Page 57 of Curvy Sold Mate

“You held it,” Viktor said.

“I held it.” Damian’s voice carried something it hadn’t carried when he’d arrived at the compound two weeks ago—a gravity that sat beneath the lightness, not replacing it but grounding it, the way ballast grounded a ship without changing the shape of its hull. “And I want to keep holding it. If you’ll let me.”

“Damian—”

“I mean it. I know I’ve been the one who leaves. I know that’s what you think of when you think of me—the brother who walked out, who chose easy over hard, who let you carry everything because carrying was your job and watching you carry it was easier than picking anything up myself.”

He set the mug on the bench between them. “I’m done with that. I don’t know what staying looks like, because I’ve never done it for longer than three months, and I’m going to get it wrong, and I’m going to need you to tell me when I’m getting it wrong, because you’re the only person I know who tells the truth without softening it, and I need the truth more than I need the softening.”

The garden held the words. The afternoon light had shifted, the shadows lengthening across the stone bench, and the compound moved around them in the sounds of repair and recovery—hammering from the eastern barracks, the low murmur of wolves on patrol changeover, the distant clatter of Elena’s kitchen preparing the evening meal.

“Stay,” Viktor said, and the word came out with the same weight it had carried the first time he’d said it, earlier that week, except this time the weight was lighter—carried by two instead of one, the asking and the answering happening simultaneously, the distance between the brothers closing by the width of a word that meant more than its single syllable contained.

“I’ll stay,” Damian said. The grin that crossed his face was the wide, unguarded version, the full-wattage smile that Viktor had missed for four years without ever admitting it was missing. The admission sat in his chest beside everything else he was learning to hold without sealing it shut.

He found Olivia in the kitchen twenty minutes later. She was at the counter with flour on her hands, helping Elena with the bread that fed the compound, her sleeves rolled to her elbows and her hair twisted up with a pencil—the same pencil she’d used in the archive, the same pencil she’d chewed the end of while reading patrol reports, repurposed now for the domestic work of holding her hair while she kneaded dough with the focused, rhythmic pressure of a woman whose hands needed occupation while her mind ran its calculations.

She looked up when he entered, and her face did the thing it had been doing for days—the softening, the slight release of the muscles around her eyes, the involuntary welcome that she’d stopped trying to suppress and he’d stopped pretending not to see.

“You smell like rosemary,” she said.

“I was in the garden.”

“With Damian?”

“He’s staying.”

Her hands paused in the dough. The flour settled on the counter in a fine white dust, and she looked at him across the kitchen with an expression that carried more than the news warranted—the recognition that Viktor had asked for something, that the asking had been heard, that the sealed room he’d kept his family in was opening alongside all the others.

“Good,” she said, and the word was simple and complete, and she went back to the dough, and he made coffee, and the kitchen held them in the quiet, functional warmth of two people who had learned to share a room without negotiating the distance, because the distance had closed, and the closing was the best thing either of them had ever built.

Epilogue - Olivia

Two weeks after the battle, Olivia woke to Viktor’s mouth on the inside of her thigh. The first coherent thought she had was that his sense of timing had improved dramatically since the days when his idea of a morning greeting was a monosyllable and a cup of black coffee.

“What time is it?” she managed, and her voice came out wrecked, which was his fault, because his tongue was doing something that made the clock irrelevant.

“Early.” His breath against her skin. His hand on her hip, thumb stroking the soft curve where her waist met her stomach, and the combination of his attention and his complete disregard for reasonable waking hours sent a pulse of heat through her that liquefied what remained of her higher brain function.

“Viktor, I have a meeting with Caitlynn at—oh God—at two—”

“It’s six.”

“Then you have eight hours to explain yourself,” she said, and then his mouth moved higher, and she stopped talking, and the morning broke open around them.

His tongue found the exact pressure and rhythm that undid her, and he held it there with the patience of a man who had once drawn a ward overlay by hand at three in the morning and had no intention of rushing this either.

She came with her hand fisted in his hair and his name broken into syllables between her teeth. He worked her through the aftershocks until she was boneless and buzzing. Then he kissed the inside of her knee and crawled up her body with an expression that suggested he was very pleased with himself, which was infuriating and justified in equal measure.

“Come here,” she said, and pulled him up, and kissed the taste of herself from his mouth, and reached between them and wrapped her hand around him, and the sound he made against her lips—low, involuntary, the groan of a man whose composure had just been relocated to her palm—was the best sound she’d heard all week.

She stroked him slowly, watching his face, the way his jaw clenched and released, the way his eyes closed and then opened again because he wanted to see her, because looking at her while she touched him had become the thing he reached for instead of the thing he flinched from, and the distance between those two responses was the entire length of what had changed between them.

“Olivia,” he said, her name like a prayer on his lips before he started moving. She moved with him—the rhythm between them easy now. She pressed her forehead to his and breathed his air and felt the bond between them carrying everything without strain, wide open, nothing held back.

“Harder,” she muttered against his mouth, and he gave it to her, and she arched up into him, and her nails found the healing scratches on his back. He hissed and drove deeper, and she laughed, breathless, wicked, because she’d discovered three days ago that the sound she made when she laughed during sex rendered Viktor approximately useless for four seconds, during which his rhythm stuttered and his eyes went dark, and his hips snapped forward involuntarily, and she was not above using this information strategically.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” he said, his voice ragged.