[Nico’s POV]
Everything.
The word hangs in fluorescent light, small and devastating, and something in me breaks along a fault line I didn't know was still active.
My thumbs trace the bruises forming beneath his cheekbones—purple darkening over Nordic pale—and I think about how this is the most dangerous thing I've ever done.
Not the kiss. The danger is that I mean it.
I close the distance slowly enough that he could stop me. He doesn't. My mouth finds his—careful around the split lip, tasting antiseptic and copper and underneath it, him.
Soren's breath hitches, his good eye falling shut, and the sound he makes barely qualifies as sound. More like surrender given a frequency as his fingers curl into the front of my shirt, not pulling—holding on. Like I'm the only fixed point left in a world that just beat the shit out of him.
I lift him off the counter—dead weight of exhaustion and a body beaten past its limits. His arms loop around my neck, face pressing into my throat, and I carry him to the bed.
The hotel sheets are cool and white as I lower him onto them, his hair fanning across the pillow—dark gold streaked with dried blood near the temple. The bruise around his left eye has swollen to a livid crescent. His ribs are a mottled landscape of red and purple that will blacken by morning.
He's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and right now he looks like a crime scene.
My hands find the hem of his shirt and I ease it up slowly—over the bruised ribs, past the scraped skin along his flank where pavement tore through cotton.
He winces, a sharp intake through his teeth, and I pause, smooth my palm flat against the uninjured stretch of his stomach until his breathing steadies. "I've got you," I murmur, and his throat works on a swallow, his fingers finding my wrist and pressing there—over the pulse point—like he needs proof that I'm real.
Part of me knows this is dangerous.
Every time I let Soren closer, I'm handing the same person the same knife. I remember being seventeen. The letter. What it cost to trust this man the first time—the annihilation of it, the years rebuilding a self from wreckage.
But his hands are shaking as I work his belt open, and I steady them with mine, and the tenderness comes out before I can stop it.
Muscle memory from a version of us that existed before everything went wrong.
I undress him with patience I didn't plan to show—easing fabric past scraped knuckles, peeling denim down long legs that tremble under my touch. The hard planes of his chest rising unevenly, the V-cut of his hips, the vulnerable hollow of his throat where his pulse beats visible and fast.
I lean down and press my mouth to the worst bruise—a dark bloom over his lower ribs—so gently he shudders.
"Nico…" His voice is barely there. Raw, scraped hollow. Not a question or a command. Just my name, offered like it's the only word left in his vocabulary.
I pull my shirt over my head and lower myself against him—chest to chest, skin to skin, bearing my weight on my forearms to keep pressure off the damaged ribs.
The contact draws a sound from deep in his throat, and his hands come up to trace the muscles of my back with fingers that still tremble. I kiss the hinge of his jaw, the bruised cheekbone, the corner of his swollen mouth.
Each one a sentence in a language we've never spoken.
Every encounter before this has been combat. This is something else entirely.
When I take him in my hand—hard despite the exhaustion, flushed and heavy—I stroke slowly, watching his face. His head drops back, lips parting, the tendons in his neck standing taut as his hips rise into my grip.
Thumb circling the swollen head, spreading the slick that gathers at the tip, my fist dragging down with a pressure that makes his stomach muscles clench beneath bruised skin.
"Herregud—" The Swedish breaks out of him breathless, and his fingers dig into my shoulders as his spine arches off the sheets. Every involuntary sound, every language he reaches for when English fails—proof that he's not performing.
This is Soren with every wall leveled, and the sight of him undone does something to my chest that I'll never be able to undo.
I prepare him with care that terrifies me—slick fingers working slowly, reading every flinch, adjusting when his bruised ribs protest. His body opens incrementally, breath catching in stuttered rhythms, one hand fisted in the sheets, the other gripping my forearm.
"Still with me?" I ask against his temple, and he nods, turning his face to catch my mouth in a kiss so desperate it answers every question I didn't ask.
When I finally press inside him, the heat is blinding—tight, pulsing, his body clenching around me as I sink in slowly, inch by careful inch, watching his face for any hurt beyond what his injuries already carry.
His good eye finds mine. The blue is nearly gone—pupil blown wide, wet at the edges—and what I see isn't lust.
It's something older, something that predates the hatred and the years. I hold still, fully seated, both of us breathing hard, and the silence carries a gravity that makes my chest ache.
I move with a care I didn't plan to show, and it scares me how natural it feels. Slow, deep strokes that draw almost entirely out before pressing back in, each deliberate enough that he feels every inch.
His legs wrap around my waist—battered body trembling—and I brace one hand beside his head, the other holding his hip as I set a rhythm closer to worship than anything we've ever been.
When his body begins to tighten—thighs shaking, fingers clawing at my back—I reach between us and wrap my hand around him, stroking in time with each thrust.
Soren comes apart beneath me in a way that feels less like physical release and more like emotional surrender.
His whole body arches, cock pulsing hot between my fingers, spilling across his stomach and mine, and the sound he makes is gutted—a raw, wrecked cry that breaks into something closer to a sob.
I follow seconds later, burying deep as the release rolls through me with devastating depth, my forehead dropping against his.
I'm not just witnessing vulnerability. I'm answering it with my own.
Afterward, his body gives out almost immediately. Adrenaline, endorphins, alcohol and pain converge into exhaustion so total that his breathing deepens within minutes, his face going slack against the pillow.
I ease out carefully, clean us both with a warm cloth, pull the sheets over him before lying beside him in the dark to watch the bruises deepen.
Estou me apaixonando por ele.
I'm falling in love with him.
The thought surfaces with the quiet certainty of something that was always there—not a revelation but a recognition.
Or maybe I never stopped. Maybe the hatred was just love with nowhere safe to go, and now that the walls are cracking, the original feeling is bleeding through—older and deeper than the hurt.
It terrifies me more than any crash ever could, because the first time nearly destroyed me, and this time I'm walking in with open eyes.
My phone lights up on the nightstand, the vibration muffled by wood. I turn my head just enough to read the name.
Julien: When can I see you again?
I look at the message and then at Soren—asleep, bruised, breathing softly against my pillow, fingers still loosely curled on the mattress between us, reaching for something even in sleep.
I reach over his body and turn the phone face down.