Aleksis' Request **

Nicolae could only gulp down the wine and didn't answer. He didn't want to pretend to have forgotten about Aleksis in front of his brother.

"I still need time." In the end, that was all he said.

Nicolae didn't like being alone. That's why he had recently enjoyed living with his father and now with the twins. If he was alone, he would often think of the four years he was together with Aleksis, and that's not good.

He remembered that he waited for Aleksis to accept his proposal for more than three years. Nicolae sometimes imagined how it would have been if he had been a little more aggressive and asked Aleksis to accept his love back then. They could have been married now, and the child who would be born soon would be his child.

If Alaric returned when Nicolae had already married Aleksis, then inevitably, Alaric and Aleksis's marriage would be annulled because of his 'death'.