"TAKE IT OFF"

"The bravest thing a broken person can do is say yes to something good."

KIVA.

"Yes."

The word came out broken by tears, cracked right down the middle, not elegant at all, not the way I had ever imagined saying something like that if I was ever lucky enough to be asked something like this.

"Yes, Fabian."

For a second, neither of us moved.

The practice room was completely still around us, just the low hum of the library beyond the door and the faint tick of the old radiator in the corner and the two of us suspended in the moment right after everything changed.

Then his entire face lit up.

Not the polished smile he put on for rooms full of people. Not the composed, controlled expression he wore during meetings when he needed to be the Alpha of the Southern Gates and not just himself. This one was different. This one started in his eyes before it reached his mouth and it changed his whole face, made him look younger, made him look like someone who had been holding his breath for a long time and had just been told he was allowed to stop.

This smile was real.

This one was just for me.

A laugh escaped him, low and relieved, and then his arms were around my waist and he pulled me off the bench and against him in one motion, holding me like I was something he had been afraid of losing before he even had me properly.

"Oh, thank God," he said into my hair.

I laughed through my tears, which was not a dignified combination but I was well past caring about that.

"You sound surprised," I said.

"I was terrified."

I pulled back enough to look at him. "You?"

"Yes, me."

"Fabian, you negotiate territorial agreements with people who could level buildings."

"And I would do that again before I asked you this question," he said, completely seriously. "I had a whole speech prepared in case you said no."

I stared at him. "You did not."

"I absolutely did. Three paragraphs. I rehearsed it in the car on the way here."

The image of him sitting in the car park outside the library rehearsing a rejection speech was so perfectly, painfully him that something in my chest cracked open in the best possible way and I laughed again, a real one, the kind that felt unfamiliar in my own throat because I used it so rarely and it always surprised me when it came.

Fabian went quiet for a second.

He was just looking at me.

"There it is," he said softly.

"What?"

"That laugh."

Heat crept up my neck and into my cheeks. I looked away, which was a defence mechanism he had long since seen through, but I did it anyway.

His hand found mine. He lifted it between us and the ring caught the light from the small lamp in the corner and threw it back, small and bright and real.

I stared at it.

I was engaged.

Engaged.

The word turned over in my head like something I was trying to find the edges of. It didn't feel real yet. It felt like a word from someone else's life, from one of those lives I used to imagine in the quiet parts of the day when I let myself think about what things might look like if they had been different.

But it was real. It was on my hand. He had asked and I had said yes and it was real.

My father couldn't sell me off now. He couldn't sit at the head of that table and talk about finding someone who wouldn't ask too many questions like I was a piece of furniture he was trying to offload. That conversation, the one I had heard tonight with my face still warm from Giovanni's hand, the one I had carried out of the house and down the street and all the way here, it didn't have the same power it had an hour ago.

I had someone.

Someone who had come to a library on a Thursday night because he knew where I would be. Someone who remembered my birthday when everyone else let it pass like any ordinary day. Someone who had crouched on the floor of a practice room and asked me to be his wife like it was the most important thing he had done all year.

Someone who chose me.

The thought moved through me slowly and then all at once and I felt my eyes fill up again before I could stop them.

Fabian noticed immediately. He always noticed.

"Hey." His thumb brushed gently beneath my eye. "No more tears tonight, Sweet Pea."

Sweet Pea.

I had not had a nickname before Fabian. Not one that was given with any warmth behind it. The names I had been called in that house were a different category of thing entirely. But Fabian had called me Sweet Pea almost from the beginning, early on when things were still new between us, and every time he said it something in me went soft in a way I had never quite managed to harden against.

Nobody had ever cared enough to give me something like that before.

"I love you," I whispered.

His expression shifted, all the lightness still there but something quieter underneath it, something that had weight to it.

"I love you too," he said.

Then he kissed me.

Slow and unhurried, one hand resting against my cheek, gentle in the specific way he was always gentle with me, like he understood without being told that I needed things to be gentle. My hands gripped the front of his jacket and I kissed him back and for a moment everything else in the world became completely unimportant. The house. The family. The years of being the wrong one, the unwanted one, the one at the wrong end of the table.

All of it went quiet.

It was just him and the warm lamp and the slightly out of tune piano and this moment that belonged entirely to us.

When we finally pulled apart I rested my forehead against his chest and stayed there, listening to his heartbeat slow down from something fast to something steady.

I wished I could stay there all night. I genuinely, deeply wished it.

Then my phone lit up on top of the piano.

I glanced at the screen and my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

"Oh no."

"What?"

I pulled back and grabbed the phone and showed him the time and watched his expression change as he read it.

"I have to go," I said, already reaching for my bag. "If Giovanni notices I'm not back—"

I didn't finish the sentence. I didn't need to. Fabian's jaw had already tightened in that particular way it did when I said things that implied more than I was saying, and he was too perceptive to miss what was underneath it even when I was trying to keep it covered.

