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Nikolai contemplates the glass in his hand, weighing the benefits of smashing it against the wall instead of pouring himself another shot of brandy. It would solve nothing, of course, but it might be a more effective emotional outlet than pacing around his bedroom, which has so far proved fruitless.
Today – well, yesterday – wasn’t supposed to go the way it did. His coronation was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era when things finally start getting better. Instead, they’ve got an escalation in the conflict with Fjerda, foreign dignitaries attacked at an official Ravkan event, which is bound to lead to a diplomatic scandal of unprecedented proportions, a drug that apparently makes Grisha all-powerful, a Sun Summoner who can use the Darkling’s signature move, and a king who–
He flexes his shoulder, an unpleasant tingling sensation shooting through it.
A king who might not be fit to be king at all.
A knock on the door startles him out of his thoughts. It’s the middle of the night, but an urgent matter may require the king’s attention at any time. Plus, his treacherous heart reminds him, there are other reasons for night-time visits, too.
Depositing his glass on the side table, he fastens his dressing gown more securely around his waist and opens the door.
Alina is on the other side, a déjà-vu and a fantasy. Hair tumbling down her shoulders in soft waves, nothing but a sheer lace robe over her nightgown. She doesn’t look like she has slept at all.
Nikolai steps aside to let her through without a word. The guards standing on either side of his door show no reaction to the king’s betrothed showing up at his door in the early hours of the morning in a state of undress, but Nikolai knows it will be a prime topic of palace gossip come morning anyway.
As soon as the door falls shut, Alina moves as if to throw herself in his arms but stops herself before she touches him. Nikolai squashes the disappointment. She turns her back to him, rubbing her forehead and moving with the same nervous energy that has been plaguing Nikolai all night.
“Sorry for disturbing you,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep and I saw your light was still on.”
Nikolai doesn’t point out that she would have to be right by his door to see light seeping from under it. He tries not to read into it.
“It’s okay. You know my door is always open to you.” He watches her cross to the centre of the room with restless strides, then to the window and back.
“Why is the mirror covered?” she asks distractedly. “Getting tired of your own good looks?”
Nikolai glances at the bedspread he’s thrown over the mirror to avoid catching a glimpse of himself or… not himself.
“Something like that,” he replies, swallowing the urge to press Alina to concede she’s basically just admitted she finds him good-looking. Not relevant right now. “Are you all right?” he asks instead, even thought the answer is obvious.
Alina stops her pacing and turns to face him.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “and it seems to me that the only sensible thing to do is to break off the engagement.”
Nikolai has been expecting her to say something like that ever since she accepted his emerald the second time, which he knows she only did because she was suddenly purposeless and had nowhere else to go after she had completed her mission and Mal had left. He knew from the start that the likelihood of them ever actually making it all the way to the altar was pitiably low. That doesn’t make hearing her actually say it any easier, though.
“I’d only cause problems for you now,” Alina continues. “What I did today – you don’t need a bride that slices people in half.”
“You saved everyone’s lives, Alina,” Nikolai reminds her. “We’d all be dead if it weren’t for you.”
Alina closes her eyes briefly, shaking her head. “Maybe. But once the news spreads, it won’t matter. People will say I only killed the Darkling because I wanted all the power for myself, or that I’m marrying you so I can usurp the throne and establish my own reign of terror, or something worse that I haven’t thought of yet, you know they will. Being engaged to me will only hurt your position now.”
She’s not wrong, of course. Nikolai could hardly have avoided the same thought, given how tenuous his claim to the throne is to begin with, as the Apparat has so graciously reminded him. Right now, though, he’s mostly just glad that this is Alina’s reason for wanting to end the engagement, that it’s not because he was an idiot and made her uncomfortable by making a stupid comment about wanting to kiss her.
Nikolai takes a step towards her, resisting the impulse to touch her. He did make that stupid comment and neither of them is properly dressed. Best not to cross any boundaries.
“If breaking off the engagement is what you want, then that’s what we’ll do.” That was always how it was going to be. He was honoured to be her safe haven while she needed him, but he would never make her stay with him against her wishes. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea to do it now. If it seems like I’m not on your side, it will only fuel the rumours. What we have to do is present a united front, and maybe you cou–”
“You’re not getting it,” Alina cuts him off. “The problem isn’t what people will think, the problem is how close they’ll be to the truth.” She sighs, then meets his eyes, very serious. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
Nikolai feels the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “What have you done?”
