No! I just want to help Azazel free his people, I told myself. “Azazel said that you could see the future. Is all that true then?”

Loki opened his eyes, green as malachite and devoid of focus. “I see the paths. Is my brother free already?”

“Yes.”

“Does he know how this will end?”

“I don’t think he cares much, so long as it doesn’t end like this.” I gestured at the cave around us, though I could see nothing in the darkness.

“What about you, Daughter of Earth? Don’t you care what happens to the world?”

Me? Go to hell, Samyaza. I have enough guilt on my conscience; I can’t carry any more. “Well, I don’t believe in predestination. But supposing I did, then how could I fight it?”

He laughed, his torn lips weeping blood.

But I opened my eyes and saw stars, and trees, and moonlight on snow. I’d wandered away from the lodge, it seemed, into the untracked wooded area further along the shore. Everything seemed to glow blue under that moon, and the trees themselves were so bowed by snow that they looked like icing-sugar lumps on a Christmas cake. The muffled silence was profound. I turned in a circle, huffing out ice crystals and watching them rise into the still air. Then I looked down at myself.

I was bootless and naked, almost knee-deep in a drift. For once my creamy Serbian skin looked dark, just in contrast to that glimmer. I still had my panties in my right hand, but they seemed purposeless so I tossed them away with an uncomprehending laugh, starlight fizzling against my bare flesh. I shook out my hands and lifted my arms to the moon, feeling its glare lap me like a cold tongue. Every particle of my flesh was filled with its glow.

Without fanfare, a shimmer of green flowed in a skein across the heavens. I caught my breath as it widened, dancing. It looked like a transparent veil undulating across the jeweled stars, and it made the faintest of whispering, crackling noises.

My hair unwound itself from its braid and spread out on the air, a dark cloud.

“Milja?” It was Egan’s voice, all resonance flattened by the snow. “Are you okay?”

“I’m just fine! Over here! Look at the aurora!”

He waded into sight between the small trees, looking around himself in confusion; up at the laden branches, down at his hands. “I can see every flake,” he said wonderingly. “I could see where you danced in the snow. Three thousand, two hundred and eight steps; that’s how many you took here.” He finally caught sight of me properly. “Ah.”

I came to him through the snow, feeling the squeak of its compression beneath my bare soles. He was muffled up in all his outdoor gear, and I recognized my discarded clothes in his gloved hand.

“You’re not cold then?” he said faintly.

“I’m hot,” I giggled, pulling the garments out of his hand and dropping them aside, then catching his gloves and drawing them off to discard too. I put his hands on my waist so that he could share my body-heat; they felt cool to me.

“I can count your eyelashes,” he whispered. His pupils were hugely dilated, making his eyes look black and empty.

“I’m impressed,” I laughed, drawing his hand up to cup my bare breast, where it belonged. “My eyes aren’t even down there.”

He made a valiant effort to lift his gaze back to my face, but failed. He seemed hypnotized by the sight of my naked body, by the in-curve of my waist and the swell of my breasts. “Oh God. That mead was spiked. There was something in it—I don’t know what.”

“Angel blood.” I quivered as his fingertips found my erect nipple. “It’s made with blood.”

“Ah. Kvasir. Shite. What’s it doing to us?”

“Don’t worry.” I’d been bodily possessed by Azazel back in Ethiopia; I knew how disoriented Egan must feel. I stretched up to brush my face against his, and the press of my body forced him to move his hands around to my back and my ass, skin gliding over skin, testing the slopes and curves like they were snow mounds he dare not deface. “Just enjoy.”

He made a broken noise in his throat, but his hands were everywhere.

I brushed my cheek against his, teasing his lips with the promise of my own. His frozen breath had formed a crust of rime on his stubbled jaw and I kissed it away.

“Milja.” The word was thick with desire. “No.”

“Don’t you like it?” Pouting, I pulled away just enough to taunt him and he captured my nipple instantly between two knuckles, the tug making sure I could retreat no further. A whimper of pleasure escaped my lips.

“Don’t,” he warned.

“Don’t what?” I stoked my fingers across his cold-parched lips, and the memory of Loki’s torn ones rose out of the depths to intoxicate me.

“Don’t make me…” Egan caught my flowing hair, his touch cold on the back of my scalp and hot all the way down to my aching core. “Christ, you’re beautiful.”

