He kisses me. Soft, long, full of every word he couldn't say for eight months and is saying now with his mouth and his hands and his body still warm against mine.
"Whatever comes next," I say against his lips, "we face it together. No sending me away. No decisions without me. Together."
"Together."
The word seals itself between us. A vow more binding than the one we made at St. Demetrios.
I close my eyes. His hand traces circles on my stomach. His heartbeat slows beneath my ear. The penthouse is quiet. The city glows. Somewhere Viktor Reznikov is planning his next move and somewhere Elena Drakos's empty chair is waiting to tell a story and somewhere the war is sharpening itself for what comes next.
But here. In this bed. In this man's arms. There is only this.
Chapter 24
Siobhan
The Secret
* * *
The first morning, I blame the oysters from Elena's lunch two days ago.
I make it to the bathroom before Nico wakes. Knees on the marble, forehead against the toilet seat, body convulsing with a violence that feels disproportionate to anything I've eaten. The retching is loud and raw and completely beyond my control. My hands shake on the porcelain. My stomach empties in waves that leave me gasping, hollow, sweat beading along my hairline.
When it passes, I flush. Brush my teeth. Rinse with mouthwash. Study my face in the mirror: pale, damp, eyes too bright. I look like a woman recovering from a bar fight, not a quiet night in bed with her husband.
I go back. Nico is still asleep, one arm slung across my side of the mattress. I slide beneath it, and his hand finds my hip automatically, pulling me into the collarbone hollow. His breathing doesn't change. I press my face into his chest and will my stomach to settle.
Stress. The war, the back room at Elysium, blood on my lips. The body processes trauma physically. I've told clients thisa hundred times. I wrote a Ward Risk Advisory white paper on crisis-related physiological response. Stress.
The second morning, stress becomes a thinner explanation.
Same time. Same violence. I barely make it, catching myself on the doorframe, dropping to my knees hard enough to bruise. Nico is in the shower. I can hear the water through the wall, which means he can't hear me, which means the retching and the gasping and the animal sound I make when my stomach contracts around nothing are mine alone. I crouch on the cold marble with my hair stuck to my face and my body doing things entirely without my permission and I think: this isn't stress.
I brush my teeth twice. Use concealer under my eyes. He notices anyway.
"You okay?"
"Fine. Didn't sleep well."
He studies me over his coffee. The tactical assessment. I hold his gaze the way I've held it since the first day in his office: level, steady, giving nothing away. He accepts it. Why wouldn't he? I've never lied to him before.
The third morning, I don't make it to the bathroom.
Nico is in the shower again. I'm at the kitchen island with my laptop, a client email half-drafted, coffee untouched because the smell of it — the smell I've loved since I was sixteen, the smell that used to be the first good thing about any morning — turns my stomach inside out. I lunge for the kitchen sink and throw up so hard my ribs ache. I run the tap to cover the sound and grip the counter and stare at my hands on the granite and the thought I've been pushing into the dark corners of my mind for two days walks into the light and sits down.
I'm late.
Not a day late. Not the kind of late that stress explains. Weeks late. My last period was before the wedding. Before the consummation. Before the wall and the floor and the bed andevery night since when we fell asleep tangled together without a single thought about consequences because we were too consumed by the war and each other to think about anything beyond surviving until morning.
I track everything. Client deadlines. Alliance movements. Viktor's pattern of escalation. The rotation schedule of Nico's security detail. I built a consulting firm on the principle that you see the crisis before it arrives. And I missed THIS. The most basic biological math a woman can do, and I missed it because I was busy assessing external threats while the most significant variable in my life was multiplying inside me.
I rinse the sink. Dry my hands. Open the calendar on my phone and count backward with the methodical precision of a woman running an assessment on her own body. The wall. Day nineteen. Skin to skin. No barrier. Nothing between us. The math is clean and damning: approximately eleven days.
I need a test.
Elena called yesterday. She missed the Elysium event — family obligation, her father needed her in New York, she was apologetic in the way that means she either couldn't get out of it or didn't want to. We rescheduled our dinner to lunch. Today. A restaurant in Back Bay that she suggested.
A restaurant with a bathroom. And a pharmacy two blocks east.