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I want to make things better. Make thingsright.

“Why don’t we give them a call? See how they’re doing. And… see if we can help?”

Ethan smiled. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

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52

Siziwang Banner

Inner Mongolia

General Song metthem on the wind-whipped tarmac. A turboprop plane waited behind him, the engines warming up.

“So,” he said, smiling at Sergey, Sasha, and Ilya. Ilya was on crutches, cursing their existence every other moment. “Where will you go?”

Sergey and Sasha’s arms were around each other, Sasha’s ring glinting on his right ring finger over Sergey’s hip. “I will find a ring for you,” he’d said to Sergey. “And as soon as I do, we will marry.”

“I’m already yours,” Sergey had said, kissing him. “Nothing will change that.”

Now they were boarding a plane, going anywhere. For the first time, Sasha didn’t feel his soul burning when he thought of Russia. The world from space was a delicate, breathtaking wonder, without boundaries or borders.

Sergey carried a single duffel with all their belongings. Two new cell phones, Oleg’s wallet, a few changes of clothes. All that was left.

All that they needed.

“Anywhere,” Sergey said, smiling at Sasha. “As long as I am with you forever, that is all that matters.”

Everything, every single thing in his entire life, had led him to this moment. To stepping into his future at Sergey’s side, hand in hand, the world and all of her demands behind both of them. They had crossed the ocean. They had survived the storm. Together.

He’d thought before that love was an elusive and unreachable core of a black hole. Something out of reach, locked away from him. A mystery of the universe he would never untangle.

Love was meeting Sergey’s eyes across a Kremlin hospital suite, choking back his agony while his heart—and his life—stopped and restarted. It wasthatmoment his entire life had led to, forward and backward in time. In every universe, in every permutation of existence, their souls were conjoined, lovers sparked at the dawn of time.

You and your love were created in the same moment of the same atom and then scattered for a billion years.

He is of you, and you are of him.

He would always meet Sergey. And he would always love him.

Sasha squeezed Sergey’s hand and stroked a thumb over his knuckles. “Forever is only our beginning.”

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