Page 59 of Goldrage (The Chrysophilist Trilogy #3)

Hours later, the evening has turned into something peaceful. Lorenzo and Eleanora have taken Roby for ice cream as a bribe to stop him from whining about wanting more chocolate. The patio is ours now, just Aurelia and me in the perfect temperature.

“Remember when Valentine first gave me a gun and I went out with you and Julian to hunt?” Aurelia says suddenly, her head on my shoulder. “And I shot Julian in the foot?”

I surprise myself by laughing, all the wine having loosened me up. “Thankfully it was only a BB gun or Julian would’ve lost a toe. You’ve gotten… marginally better since then.”

She swats my chest. “Hey. Didn’t you almost shoot Lucian’s ear off once?”

I hide my smile behind my wine glass. “That was a faulty rifle.”

“Uh-huh. Sure it was.”

We trade stories like currency: Valentine teaching her to hot-wire cars for no reason at all, Valentine’s terrible cooking that we all pretended to love, the way he’d grunt instead of using actual words when he was thinking.

Then, inevitably, we circle back to more stories about Julian .

“He used to steal my books,” I find myself saying. “When we were young. He’d sneak into my room and take whatever I was reading, then pretend he’d found it somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“Because he wanted to read the same things. Emulate me and be able to talk about subjects I liked.” My throat tightens. “I always knew but never said anything. I let him think he was getting away with it.”

Aurelia’s hand finds mine. “That’s so sweet.

I keep thinking about how he’d sometimes sneak me up to the penthouse during those stupid parties.

We’d hide and make fun of all the hideous outfits.

One time, this woman came out to the patio wearing this giant feather hat and Julian said it looked like a dead peacock.

I laughed so hard soda came out my nose. ”

I can see it: Julian’s wicked humor when he let himself relax.

“He was brilliant,” I say. “Could have been anything if our parents hadn’t—” I stop and swallow hard. “If I hadn’t failed him.”

“Adrian.” Aurelia’s voice is firm. She turns my face toward hers, forcing me to meet her eyes. “You didn’t fail him. He made his choices.”

“I should have?—”

“What? Fix two decades of damage that you didn’t cause?” Her thumb brushes my cheek, and I realize I’m crying again. “You tried. God, you tried so hard. But some people can’t be saved. They have to save themselves.”

“He was my little brother. ”

“And you loved him. That matters. Even at the end, even through everything, you loved him. He knew that.”

We sit in silence and gaze out at the night, listening to the crickets. My tears dry slowly, and Aurelia stays pressed against me.

“Valentine would have hated this,” she says eventually. “All this crying and talking about feelings.”

“He would have grunted and gone to clean his guns.”

“Then made us terrible coffee and pretended he wasn’t listening while we talked.”

“That coffee.” I actually smile at the memory. “It was like drinking motor oil.”

She sniffs besides me and then wipes her cheeks. “I miss them both so much.”

“Me too.”

And we sit there, two broken people doing our best to hold each other up through the pain. Tomorrow, we’ll start figuring out what comes next. Tomorrow, we’ll have to be more than our grief.

But tonight, we have this, memories and wine and the slow, painful, necessary process of letting go while holding on.

Aurelia’s hand lingers in mine and all my heart needs is to be with her.

I squeeze and she squeezes back, an unspoken agreement that nothing else matters, not for the next few hours.

We retreat to our bedroom without words, without the pretense of hunger or thirst or sleep. Only the need to be together.

We undress each other in the blue dark, my hands more reverent than urgent.

I pull the sweater up over her head, careful not to catch the chain of my necklace at her nape, then slide it down her arms and let it fall.

Her hair crackles with static and glows against the gloom.

She stands there in her bra, her eyes searching mine for the tiniest sign of hesitation, and finding none, she unhooks it.

Her pale skin is mapped with years of life and experiences—faint lines, a scatter of freckles, round cigar burns.

I press my mouth just above the scar on her breast and feel her heartbeat thrum against me.

Alive. My Aurelia is alive. Her fingers thread into my hair, anchoring me to her as if I might dissolve with the next breath. Maybe I will.

She pulls my face up to hers and kisses me with a hunger that surprises even her; there’s a tremor in her lips, a desperation in the way her teeth graze mine. She wants to be obliterated, to drown, and who am I to hold her back?

We stumble until the backs of her knees hit the mattress and we tip together, landing messily, a tangle of limbs and longing. She pulls me with her as her nails rake down my back.

I drag my mouth down her throat, following the pulse of her life with my lips. She arches up for more. Her hands move with frantic reverence, unfastening, undressing, always touching, as if to convince herself I’m really here.

All I want is to be worthy of her. I want to make her feel something other than loss, if only for tonight.

Soon, we’re both naked and I lower myself over her, skin to skin, the weight of my body pinning her to the mattress. She laughs, then bites her lip to stop it .

“What?” I ask, kissing her again.

She shakes her head, tears mixing with the sweat on her cheeks. “I just… I missed this. I missed you.”

“I’ll never leave your side again.”

She parts her knees and hooks her ankles behind my thigh, urging me closer. She looks up at me as I enter her, eyes glazed and unblinking, and I nearly come undone from the way she gazes at my face.

“I love you with everything that I am,” I whisper in the dark.

I move slowly at first, then not at all, and just hold her. Aurelia’s hands splay across my back. She feels like sunlight, a warmth I never thought I’d know again. The press of her hips against mine is insistent, but her mouth says please don’t ever let go. So I don’t.

Tiny sounds escape her as I begin to move again. The friction is desperate and imperfect. My face is wet and I’m not sure if it’s her tears or mine, but we keep going. My thrusts become deeper, faster. Her moans become louder as she clings to me.

I lose myself in her. Each movement, each gasp draws us closer to the end. It isn’t explosive, it isn’t cinematic. It is the slow collapsing of two broken things finally allowed to rest in each other.

When she comes, it’s with a sob that breaks me open. I join her, my body shaking, mouth sealed to her throat, promising, promising, promising—until there’s no language left, just the raw insistence of breath and the dizzying fullness of loss and love intertwined.