Oh, you make me beautiful, when you look at me like that. When you touch me like that.

“Now I know you’re stoned,” I giggled.

He admonished me for that by pulling me in for a lingering kiss that tingled all over my bare skin and flowed out to join the starlight. My heart leapt.

“Do you want me now?” I growled as we broke for breath.

“Now, and forever.”

Oh, if only. “That’s a long time.”

“Not long enough.” He stooped to kiss me again but I turned my face away so that his lips found my cheek and my ear and my throat. His breath was the only part of him that felt warm. His winter clothes were padded and bulky so I couldn’t feel the hardness of his body no matter how I pressed up against him. All I had was his hands and his lips and my own bare and slender form beneath them. And I was all but writhing now with frustration.

“Please, Egan.”

I turned in his arms, not letting his heavy grip or the pull on my hair stop me, letting it inflame me instead just as my intransigence provoked him. I pushed my ass back against his armored crotch and wriggled, dragging his grasp around to the softness of my exposed breasts. He seized the opportunity in both hands and I arched against him, my giggle half groan.

“Oh no,” he growled, his hands harder now. My nipples were solid pebbles and he didn’t seem to be able to stop touching them, rolling them, pulling them. Until I writhed my legs apart, that is—when he suddenly loosed one hand and sent it down over my belly, fingers stretched to invade my dark fleece.

“Yes,” I whimpered, heaving up on tiptoes to let him reach, “yes.”

“I can’t…”

“Can’t?” I gasped, as the brush of his fingertip found my burning clit.

“Can’t stop. When you. Ah, for the love of Christ, Milja.” His groan was ragged. “God help me.”

“Help you stop?” I folded forward at the waist, plunging my hands out to catch at a fallen trunk masked in snow. My hands sank through the soft chill and gripped the frozen bark beneath, bracing my torso against the push of my spreading thighs. I arched my spine, ass upthrust and trembling. Stop now, Egan, if you can.

He mumbled an incoherent oath, grabbing my hip with one hand. The other reached for the invitation he could not refuse, the velvet folds and the hot impossible wetness between my open legs. I felt his fingers slide into me for a moment, icy in my tight grip, and I cried out in delight. His thumb brushed the sensitive whorl of my ass and I pushed back hungrily on the broad, callused digit.

“Ahhh,” he said.

“Yes—please, Egan, yes.”

He didn’t say another word, but I felt him fumbling frantically with his own winter clothes.

“How is it that you are alive?” said a man’s voice.

I think that, given the circumstances, Egan might be forgiven for his—for once—sub-par survival reactions. I straightened up and looked straight at Harald from the bar, flanked by three other guys. They were all wide-eyed, and I can’t blame them for that either.

“It’s twenty below zero,” Harald said, using the European Celsius scale of course. His expression was unreadable. “It’s so cold my nose has frozen shut. But here you are with no clothes on. How are you not dead?”

I was peripherally aware that Egan was desperately scouting around for his dropped gloves, probably so that he could draw his gun without freezing his hands to the metal. I took a stride forward through the snow and my hair rose, crackling about me.

“Because I am beloved of the gods,” I said, baring my teeth. This was no moment to hold back. “I am under their protection, don’t you doubt that.” At the sound of my voice snow shivered down from the sagging branches all around us, hissing and thumping.

“Argri konu,” muttered one of the men at Harald’s ear with some anxiety, and two of them took a step back despite the bad footing.

Harald dipped his head tersely. “You are a völva. That is what I thought.”

“Is that why you spiked her drink?” Egan asked in a harsh voice.

“The Suttungmjaðar is for all of our brethren. You are welcome here, völva.” He nodded approvingly.

I had no idea what the term meant, except that it sounded blatantly feminine. “You drink his blood?” I demanded.

“The mead of poetry is still brewed by those who know how, as in the days of Kvasir.” He smiled. “Tomorrow we will take you up to the hof, so you can see for yourself, Lady Milja.” For a moment he went down on one knee in the snow—and to my astonishment, his friends all followed suit. Then, signaling them to follow, Harald turned and led them away.

I watched them go, nonplussed. “They seem to like me,” I said when they were out of earshot. “What’s a völva?”

“A witch-woman,” said Egan as he appeared at my elbow. “Like, a seer.”

Well, it makes a change that someone thinks of that as a good thing.

He thrust my sweater at me. His face was still flushed. I stared, disappointed.

