Once there, she spends way too much time trying to get all the blood out from underneath her fingernails in the shower, and he crashes on her bed hard, fast asleep. By the time she's out of the shower, his shoulder is back in the socket and the wheezing is gone from his breath.
She spends a long time staring at him, before eventually crawling into bed and attempting to close her eyes.
Epilogue
She awakens to his arms tightening around her, and it's still dark out.
Careful not to elbow his wound, she twists to face him. His eyes are screwed tightly shut, and he breathes hard, as if awoken from a nightmare.
"Hey," she whispers, and his eyes fly open, cool and dark in the room.
"Hi," he says, his voice raspy.
They stare at each other in the dim room, and, for some reason she cannot divine, her heart is pounding. "Sorry I killed your brother," she says, almost impulsive.
A line in his face spasms, then smoothes out. "It's...Vanya hasn't been a brother to me for a long time."
"So it was Vanya that I stabbed?"
His eyebrows flash upwards, getting lost in his messy long hair. "You couldn't tell." It's a statement, not a question. "You did that, and you couldn't tell."
"I couldn't tell."
He ducks his head down, then breathes out, hard. "I don't think...I don't think they could do anything now." He marvels, and softly, ever so softly touching her cheek. "Well," he equivocates, "well not in the...ruling the world thing. Pieter...he'll unhinge."
Careful, she leans forward and presses her lips against his. "So all that nightmare, all the running, it's over?"
He leans into the kiss. "I think so," he mumbles against her lips. "I think so."
He leaves shortly after, with a promise to make sure they are safe and to come back as soon as he could.
She doesn't see him for two weeks, but it's an okay two weeks. Katya gets out of the hospital, and Aimes goes on two separate business trips.
And they're like a breath of fresh air. There's no looming doom, there's no threat from outside forces, and she gets to chat with librarians about technology.
After one small convention in Arizona, she's packing up her presentation supplies and chatting with a grad student volunteer, when the back of her neck starts to prickle. And, of course, she's not one to jump to look up, but she can feel a smile start to spread across her face as she finishes with the volunteer and bids him on his way.
Sure enough, casually leaning in the corner and keeping an eye on the clearing out librarians, Iakov stands. His stance is loose, more relaxed than she's ever seen him outside of his smarmy acting to waitresses.
He glances at her, and matches her smile, as the last librarian leaves. "So," he drawls, hand tracing out a pattern on the small desk. "You busy after this?"
She shakes her head, and her cheeks hurt from grinning so much. "This was my last of the day."
He smiles back at her, then offers her his arm. "Care to go somewhere else?"
Epilogue
EPILOGUE #2
Pieter waits.
A part of him, the part slashed away and left ragged and growing cold, knows that things cannot be the same.
So he holes himself up. Takes a long forgotten room in the middle of the Siberian wasteland, and waits.
Waits for what, he doesn't know, with only a vague sense of something needing to return. Some purpose gone, gone with the knife in his twin and blood on the floor.
And nothing happens.
But in the cooled and dead side of him, something else builds up. An anger, cold and unyielding like the ice he grew around.
For he cannot rule, not without his twin.
But that does not mean that he can't ruin.
END
Also by Alessa Winters
A Ghost of Her Own
Follow her on twitter at @writerLyn
Visit her website at: https://wintersalessa.wixsite.com/website
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