The cut along my left jaw throbs in time with the bass that leaks through the cab’s thin door. The stitches tug when I swallow. I taste antiseptic and copper. Vitaly said it would make me remember him.

I will remember—just not the way he wanted.

Anger steadies me better than the painkillers the clinic offered. I refused them. I want the ache. I want it bright enough, right now, to keep my spine straight as I step out into the night and face the black glass building that is Rope. The name is etched small in brass. No marquee. No line. Just a door and two men who see everything.

I am here to make Vitaly pay for what he did to me in a way he understands.

“Members only,” one guard says, the kind of man who doesn’t need to raise his voice. The other scans me.

“I’m here for the owner,” I tell them, even though my heart taps frantically against my ribs. “Roman Ekimov.”

The taller one lifts a brow. I take a black card from my purse and hold it steady. He turns it over, says something in Russian into a lapel mic I can’t see, then nods to the door. The lock releases with a soft sigh.

“Mind your manners,” he says.

Inside, the night becomes a living thing. Rope is a cathedral to kink. Red lines mark thresholds. Staff move like friendly ghosts. A couple laughs breathlessly as a knot is tested and admired. Conversations hum under the beat, low and private. It should feel sordid. It feels curated. It feels like rules keep this place on just this side of legal.

And then I see him.

Roman Ekimov sits on a black throne that should be ridiculous and isn’t. The platform is not high, just enough to make a focal point. People dance in front of him like the ocean deciding what to do about a rock. He doesn’t preen. He doesn’t smile. He watches. Not hunting. Measuring.

Light catches silver at his temples and the precise line of his mouth. He is built to last longer than the night—thick muscles and restless energy looking for a target.

Vitaly had choice words about his father. Neglectful. Monstrous. Absent.

But I see a man in a tailored black button-down and matching trousers, posture easy with strength, hands relaxed on the carved arms of his chair as if he grew there. He looks like control given breath. Not the feckless man his son described.

I step to the dance floor’s edge. I do not dance. Bodies bend and glitter and sway, vying for his attention. I walk a straight line, the beat parting around me the way a current will bow around a stone. A few heads turn. Some smiles are invitations. I hardly notice them. The rope motif coils over ceiling beams, traced in shadow. The air smells like cedar and something warmer, like heat held in wood.

Five steps from his platform, I stop. My jaw stings. I lift my chin anyway. I look him dead in the eye and hold.

He sees me.

He does not drop his gaze to my mouth or my dress or the bandages on my skin. His eyes are dark and steady, and they stay with mine as if fastening a cable in place. The room thins to a line of attention drawn taut between us. The music keeps breathing. People keep moving. But the altitude changes.

He lifts two fingers—approach.

I step onto the platform. Close, he smells like leather and winter air. He looks even less patient and even more courteous. I don’t know what I expected—threat, certainly—but the thing I feel most is the relief of being seen.

“What business brings you to my chair?” he asks, voice low and textured, an invitation shaped like a test.

“The boys here are nothing,” I say, words careful around the sting. “I want a man, so I found you.”

Something like amusement moves at the corner of his mouth. It isn’t unkind. He glances at my eyes and nowhere else. “You don’t dance.”

“Not for attention I don’t want.”

“And what do you want?”

“You,” I say, and heat flares in my cheeks that has nothing to do with the tape. “Tonight.”

He tips his head a fraction. Approval comes as the softest exhale. He sets his glass aside. “Then you’ll have to let me know how careful to be.” His eyes dart to my jaw for less than a second.

I don’t look away. “Don’t be careful with me.”

His hand rises, palm open, not a command. He pauses an inch from my jaw. When he touches me, it’s to the unhurt skin, thumb sliding under my ear in a stroke so delicate it steals my breath. I didn’t expect tenderness to feel like power. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

“I will.”

He draws me in. The first press of his mouth is deliberate, not a rush or a claim but a promise of both if I want them. Heat unfurls low in my belly, steady and deep. My hand finds his lapel. The fabric is fine and slick against my fingers. I open to him because I asked for this and I intend to keep asking.

Applause bursts somewhere at the far end of the room. A laugh arcs like a comet. The bass shifts into a darker pocket. He lifts his free hand and brushes a small button set into the throne’s arm. Panels rise around us with a whispering slide—smoked glass that refracts the room into warmth and color while granting us a new kind of quiet. Not a cage. A boundary.

“They cannot see us now.” He watches my face as the world softens. “Still yes?”

“Yes.”

He smiles now, not big, not bright, just real. He kisses me again, deeper, the kind that requires my name even if he doesn’t say it yet. Kissing makes my jaw ache worse, but I don’t care. I rise onto my toes and meet him hard enough that our breath tangles. He steadies me with a palm at my hip and then guides me backward until the edge of the throne meets my thighs. The chair is broad enough for two. Or three. Maybe more.

He sits and draws me into his lap without breaking the kiss, arranging me to be comfortable. My dress slides over my thighs. His hands are heat and intention. One at my spine, one at my thigh, fingers firm, patient. He does not hurry. He explores at his leisure.