“We’re going back to the lodge now,” he growled. “Put your clothes back on before everyone else gets an eyeful.”

“I don’t think Norwegians worry about that sort of thing.”

He wouldn’t look at me at all now. “Yeah well, I do.”

I could have cried. Well, I couldn’t—but the feeling was the same. I took the soggy woolen garment from his hand. “Is it safe letting them take us to their temple?”

“Safe, no. Safer than trying to make it on our own? Probably.”

“I saw him, you know. The mead gave me visions. I saw Loki being imprisoned by the gods.” He promised the End of the World, but I’m not telling you that.

“He’s somewhere close, then?”

I nodded. “And still alive. Enough for them to be using his blood to get high on.”

Egan nodded grimly. “That’s just what we need. A bunch of acid-head neo-Vikings.” He stamped his numb feet. “Come on, Milja. Just…go to bed and lock the damn door and try to get some sleep. It’s all going to hit the fan tomorrow.”

* * *

I obeyed his instructions. Well, partly. I locked myself in my pine cell, and hung all my horrible wet clothes up to dry. Then I knelt naked on the rug, bracing my hands flat on the knobbly weave. My shoulder blades were all angles, my head bowed as I whispered to my demon lover. “Azazel, we’re going to Samyaza’s prison in the morning. If you mean to take a ride there inside me, you probably ought to get on board now.”

He drained the light out of the little room as he arrived behind me. Creeping tendrils of darkness swirled across the floor, climbing the furniture and lapping around my splayed fingertips.

“Is that your plan? As we did in Lalibela?” His voice was sooty-dark, and if it didn’t sound exactly friendly at least he was talking. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder but I could feel the heat of his body right behind me. I felt his hand too, just the lightest pressure resting on the nape of my neck, and that touch made shivers chase up and down my spine.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“I will not do that.” His fingertips began to descend my back, infinitesimally slowly.

“Why not?”

“I had to tear myself out of you. Don’t you remember?”

“It hurt,” I admitted.

“It came close to killing you.”

I was surprised, because I hadn’t thought that Azazel had noticed. He’d seemed to have eyes only for Penemuel at the time, and then we’d been separated and I’d fallen unconscious for hours. I felt a faint clutch of gratitude, even though it was hard to focus my attention on anything but his touch. “Then what do we do? We have to sneak you in somehow. There’s a whole cult up there, and if we don’t have you… But you can’t risk being seen by the Host.”

“That I know. But I will not risk possession again. You and Avansha…you were the only ones. The ones I thought truly mine. Now only you remain.”

My heart leapt.

“And I was wrong about you both,” he added with a cold growl.

“Oh, Azazel,” I panted miserably. He had been at his lowest ebb when he’d discovered that she’d turned on him and that I’d been unfaithful. No wonder he’d reacted so badly, and no wonder it was still eating a hole in his heart. Angels have a tendency to see everything in black-and-white.

“Why did she betray me? I was her father. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.” His voice did not rise, but just for a moment the air became too thick to breathe. The inner pane of the triple-glazed window cracked across loudly. Then he asked a question I’d never expected: “Was I a bad father?”

You were a terrible, useless, absent father. But you’ll never understand that. You nearly burnt her to death when you rescued Penemuel, and you didn’t even notice. “Sometimes you do everything you can and it still doesn’t help,” I said, which was true as far as it went. “Humans are messed-up, Azazel. Nephilim too, for all the same reasons. They do stupid things, and self-destructive things, and sometimes really awful things, and they will always have what seems like a really good reason, to them.”

“You are insane, all of you.”

I thought of Roshana, abandoned into a childhood of unimaginable abuse, unloved, afraid, and fighting for her life every step of the way. She had never stopped fighting for more life in over five thousand years. She probably never would have been able to stop.

“We’re not created beings like you. We’re not just ourselves—we’re everything that ever happened to us too. Everything we’ve ever done. So we can’t see the world clearly, because there’s too much stuff in our heads. We look out at it from inside that mess, and it’s like the hole we’re looking through is so tiny that we can’t even use both eyes at once. We’ve got no perspective. I once had a huge row with my roomie because I hadn’t had any coffee or breakfast that morning. I thought it was because she never washed up the dishes.”

“But that is a stupid reason to have a row anyway.”

“Exactly.”

“What do I do with you?”

