Page 134 of Night of Shadows

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Pause. The candles flicker. I tuck my hand under his again so I can keep looking at the ring.

I say, "And Eleni?"

He says, "Eleni."

"And maybe Cormac?"

He says, "God help us."

I laugh. The fourth, but mine. I say, "I want it to be a family place. Not just a place we go to be alone. The version of you that needed to be alone is gone. Let the version of you that is here meet that house properly."

He pulls me against him. He says, against my hair, "Okay."

Pause. Long pause. The clock reads 1:34 AM.

I say, "Lex?"

"Yes."

"You should bring the rest of your things from Elysium."

"I have very few things."

"Then bring those few things."

He says, "Okay."

I say, "This is your home now. Officially. Not as my bodyguard. Not as Nora's father by accident. As mine. As ours. The version of this where you have an apartment elsewhere is over."

He says, "I know."

"Good."

I sit up slightly. I kiss him. He kisses me back. The kiss is the quiet kiss of an engaged couple at 1:36 AM on the night they got engaged — not urgent and not performative but simply theirs.

When I pull back, his eyes are open. They are tired. They are warm. They are the eyes of Lex Konstantinos, the most dangerous man in Boston, sitting on a couch in a Brookline brownstone with his fiancée against his side, his daughter at his mother's apartment, his brothers all in his orbit, his mother's mother's ring on the woman he loves, and a wedding to plan.

He’s not been at peace in fifteen years.

He’s at peace now.

? ? ?

His phone buzzes.

I feel him register the buzz against his thigh through the fabric of his pants. He doesn’t move for a long second. Then he pulls the phone out. He looks at the screen.

He says, "Petrov."

"At 1:38 AM."

"At 1:38 AM."

He reads. His face doesn’t change. The Konstantinos face that has been on holiday since 8:54 PM doesn’t return entirely, but it tightens at the corners in the exact way it has tightened a hundred times in the manuscript of our marriage when something operational has crossed his screen.

He says, "Petrov has news."

"About what."

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