Alex Pov
The question left my lips before I could stop myself, and once it was out there, I felt a strange weight settle in the room. It wasn’t what I expected to ask—hell, I wasn’t even sure why I’d asked it. But there it was, hanging between us like an open door I couldn’t close.
Nikolai didn’t answer immediately. The bed shifted as he adjusted, and I tried not to notice the way his presence seemed to fill the space. His silence only made me more aware of how close we were, how tangled up we’d become in this whole mess. I was still trying to wrap my mind around what had just happened between us, how everything had shifted in the blink of an eye.
“I’ve… had feelings,” he said after a long pause. His voice was quiet, almost hesitant. “But love? That’s a different thing altogether.”
I
