ARIA

The morning felt different.

Not in any dramatic way. Just lighter. The kind of light that comes after something very heavy has finally been set down, when your arms are still sore from carrying it but at least your hands are empty now.

Kael had left early. Something about the press conference fallout, lawyers, statements that needed to be carefully worded so that the whole story of what Andrew had done could come out without destroying what remained of the Romans’ empire in the process.

He’d kissed my forehead before he left and told me to rest, which I had fully intended to do until I opened my eyes and found Olivia and Ash already deep in what appeared to be a very serious card game on the couch across the room.

Sylas hadn’t shown up yet. It was just the three of us, and honestly, that was its own kind of good.

I watched them for a while before either of them noticed I was awake. Ash was explaining the rules of something to Olivia with the particular confidence of someone who was almost certainly making half of it up as she went, and Olivia was listening with her eyebrows slightly raised, nodding slowly, in the way she did when she was being polite but had already decided she didn’t believe a word of it.

I hadn’t planned for these two to end up in the same room together, let alone become whatever they were becoming.

But watching them now, Olivia laughing at something Ash said, Ash looking genuinely pleased about it, I felt something warm and quiet settle in my chest.

Some things came out of disasters that you couldn’t have planned for.

Eventually I sat up, and both of them looked over.

"Good morning," Ash said, in the tone of someone who had been waiting.

"How are you feeling?" Olivia asked, already starting to stand.

"Better," I said. And I meant it. Not perfect or back to normal, but genuinely, actually better. "I want to take a walk."

They both looked at me.

"We’ll come," Olivia said immediately.

"No, stay. I just want to move around a little. I’ll have a guard with me."

"Aria—"

"I’m fine. I promise. I just need a few minutes." I looked between them. "Finish your game. I’ll be back before you notice I’m gone."

Ash studied me for a second, then looked at Olivia, then back at me. "If you’re not back in twenty minutes I’m sending the entire police department of the city after you."

"Noted," I said, and got up before either of them could change their minds.

The two guards outside my door straightened the moment I appeared, both of them greeting me with that particular quiet respect that Kael had clearly trained into every single person he employed. I’d stopped finding it strange about a month ago and had simply accepted it as part of my life now.

I asked if either of them knew where Nikolai was.

One of them, the taller one whose name I kept forgetting, nodded and told me he could take me there. Not far, as it turned out. Same wing, a few corridors over.

He stopped outside a door, told me this was the room, and then very tactfully positioned himself a little further down the hall to give me space.

I knocked once and pushed the door open.

Niko was in bed, laptop open across his knees, headphones on, completely absorbed in whatever was on the screen.

His hair, which I had only ever seen pulled back into that neat half-up style he always wore, was completely down. It fell around his face in a way that made him look younger, softer, faintly nerdy in a way I found oddly endearing.

He hadn’t heard me come in.

I stood there for a second, then stepped further into the room.

He glanced up.

The transformation was immediate. Headphones off his ears in one motion, laptop angled down, his whole posture straightening in that reflexive, trained way of his.

"Miss Aria." Formal. Attentive. Like we were back in the hallway outside Kael’s office and not in a hospital room where he was currently recovering from being stabbed.

"Oh, absolutely not," I said.

He blinked.

"We are not doing the formal thing. We have been through entirely too much for that." I crossed the room toward him. "Sit down, by the way."

He had already started to shift like he was going to stand up. He stopped, winced, and settled back.

"See," I said. "Sit. I mean it."

Something in his expression loosened a little. The corner of his mouth moved.

I pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat down. Looked at him. He looked back at me with those very steady, very earnest eyes of his, and I thought again, not for the first time, that Kael had extraordinary taste in the people he chose to keep close.

"I heard you got stabbed," I said.

"It wasn’t—"

"If you say it wasn’t that bad I will personally tell Kael to extend your hospital stay by a week."

He closed his mouth.

"I’m glad you made it," I said, more quietly. "I mean that."

"It’s my job, ma’am."

"Getting stabbed is not your job. Your job is to make sure other people don’t get stabbed. There’s a difference."

He looked at me for a moment. Then that quiet expression came over his face, the one that didn’t quite fit with the rest of him, a little sad, a little heavy.

"What’s that face," I said.

"I wanted to apologize," he said. "For not protecting you better. You were taken on my watch and I—"

"Nikolai."

He stopped.

"You got stabbed," I said slowly, like he might have somehow missed this detail.

"Someone put a knife in you. While you were trying to stop them from taking me." I looked at him steadily. "That is not failing. That is the opposite of failing."

He held my gaze. Said nothing.

"Thank you," I said. "For protecting me. For trying to protect my baby. For getting yourself put in a hospital bed doing it." I paused. "I mean that genuinely and completely."