Page 189 of Golden Eagle

“What have you been doing?” Kolya finally asked, conversationally, and Nikita started talking – and didn’t stop. Their adventures pouring out, one after the next, stories he’d never voiced to anyone. Softened by his own voice; not the raw look Trina had had inside his brain, aided by Val’s power, but told the way he wanted to tell it.

And the way he wanted to tell it, he realized, as he went, was shockingly honest.

“Your great-granddaughter?” Kolya asked, brows lifted when Nik spoke of Trina.

He smiled. “She’s ferocious. You’ll love her.” He frowned a moment later. “Not that way, though. She’s spoken for – even if he is an idiot.”

Kolya grinned. “So he’s like you, then?”

Nikita elbowed him, the way he would have decades ago, and it felt good. It feltright.

The sun was up, still pale gold in the way of fall, slanting down between the building rooftops, when Nikita realized he could smell coffee. He broke off in the middle of trying to describe the situation with Alexei when he heard the barely audible sound of footfalls on the floor inside, and a moment later Sasha stepped elegantly out of the window, dressed in sweats and one of Nikita’s more tattered old hoodies, balancing three steaming mugs of coffee, a blanket slung over one shoulder. “Good morning,” he greeted, with a quiet smile, and Nik and Kolya reached, automatically, for mugs. After, Sasha cradled his own, and snuggled down on Nikita’s other side, casually tossing the blanket around both of them.

Nikita shivered down into its familiar warmth with a pleased hum, leaning into Sasha’s side.

“Was the bed comfortable enough?” Sasha asked, blowing the steam off his coffee, his face – when Nikita glanced sideways at it – soft, still-sleepy, pillow-creased, and the picture of peaceful contentment.

“Better than anything I remember,” Kolya said. “Everything’s more comfortable in the future.”

Nik snorted, and Sasha laughed, quietly.

“I’ll make breakfast in a minute,” Sasha said, gaze wandering out across the morning, smiling into his mug.

Nikita’s heart clenched hard, overfull with love. “We’ll make it together,” he said, nudging his mate’s knee with his own.

It was Sasha’s turn to hum a satisfied note.

Bind him, Val had said. And Nikita thought that, maybe, he understood just what that meant, and not what his old anxieties had led him to believe.

He turned to Kolya. “I don’t have any idea what the day will bring,” he said, taking a deep breath, feeling anticipatory, and on the edge of something. “But you can stay. You can always stay.”Please stay, he didn’t say.

Kolya lifted one shoulder, and grinned in a lopsided way. “Where else would I go?”

Inside the apartment, a phone rang.

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