"I'll drive you," he said.

"No."

His brows went up. "No?"

"I'll walk. It's not far."

"Kiva, it's dark outside."

"I know."

"Then let me drive you. That's not a complicated solution."

"I like walking," I said, which was such a transparent lie that I almost winced at myself.

He looked at me for a long moment in that steady, patient way he had, the way that meant he didn't believe a word of it but he had decided not to push tonight. There was a conversation waiting in his eyes that I was grateful he was choosing to save for another time.

"Fine," he said finally.

I breathed out. "Thank you."

"But tomorrow."

I stilled. "Tomorrow?"

His expression had shifted into something that was almost amused, warm but with a kind of quiet certainty behind it that reminded me, not unpleasantly, that underneath everything he was still an Alpha who was used to things going the way he decided they should go.

"Tomorrow I'm coming to your house."

The words landed like a stone dropping into still water.

"What?"

"Kiva." He said my name like it was both the beginning and the end of the argument. "We're engaged. I have to ask your parents properly. That's how this works."

My heart was doing several things at once and none of them were calm.

Tomorrow. He would walk into that house tomorrow and my mother would recalibrate and my father would calculate and Giovanni would perform and Paige would look at him the way she had looked at every good thing that had ever been adjacent to me, and I had no idea what would happen after that, I had no way of predicting it or controlling it or protecting this one perfect night from what the morning might do to it.

But also.

He was coming. For me. Officially. In front of all of them.

"Okay," I whispered.

His smile was slow and sure. "Good."

He pressed his lips to my forehead, the same as he always did, slow and careful like punctuation, like a promise he made with his body because words sometimes weren't enough.

"I'll see you tomorrow, Sweet Pea."

Then I turned and walked home.The whole way back I couldn't stop looking at my hand. I kept lifting it under the streetlights, watching the ring catch and throw the light, turning it, touching it, confirming it was still there. At one point I lifted it to my lips and kissed it and then immediately looked around in case anyone had seen me do that, which was completely irrational at this hour on a quiet street but still.

I smiled the whole way home. My cheeks actually ached from it. It had been a very long time since my face had been asked to do that much smiling and the muscles were apparently out of practice.

***********************************************************************************************************

By the time I slipped in through the kitchen door, the house was mostly dark and quiet, the way it got late on weeknights when my father had gone to his study and Giovanni had gone wherever Giovanni went. The kitchen lights were still on. The last of the household staff were finishing up.

I was almost to the stairs.

Almost.

"Kiva.”

I stopped.

The voice came from the doorway to the sitting room. I closed my eyes for exactly one second. Then I turned around.

Paige was leaning against the frame with her arms crossed, still in the yellow dress from dinner, watching me with that particular quality of attention she kept for moments she suspected were worth paying attention to.

"Where have you been?" she asked.

"Outside."

"Outside where?"

"Uhmm— The garden."

Her eyes narrowed. "For three hours."

"I was picking fruit," I said, which was possibly the worst lie I had ever told and I had told some genuinely bad ones over the years.

Paige looked at me the way you look at someone who has just said something so unconvincing it almost becomes impressive.

Then she rolled her eyes. "Only you would spend your birthday picking fruit."

The words stung. Not because they were cruel, though they were, but because she remembered. She knew exactly what day it was and she had let it pass without saying a word, the same as everyone else, and she was only mentioning it now to use it as something small and sharp to press against me.

I started moving toward the stairs. I didn't want to do this tonight. Not tonight, when I was still warm from everything that had just happened, when I could still feel the shape of it in my chest. I wanted to go upstairs and sit on my bed and look at the ring in private and call Ada in the morning and have this one good thing last a little longer before the house got its hands on it.

"Kiva."

Something in her voice made me stop.

It had changed. The bored, dismissive quality was gone and something sharper had replaced it.

I turned back.

Her eyes were on my left hand.

My stomach fell completely out of my body.

The ring. I had forgotten I was wearing it. I had walked through the front door and through the kitchen without even thinking about it because I had been so careful for so long about so many things and for one unguarded moment I had just forgotten.

Paige slowly pushed away from the doorframe.

She didn't say anything yet. She just looked at it. Then she looked at me. Her expression was very still in the way that things are still right before they move fast.

"What is that," she said. Not a question.

"It's nothing."

"Nothing."

She stepped closer. Her eyes hadn't left the ring. I instinctively moved my hand behind my back, which was the worst thing I could have done and I knew it the moment I did it.

Paige smiled.

Not the warm kind. The other one.

"Where did you get that ring, Kiva?"

I opened my mouth. Nothing useful came out.

She took another step forward. Then another. Her voice when she spoke again was completely, terrifyingly calm.

"Take it off."

My breath caught in my throat.

"What?"

"Take." Another step. "It." Another. "Off."