“You forgive us, I guess. Because the only alternative is Noah’s Flood or rains of fire or whatever. And Roshana is dead, so there’s no alternative as far as she’s concerned; if you don’t forgive her it will poison you.”

“I meant, what do I do with you.”

I whimpered under my breath. Oh, that touch. That caress—too soft, too slow, too cruel. His fingertips had made their tormenting journey all the way to the small of my back. My spine arched and my hips lifted as the shivers flowed across my skin. I was offering my ass to Azazel just as I’d offered it to Egan, my need so great that it overwhelmed all dignity.

“He has left you unsatisfied,” Azazel observed. “I can smell his desire and his intent, but not his seed. Not this time.”

“He had other things on his mind.”

“Then he is twice the fool.”

Don’t. Please don’t. “He’s just trying to be a good man.”

“Oh, I can see you need one of those.” He stooped over me, and my heart leapt as I felt his blunt nudge against my sex. I was wet; so wet. That was Egan’s doing, I thought, as Azazel soaked himself. The two of them were working together, like it or not, realize it or not, to keep me in a state of unbearable, near-constant arousal.

“Please,” I whispered.

“Do you think you deserve it?”

“No,” I sobbed. I don’t deserve it. I just want it so bad.

He slithered from me, pulling up to threaten my other entrance. “What about this?”

I changed tactic, in my desperation. “Yes.”

He pressed for further admission. “Yes what?”

Oh God. “Yes. I deserve that. I deserve. Gaah… Anything. You want. To do. To me.” I clawed at the rug and groaned again, biting my knuckles. The sensation of being stretched and invaded was incomparable to any other pleasure I craved. My skin felt wet, hot, cold, alive—like a mains current was shorting through it. “Oh shit. Oh. Oh. Yes. Azazel.”

He felt vast as a planet and he moved with the majestic, inexorable deliberation of worlds colliding. I couldn’t resist. No human flesh could have resisted that. I was being taken, and all I could do was go with him, pushed before him on the bow wave of his surge. His continental thrusts threatened to push my soul out of my body. His breath burned between my shoulder blades. His clutch was spasmodic, his muscles hard and quivering.

Finally, he left me awash in his great tidal spill.

But he didn’t make me come. I’m guessing he might have deliberately denied me.

“Oh please, please, keep going, Azazel, please,” I grunted into the fold of my elbow.

“Do you deserve pleasure?” He stooped to bite the back of my shoulder. Then I heard a growl. Not a human growl; the noise of a beast, followed by the words, “I can taste Samyaza on you. How is that?”

He was still panting from his climax, and I could hardly breathe.

Oh God, not this. Not now. “They gave me his blood to drink. I didn’t know—I’m sorry. They’re bleeding him.”

The light in the room tinted an ugly red. “Who did that?”

I pulled my consciousness up from the depths. “Please, Azazel, don’t go looking. If you start killing people here the Host will see you, and you’ll never get anywhere near Samyaza.”

“This is an abomination,” he snarled.

“But he’s alive! We can reach him! Just wait, please.”

He inhaled harshly, and for a long moment there was silence. “You tell me, then: what is their human ‘reason’ for doing that to him?”

“Poetry. Inspiration. Vision. I saw him, Azazel—he’s a bit…muddled, but he’s conscious, and he’s here. We will find him.”

He raked both hands slowly across my ass, and I thought I would fall out of my own skin. “If you say so, then.”

Thank you. Thank you. Inch by painful inch, we seemed to have crawled back to some sort of accord. An acknowledgement on his part that I could still be trusted, mostly. On my part, a deeper understanding of how lost he was in the world of human emotion. It seemed to be a lesson I had to learn over and over again. “Okay,” I whispered.

“What do you want now, Milja?”

“Now?”

“If I were to do any one thing for you, what would you ask for?”

“You mean sex?” Just take me again and make me come, I don’t care how.

“I mean anything. Your paramour was right.” The words were grudging. “I owe you my life—even if you took my daughter’s. It is just that I pay that debt.”

Then forgive Egan.

Forgive me.

I cleared my throat. “There is a debt that I owe.” That’s how you weigh these things, right? “Would you help me repay it, if I asked?”

“I might.”