“I killed Mal,” Alina says so slowly it sounds like she’s forcing the words out against her own will, “and then I brought him back. I let everyone think Nina restarted his heart, but she didn’t. She tried but couldn’t do it, it was too late. He was dead, and I made him alive again. I made something out of nothing.”
Oh. So that was what happened. Nikolai never asked for details about how exactly the Fold was destroyed, how Alina managed to get the power of the third amplifier with Mal making it out with his life intact. She only gave him a vague explanation when they reunited and Nikolai didn’t pry, assuming the experience had been traumatic enough without him making her relive it. Mainly, he was just happy and relieved that they were both all right, despite the bleak outlook they had set out with.
“You used merzost,” he draws the inevitable conclusion. Another item to add to his ever-growing list of crises.
Alina nods grimly. “I knew there’d be a price, but I didn’t care. And you know what?” She looks at him with fire in her eyes, as if daring him to challenge her. “I still don’t care. I’d give anything in exchange for Mal’s life, and if it means that the Darkling was right and I’ve chosen the same path as him, then so be it. Now I can summon shadow and do the cut and I like it, and I don’t know what’s next. So if you want a fighting chance to keep the crown and actually do something good for this country, you shouldn’t want my name linked to yours.”
She looks at him with a mixture of desperation and resolution, scared of the consequences of her choices but without a smidge of regret for making them. Does she really think Nikolai would blame her for using every tool at her disposal to save Mal? That he would cut all ties with her and let her deal with the consequences on her own, washing his hands of her?
He steps closer to her, taking her hands in his. Alina looks down at their hands then back up at him, seemingly confused by the gesture.
“If you think I’m going to judge you for saving Mal’s life by any means necessary, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” he says quietly. “I’m not making light of it,” he adds when she opens her mouth to protest, “I understand merzost is not to be trifled with. But I also think most people would’ve done the same in your position if they had the ability. I know I would. It doesn’t put you on the same path as the Darkling.”
“It might.”
“But you won’t let it. That’s not you, Alina. You’re one of the most caring people I’ve ever met. You say you don’t care but you’re here right now, aren’t you? Telling me all this, essentially begging me to run and save myself. That’s how much you do care.”
Alina doesn’t look fully convinced but her features relax, something soft appearing in her eyes. Her fingers, lax until now, tighten in Nikolai’s grip.
“Do you trust me?” Nikolai murmurs, and she nods without hesitation.
“Then trust that what I told you this morning still stands: I’m honoured to have you by my side. And if you allow me to stay by yours, as your friend if not as your husband, then I’ll be honoured to help you face this.”
For a moment Nikolai fears he’s said something terribly wrong and she’s going to cry. She doesn’t, but when she speaks, it’s with a cracked voice.
“I’m so lucky that I know you, Nikolai Lantsov,” she says very softly. “I would be so very alone in this, too, if it weren’t for you.”
Nikolai shifts his weight and lets go of her hands, finding himself suddenly compelled to look at the floor, not quite prepared for her expressing such a feeling. He wants to deflect, mention that she has friends and a country that’s devoted to her, but he knows that’s not what she means. What she means is that the one person she’s come to rely on isn’t here.
Deserve her, Mal had told him, and Nikolai hopes he does. Not to replace Mal, he has no wish to do that, but simply to be there for her in his absence.
He clears his throat awkwardly. “Mal’s coming back, you know. I know you’re worried he won’t, but he will.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually,” Nikolai says with perhaps more confidence than strictly speaking warranted. “He has to return my compass.” Which doesn’t prove that Mal will come back to Alina, but Nikolai is certain of that, too.
Alina gives him a small, thoughtful smile.
“Your compass,” she repeats. “And your ship, your crew… your name.”
Nikolai winces. It doesn’t seem very subtle, laid out like that. He doesn’t add that if Mal wanted, he could keep it all, and more, forever.
“You love him,” Alina says simply. It’s not a question, and it doesn’t sound like something she’s only figured out now, either.
It seems pointless to try to disprove it. They have much bigger problems than Nikolai’s misguided feelings. Besides, he’s not ashamed. He just wishes he could stop complicating his own life.
“Yes,” he admits, the word quiet but clear.
“And you love me.”
Nikolai squeezes his eyes shut.
“Yes.”
He waits for Alina to say something about how she cares about him as a friend but her heart belongs to Mal. He braces himself for the finality of her rejection, but it never comes.
Instead, Alina is silent for a moment and then says contemplatively, “You know, I know for a fact that there were at least two boys back in Keramzin that Mal fooled around with.”
Nikolai’s eyes fly open. He never really stopped to wonder whether Mal was interested in men like that. What would be the point? He was in love with Alina, and that was the end of the matter. But now, with Alina bringing it up…
“Why are you telling me this?” he asks cautiously.
