SANDALWOOD. RAIN. HOME.

"The thing about being loved by the right person is that it doesn't feel like anything you were warned about. It feels like finally exhaling."

KIVA POV.

For a second I could only stare at him. Fabian stood near the library doors holding a bouquet of white lilies and dark red roses in one hand while the other rested loosely by his side. He looked completely out of place in the quiet library, too big for the room somehow, too warm for a place that had always felt cold to me, but the moment I saw him, something inside my chest loosened.

"Fabian," I said.

"Hi, sweet pea."

I was off the bench before I finished deciding to move.

I crossed the small room in three steps and walked straight into him and his arms came up around me automatically, the way they always did, like catching me was just something his body had decided to do without needing instruction. “There’s my girl,” he murmured, I buried my face against his chest for a second, breathing him in.

Sandalwood. Rain. Home.

That was what Fabian smelled like to me.

He lifted the flowers slightly. “Well, it’s your birthday.”

The words made something ache in my chest again. “And I knew you’d be hiding in here,” he continued. “So I came to see you.”

I blinked at him.

“You remembered?” It came out quieter than I meant it to. More raw than I intended. The words had weight behind them that I hadn't planned to let out and I could hear it and I couldn't take it back. He looked down at me with an expression that shifted slightly, something softening behind his eyes. “Of course I remembered.” He reached up and brushed a strand of hair away from my face gently. “Why wouldn’t I remember my own girlfriend’s birthday?”

His mouth curved slightly.

“That would make me a pretty shitty boyfriend, wouldn’t it?”

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.

A real laugh.

Not the polite fake ones I used around my family. Not the quiet little smiles I forced to make people comfortable. A genuine one, Fabian’s expression changed the second he heard it, Like hearing me laugh was his favorite thing in the world.

God, I loved this man.

I shook my head and leaned back into him and he let me, tucking his chin over the top of my head, and we stood there for a moment in the small warm light of the practice room while the piano waited behind us with its slightly uneven keys and the rest of the evening stayed outside the door where it belonged.

This was the thing about Fabian.

Not the way he looked or the position he held or any of the things that other people noticed first when his name came up. It was this. The way he showed up. The way he made it feel simple, being near him, the way all the held tension in my body had a habit of slowly unknotting when he was in the room.

 I had spent my whole life in a house where I had to be careful and watchful and small, where taking up too much space or wanting too much or needing anything at all was always the wrong move, and then I met Fabian and he just. He made room for me. He always made room for me.

I loved him in a way I hadn't really admitted even to myself yet, not in full, not in all the parts of it, because loving someone that much felt dangerous when you had spent your whole life watching good things get taken away. But it was there. It had been there for a long time.

I thought, not for the first time, about what it would mean if he marked me. If he made it official in the way that mattered, the way that would mean no one else could make decisions about who I was or where I went or who I belonged to.

 The way that would mean my father's talk of selling me off to someone who wouldn't ask too many questions would become exactly what it deserved to be, which was nothing. Just words. Just noise.

I hadn't told Fabian about any of that. I hadn't told him what was said at dinner tonight or about the dress or about what my father had started planning. I hadn't told him because I didn't know how to say it without it sounding like I was pushing, like I was hinting toward something, like I was trying to move things faster than they were naturally going.

 Because Fabian was the Alpha of the Southern Gates. He was an important figure, a significant one, and the gap between what he was and what I was, a nobody omega from a family that barely acknowledged her existence, was not a gap I let myself forget very often.

He loved me. I was sure of that. I felt it the way you feel things that are real rather than imagined, in the consistency of it, in the way it showed up even in the ordinary moments, even in a library practice room on a Thursday night with nothing remarkable about it except that he had come.

But being loved and being claimed were different things. Being loved privately and being chosen publicly were different things. And I was not going to be the one to push him toward something he hadn't decided on himself.

So I held onto him and I kept quiet about all of it and I just let this be what it was, which was good, which was more than I'd had an hour ago.

He pulled back after a moment and looked at my face properly.

His expression changed.

"You haven't answered my question," he said. His voice was still easy but there was something underneath it now, something paying attention.

He lifted one hand and touched my cheek. The one Giovanni had hit.

I made myself not flinch.

"Who did this to you?" he said.

He wasn't asking casually. His thumb moved very gently across my cheekbone and his eyes were on mine and there was a stillness in him that I recognised, the kind that sat just on the surface of something much less still.

"It's nothing," I said. "I had a reaction. To an oil I was using earlier. My skin does that sometimes."

He looked at me.

Not the look that means someone believes you. The other one.

"A reaction," he said.

"Yes."

"To an oil."

"Yes, Fabian."

A pause.

"Okay," he said.

He said it in the way that meant he had filed it away and decided not to push tonight, not because he believed me, but because he knew me well enough to know that pushing wouldn't get him anywhere and that I would tell him when I was ready. That was another thing about him. He knew when to wait.

He dropped his hand from my face but he kept hold of my other one, thumb moving back and forth across my knuckles in the absent, automatic way he had when he was thinking about something.

I looked at him properly for the first time since he walked in. Really looked.

"Are you alright?" I said.

He smiled but it didn't quite finish the journey to his eyes.

"What makes you ask?"

"You look like something's on your mind."

He was quiet for a second. He moved us both backward until I was sitting on the edge of the piano bench again and he was crouched in front of me, still holding my hand, elbows on his knees. It made us level with each other. He did that sometimes, made himself smaller so we were the same height, and every time he did it something in me went a little soft.

"There's been talk," he said. "Rumours, mostly. But enough of them and from enough places that I've started paying attention."

"What kind of rumours?"