“In Ethiopia. There’s a woman called Deborha, in a prison near Sokota…”

* * *

Left without fulfilment, as soon as I pitched into bed I fantasized that I was back in the snowy dell with Egan; that I was bending over and wriggling my ass in invitation once more. Only this time, we were not interrupted. This time he took me, above and below—and it was everything I’d wanted, everything that he and Azazel had both denied me. I slid into the shallows of sleep, my fantasies becoming dreams, but never quite losing awareness of my body. As my fingers stirred I rose and fell through the surface of consciousness, sometimes directing my imagination, sometimes falling through its rainbow imagery.

Then I woke fully, glossed with perspiration and quivering with orgasmic aftershock, and I threw off my cover and rolled up onto the edge of the bed just to cool down. The wall bulb was near useless when I finally found the switch; it lit the tiny rabbit-hutch room with only a dim yellow glow.

Oh God, I thought blearily. Why are we so screwed up?

At that moment I heard Egan’s door thump open on the opposite side of the corridor. I caught my breath and braced myself for the crash of his fists on my own door.

Oh no. My dream. I was only dozing. I didn’t—did I?

But there was silence.

I sat, hearing only the race of my own heartbeat. No accusations; not even the sound of his feet stomping away down the hall. Just silence.

What is he waiting for?

Me?

I pushed myself to my feet, pulled on a tank top shirt just long enough to afford me some decency, and went to the door. I could feel a trickle of sweat running down between my breasts. The handle felt slippery under my fingers.

Egan was standing on the other side of the door, one muscular arm braced against the frame, wearing nothing but the pair of gray briefs he’d presumably gone to bed in. The sight nearly sent me into meltdown then and there. His expression was grim, but not a word passed his lips. His pupils were still horribly dilated.

I searched his face for any sign of light, but saw none. It was the expression, I thought, of a man who had heroically fought the good fight against his inner demons—and lost. I took a step backward into my room and he followed me, pushing the door closed behind him.

Are we going to fight? To kiss? To talk? I don’t want to talk. Not now. I want you to touch me.

We stood wordless in that dim yellow light, like we were stuck in amber.

Then I looked down. I wasn’t jiggling about naked in the snow now; just clad in a sleeveless top that was so tight my erect nipples drew a bar across the stretched cotton. Egan wore even less. And unless he had taken to smuggling a length of lead pipe sideways under his briefs, he was finding even that garment uncomfortably constricting. He loomed so close to me that I didn’t even have to step forward to put my hand on that imprisoned shaft and feel it kick against my palm.

Oh. He’s had enough of dreams and teasing. He needs sorting out. Now.

I looked up into his eyes, wondering if he would say anything, and wondering what I should say. But we’d run out of words, both of us.

Did he want me to carry on where I’d left off in the snow? To bend over the bed? He was hard and burning under my hand as I squeezed him through the soft cotton. Oh. Oh. Oh.

He stooped a little, just enough so that his cheek brushed mine, his breath on my ear and neck. I’m used to thinking of myself as tall and gangly, no delicate flower—but it suddenly came home to me how much bigger he was; so much muscle and bone. And that was before I recalled his history of extreme violence. It appalled me now to think how I’d had the gall to tease him; we’d shared rented rooms and a pup-tent and even a bed in our journeys together, and I’d never given him enough credit for his restraint, or his honor, or his kindliness.

He could have had me at any time.

Oh, that thought made me run wet.

I’d had my fill of taunting him, for the moment. Now I wanted to give him everything he needed. Keeping one hand on his Calvins and running the other down the glorious hard undulation of his torso, I sank to my knees until my hands could meet. My lips pressed the flat wall of his stomach. Then I slipped my fingers under the elastic of his briefs and pulled them down. His cock bounced free, hard enough to give my face a hot, silky slap.

Oh you beauty…

I took him in my mouth, all the way, and I heard the quietest of sighs he uttered. That was all he did for a long moment; just stand there, almost motionless, as I sucked gratefully at his strong, beautiful length. It was impossible for anything to make it harder, but I could feel the gather of his heavy ball-sack. He was so turned on that for once he would come easily, I thought.

Then he touched my cheek. “Is that all you want?” he rasped.

No. Not all.

My mouth was too full to talk, so I shook my head. Only when I’d wrapped a hand firmly around his girth did I release him from my lips, and I used my hand to pull him with me, step by step, as I crawled backward across the floor.

He followed, allowing me my little dominion.