“I’m just saying, it’s not impossible. I could see it happening.” She says it like it’s a completely normal thing to say and not something that makes Nikolai’s entire chest squeeze with an emotion he can’t name. “He liked it when you flirted with him.”
Nikolai chokes on air. “Did he… tell you that?”
Alina’s smiles, amused and… fond? “No, but I have eyes.”
Nikolai has no idea what to say to that. The conversation seems entirely surreal. They were discussing shadow cuts and merzost just a moment ago, and now it’s suddenly about Mal and Nikolai’s feelings are in the open and Alina’s being all… weird.
After a moment of standing with his mouth hanging open, Nikolai settles on, “Sorry.”
“What for?”
“Flirting with your boyfriend right in front of you? What can I say, Sturmhond’s shameless.” He didn’t know then, back in the early days on the Volkvolny, what both Mal and Alina would come to mean to him.
Alina chuckles. “Not in the best of tastes, true, but… I never said I minded.”
Nikolai’s whole body goes very, very still. He’s not even sure he’s breathing.
“There’s no telling what he’ll want when he comes back. If he comes back,” Alina continues. “But I know what I want.”
Nikolai hasn’t been breathing, which becomes painfully apparent when his lungs suddenly decide to restart and he has to take in a huge gulp of air. It sounds like Alina’s saying… like she’s saying…
He looks at her open face, her eyes boring into his without flinching. The distance between them seems to have shrunk, somehow.
“What do you want?” he asks, barely managing to get the words out. His body moves of its own accord, no longer able to resist the force pulling him towards her.
“I want him,” she says, her voice very low but the only thing Nikolai can hear over his own thundering heart, “and you. I think I’ve wanted you for a while now. So don’t think I’m only here because he’s gone.”
She’s so close now that he has to bow his head slightly to look her in the eye, close enough that he could count her eyelashes. Nikolai feels frozen in place. Alina touches his chest, her hand running down the lapel of his dressing gown, not touching skin but close, so close.
“Is that okay?” she whispers, as if it being not okay was anywhere near the realm of possibility.
His chest heaving under her palm, Nikolai nods, lifting a hand to gently tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. He sees her eyelashes flutter, hears air escape her nostrils in a shaky burst at his touch.
Her gaze drops to his mouth and then Nikolai is kissing her, unsure which one of them moved first. It doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter that despite what she thinks she feels now, she may find she has no use for him once Mal is back. If all Nikolai gets to be is a brief interlude in her life during Mal’s absence, he’ll take it. If all he gets of Mal is those few bright moments on the Volkvolny and perhaps a fantasy shared with Alina, all of it snatched away when Mal and Alina reunite, he’ll take it.
All that matters is this, now, here. Kissing her, the feel of her in his arms, the soft slide of her lips, the way she raises herself on her tiptoes to press her body closer to his. The backs of Nikolai’s thighs hit the table in the centre of the room and he leans against it gratefully as holds her tighter, letting the kiss deepen.
“Nikolai,” she sighs when they separate for a brief gasp of breath, and hearing her say his name like that, like he’s something she’s starving for, is almost too much to take. He makes a wholly undignified noise that he muffles against her mouth, considering the distance to his bed and how to cross it without having to lose any point of contact between them.
But then her hand runs down the exposed V of his chest, fingertips slipping under the edge of his dressing gown, and Nikolai suddenly remembers that he hates his life.
“Alina,” he gasps, forcing himself to pull back when she chases his lips. “Alina, wait.”
She looks at him the way he’s seen her look at Mal, pink-kissed lips and a half-drunk look in her eyes, and he struggles to string coherent words together.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
Which is why, when Nikolai finds himself sitting shirtless on his bed with Alina next to him, touching his naked back, it’s much less erotic than he’d like it to be. Few things ruin the mood faster than informing your would-be lover you’re possessed by a shadow monster, it turns out.
Alina’s fingers trace the outline on the wound with the tips of her fingers, ever so careful. It seems to have gotten bigger since the morning.
“I could try pushing it out with my light,” she muses. “That could work, couldn’t it?”
“Maybe,” Nikolai says, though privately he doubts it will be that easy. “I guess it can’t hurt.”
Which is where he’s wrong – when Alina places her palm over the wound, he doesn’t even see the burst of light, that’s how blinding the pain is. It spears through him like an arrow and he throws himself out of Alina’s reach on instinct, ending up on the floor next to the bed. He barely manages to cover his mouth with his palm to muffle a scream of pain so that his guards wouldn’t burst in, thinking the king was being assassinated.
