Page 137 of Angels Are Falling

Epilogue

KAI

I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

It had taken the better part of a decade to earn that sentence. Years of standing in the dark outside another man’s window. Years of watching that man hold my entire world in his hands and complain about it. The world in question made up stories for Bella, cried at other people’s happy endings, and had never once learned how to love anything halfway. She was the answer to every prayer I never said out loud.

Now the fire in the chimney had burned low. The kids were asleep upstairs. And my wife was crossing the living room of the house where she’d first learned what a family sounded like, barefoot, in my shirt, seven months of our child rounding the front of it.

Two years since the door slid shut on him. Two years of Pictionary and pancakes, of school runs and Sunday markets, of my ring on her finger without another one overshadowing it. Domesticity, it turned out, was simply the art of showing up when someone needed you.

We could have lived anywhere. I owned mansions she’d never seen, a dozen addresses that would have photographed better than this one. But I kept us here, in the smallest house I owned, because my wife spent her childhood disappearing inside palaces, and this was the first home to make her smile.

Was it wrong to take his childhood home on top of his family?

I only had one response to that question—who cares?

I didn’t give a shit about morals as long as it brought a smile to my wife’s face. She asked me once for a totally ordinary life, and I knew then that she was imagining this house. It was where the noise she loved first learned its name. It was where she witnessed an ordinary life. I intended to spend the rest of mine making sure she never had to ask twice. Moving her somewhere grander would have been spending her happiness to show off my money. And I’d never make his mistake.

“The kids are down,” Amelie said.

I watched her as she walked toward me. Sometimes, it still felt surreal that she walked toward me willingly.

“Mrs. Bea took the night off.”

“I know. I told her to.”

“Of course you did. I’m guessing it’s because you have nefarious intentions.”

“You guess correctly.”

She stopped between my knees, firelight moving over her face, and I permitted myself the luxury I had once rationed through glass—I looked at her without a time limit. My beautiful wife, and she was finally mine. Only mine. Though anyone keeping tabs knew the ownership ran the other way. She held a control over me that was unparalleled by any power in this universe.

“What are you staring at?” she asked, climbing onto my lap with the careful geometry of a pregnant woman.

“You.”

She smiled shyly as her fingers found the hem of the shirt.

I caught them.

Not because I didn’t want her to take it off. Wanting her was the one appetite that had never once obeyed me. Two years of marriage, and her reaching for me still felt like the first time. I’d stopped waiting for her effect to wear off. It wasn’t going to.

However, a familiar pressure had settled between my shoulder blades. It was the feeling of being watched. It was the only skill the watching years had left me, and it had never been wrong.

My eyes went to the window and looked out into the dark. I knew the spot. I had stood in it myself, learning this window by heart.

I lifted her gently by the hips, set her on the cushion, and stood.

“Where are you going?” she asked, curious.

“To close the blinds.”

“Kai. It’s pitch-dark out there. Nobody’s watching us.”

“Just a precaution, Princess.”

She rolled her eyes. There was a time my proximity made her flinch. Now she rolled her eyes, huffed at me, and did all sorts of gestures to express her annoyance, all of which were worth more to me than gold. Every one of her reactions, anything that showed she cared and wasn’t indifferent to me, was worth its weight in gold to me.