But once I’d got my rear up on the bed he seemed to come out of his trance, and the transformation was almost shocking. He pushed me back flat onto the mattress, and climbed up to overshadow me on all fours. Grabbing a pillow, he stuffed it under my ass to lift my hips, scooping my weight with no effort. He pushed up my top, then his right hand claimed my sex.

I was a disgrace down there. So goddamn wet. All open, loose petals, like a blown rose after an autumnal storm. He swept down and caught a nipple in his lips, and his fingers sank into me like into melting butter.

“Ah!” I tried to stifle my cry for the sake of any hostel neighbors. His hand was big and his kisses on my breasts were almost fierce enough to bruise me. But I couldn’t hurt—not with his palm down there mashing my sex and his fingers sliding into me, in and out, no friction and no resistance at all. My nipples welcomed every suck and every tug, my back arched, and I grabbed at his arms and felt the muscles working like steel beneath the skin.

And I came. I came on his hand; his wonderful, ruthlessly efficient hand with his strong fingers and his hard grip. I came with my nipples feeling like they were on fire, spitting out stars.

The moment he knew he had me, he switched tactic. Fingers still inside me, but sliding his torso down now, burying his face between my thighs to join that hand. His mouth was gentler now, thank God, but it was all a ruse; he was no less ruthless in his intent. When I came this time he gave me only a handful of seconds to recover before diving in again. And again. And again. Absolutely relentless—and so good, I couldn’t have imagined.

After my third climax—or the fourth, I’d lost all ability to count—he shifted his fingers from my sex down to my ass. That gate had already been overthrown by Azazel and could offer no resistance. I was already soft and greased and hungry, and his fingers slid in to the accompaniment of my whimpers. I don’t know how many fingers…just that it was more than one, because he scissored them to open me, and curled them to touch me in places that I knew nothing about but that sent electric shocks of pleasure through my whole body.

I panicked a bit. I’d never come like this, so fast, so often; each time he whipped my flesh to another orgasm I felt a visceral fear that one more would be enough to kill me—a fear that lasted only long enough for the next wave of arousal to sweep me off my feet. I pawed at his hair with my hands, pushing him away and then pulling him in harder. I started to sob, tearless.

He paused then to let me catch my breath and my courage, and I tried frantically to pull his mouth back onto me. But he had other plans. By the insidious working of his fingers he’d ensured that I was ready to accommodate all of his need. Now, hooking his arms under my thighs, he pushed them back until my knees were pointing over my head, and then he knelt up behind my raised ass and slid in with one slippery push.

So then; he wanted everything that I’d offered him. Everything that Azazel had already had. That made sense to me. And at least he wasn’t rough in the taking. He was pretty gentle, considering. Just hard—so incredibly hard. I could feel his arousal the moment he entered me; the dream-orgasms hadn’t given him release, but left him desperate to unload in real life; a heavy, imperative need. So there we were under that dim yellow light that made everything look honey-colored; the pine, his hair, our skin. Me pinned into a curled position by him book-ending my ass and bearing down over me. Our stifled breathing in the humid air of the tiny room. Face to face, moving honey-slow, honey-sweet.

Oh God. This shouldn’t feel this good. I’m going to—

I started to keen softly as that strange ecstatic sensation uncurled inside me, stretching out, flowing, taking over every fiber of my body. I was dissolving in a liquid orgasm unlike anything I’d felt in other parts.

“Egan!” I cried, eyes wide, terrified that he could do such a thing to me, that something so dirty could feel so transcendent—and even more terrified that he might stop.

But he didn’t stop. He thrust deeper, groaning, open-mouthed, and through my own rapture I felt the release of his control and the blaze of his orgasm, scorching through my honeyed ecstatic bliss, catching me up and setting me on fire.

Honey burns, I found.

Then he dipped to rest, his face brushing mine. We were both breathing harshly. I could feel every dying pulse of his relief, and I knew that any second now my hips would start to cramp, but I clung to this moment.

“Milja…”

“Oh my God, Egan. Oh my God.”

“There’s no escape,” he mumbled. “Not even in dreams.”

Oh Egan. I wrapped my arms around him. His next words took my breath away.

“I am not the only one for you, I know. But you are the only woman for me, Milja.” He kissed me softly.

I didn’t break the kiss. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare.

We slept the rest of the night on top of the covers, curled together. I woke very early, well before it was light, and heard the sound of him showering. Lulled by the hum of water, I drifted back to sleep.

When my alarm woke me properly, Egan was gone.