d first moved in. “It does not match anything in Cam’s house.”
“Camdoes not seem like the kind of man to care about such things.”
He wasn’t.
Neither was Saint.
And my cousin was sharp enough to interpret what I was trying to say.
He smiled again. “When I think of you—all three of you, it is nice to know you are happy. You deserve it, Alyosha.”
So did Sacha. He had survived as many unfathomable things as the family I chose. And I loved him as much.