“Saints, I’m sorry!” Alina is immediately on her knees next to him, reaching for him but not daring to touch him. “Are you all right?”
“I think so,” Nikolai gasps. The pain has receded as quickly as it had come, but the shock of it is still reverberating through his body.
Alina helps him to his feet and keeps hold of his hand when they sit back down on the edge of the bed. Her touch is comforting now, relaxing the tension in his muscles.
“So that didn’t work,” Nikolai points out the obvious.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe…” Alina hesitates, her thumb drawing thoughtful circles on the back of Nikolai’s hand. “If I can do the cut, maybe I could learn to control this, too. Just… guide it out, somehow.”
It’s as if a Heartrender had stopped the course of blood flowing through Nikolai’s veins.
He turns his head to stare at her. “You think you could control… a shadow monster,” he says, spelling it out because it doesn’t seem like Alina is taking in the meaning of her own words. “Alina, that’s exactly the kind of thing we just talked about you not doing.”
“I know, but if it helped you?”
Her face is full of concern and Nikolai can see how deeply she actually cares about him, which, under normal circumstances, would make his heart somersault – and it still kind of does, except there’s something else, too. A glint in her eye, an eagerness to accept the challenge presented by Nikolai’s condition, to see what she could do.
Nikolai realises then that he didn’t take her concerns seriously enough before. Now I can summon shadow and do the cut and I like it, she said, but he brushed it out of his mind. He thought she was too full of light to ever find herself on a slippery slope, but now he can see that she’s on it already, and he may have severely overestimated his ability to pull her off it.
Giving Mal his life back, stopping a massacre, healing Nikolai… all seemingly good things, but where do they lead?
“No,” Nikolai says firmly. “You’re not doing that. Not for this, not for me, not for anything.”
“But we don’t know how fast it will spread, what it will do to you… and you’re the king.”
Nikolai hardly needs the reminder. He grits his teeth.
“You said you trusted me, so trust me. This isn’t the way.”
Promise me, he wants to say but doesn’t, because he’s not sure a broken promise from Alina Starkov is something he could live with.
She holds his gaze for a long time, emotion flickering in her eyes. The desperate need to help him, a wish he would let her, the fear of what might happen if he doesn’t… and if he does.
Eventually, she nods. “I guess you’re right. Kirigan couldn’t actually control the nichevo'ya himself, so I probably couldn’t, either.”
Nikolai tells himself he doesn’t hear the lack of conviction in her voice. The suspicion that she would be able to do all kinds of things Kirigan never could.
She stands up, ready to spring to action.
“We’ll find another way,” she says, clearly trying to convince herself as much as him. “This can’t get out, obviously, but we’ll need help. So I… I’ll go get Zoya and Genya, that’s the first step. We can trust them, and we’ll–”
“Alina.” Nikolai grabs her wrist to stop her. “It’s barely an hour until sunrise. I think we can let them get a full night’s sleep before we give them more bad news.”
There’s a brief moment where it looks like Alina will protest, insist on getting started as soon as possible, but she gives in almost immediately. She moves her hand until her fingers are threaded with his, lets him pull her back to him, to stand between his open knees.
He knows she knows Zoya and Genya are far from being his primary concern, that what he really wants is for this sleepless night not to have to end. This interlude that he now fears might be shorter than he previously thought. He wants to postpone the start of whatever it is they have to do next, some kind of futile chase after a cure, the hopelessness of it, the inevitability of Alina bringing up her solution again when it takes too long.
He doesn’t want to wonder if some part of her desire for him is just the dark thing in her calling out to the dark thing in him.
All he wants to think about is the gentle touch of her fingers on the sides of his face, the beat of her pulse on her wrist against his lips, the warmth of her hips under his hands, the way her hair tickles his face when she bends down to kiss him. The taste of her. Her nightgown riding up when she straddles him, the soft skin of her thighs.
Nikolai has had perhaps more than his fair share of lovers, but no one has ever touched him with such tenderness as Alina does now, showing him that he’s not alone in wanting to make this moment last as long as possible. The only saving grace: that they’re in this together, whatever it turns out to be.
He wants to believe that they can keep this, somehow, the quiet joy of coming together as the night fades, unmarred by lurking shadows. He wants to believe that Mal will return home to a country that’s not in shambles, to the woman he loves and a man he might, possibly, still like to flirt with, and that he won’t have to save either of them. That they’ll have a chance to explore if there’s anything there, between the three of them.
He hopes Mal makes it back in time.
*