I answer by learning him in return—jaw, cheek, the shallow divot at his temple where gray threads through. Touching, teasing, kissing, he seems to like it all. “Good,” he murmurs, mouth at the corner of mine. “Just like that.”

I am suddenly greedy. I kiss him until I’m dizzy, and I’m over the foreplay. He lets me take what I want and then takes it back, not to punish, but because the dance is better when it’s shared.

“Careful,” he says when my hand skims the side of my face by habit. He catches my wrist, turns my palm, kisses the center of it. The gesture is so unexpectedly reverent that it undoes me a little. I make a sound I’ve never made in public.

His answering inhale is sharp, hungry, contained. “Tell me to stop,” he says again, rougher now.

“Don’t you dare,” I breathe, and the words break on a laugh that surprises both of us. His smile flashes, quick and devastating, before heat takes it.

We move together with the kind of focus that empties the mind. I am aware of the glass humming with the music. Of shadows moving outside our little square of privacy. Of the way he keeps his touch clear of the wound without treating me like something fragile. He finds the places that make me say yes without words and returns to them with patience and precision until the yes fills the air around us.

His hands slide under my dress and over my underwear-covered ass. “Beauty, I am quickly losing my restraint.”

“Good.”

He arches a brow in a question. Now?

I nod once, and the next thing I feel is him ripping the fragile lace apart until my panties are a stringy memory. I go for his zipper, and when I reach inside his trousers, it’s all I can do not to panic.

How is that going to fit anywhere?

But I came all this way, and I’m not a quitter. I want revenge.

When his fingers glide over my slick pussy, I gasp at the sensation. It makes him smile. “There?”

“Yes.” The word contains no breath.

But I am here for a mission, not an orgasm. I grab his cock, stroking it until I have his full attention.

“Soft hands.”

“I’m softer inside.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” He aligns our hips and pulls me on top of him. When he starts to enter me, it’s a stretch. I lose my breath and wonder if this was a mistake, but there’s no going back now.

I wouldn’t if I could.

I’m halfway down his shaft when he loops an arm behind me and suddenly stands, flipping us around. He presses another button on the throne’s arm, and the throne reclines, lies flat. He lays me down, using the throne’s arms for leverage as he works the rest of his cock into me.

Slowly.

Excruciatingly slowly.

As he buries himself, he reaches down for my clit with one hand, and braces himself with the other on my throat. Not choking, but claiming. His dark eyes bore a hole into my soul as he fucks me. Heat rises through my core, and I’m twitching against him, so fucking close.

He grunts, “Is this what you wanted, Beauty? To get fucked hard by a man who knows how?”

“Yes,” I growl out.

“Come on my cock!”

From his mouth to my body, it rips through me, equal parts devastation and ecstasy. Shock wave after shock wave take over, and I’m helpless in his hands. He pounds me into the throne, a man possessed.

Until suddenly, he flips me over again, onto my hands and knees. Then he plows into me from behind. Inches of his length graze my G-spot. He smacks my ass, and the vibration triggers another orgasm, this one taking my hands out from under me. I’m face down, ass up, and all I can do is lie there and take it. Too weak to do anything else.

“You take my cock like such a good girl.” His words pour like honey. “That dress of yours will be ruined if I come on it. So I will come in you instead, da?”

“Mm, yes, come in me!”

He unleashes himself until he finally comes deep inside of me with a howl. His body jerks like he can’t help it, but eventually, things slow to a stop. There is only heat and breath and the grounded anchor of his hands on my hips. He strokes my skin reverently until he spreads himself over my back and kisses my neck. “That was foolish of us.”

It makes me grin. “It was. And I don’t care.”

“Right now, neither do I.” He pulls out, making an absolute mess between us. But he doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, he turns me around and kisses me until I can’t see straight. “Usually, I know a girl’s name before I fuck her.”

I laugh. “Mystery is good for the soul.”

He gives me a full smile at that. “I suppose it can be. There is a bathroom behind the curtain.”

I pull him down for one last kiss. “Thanks.” He doesn’t need to know I’m not coming back after I clean up, and I’m not one for goodbyes. The bathroom is private—it links to the strange space of his temporary throne room and nowhere else.

But it has a window that leads to the alley out back, and from there, I get back to the main road and the rest of my life. Vitaly hears all the gossip at Rope, which means he will hear about the scarred girl his father hooked up with.

I wish I could see his face when he hears it.

One Year Later

Fyodor rides across from me, my sovetnik and the closest thing I have to a second father, hat in his lap, back straight like he’s in a pew and not the back of my SUV. Marcus drives, silent and sure. We took the two-lane through the trees to avoid cameras and the late commuter mess. I want a short night, a short conversation, and a shipment of guns that should have been in my warehouse two days ago.

“Belfour says the port is the problem,” Fyodor reports. “Random inspections. New inspector. Crate pulled, then pushed back to the stack.”

“If a crate is mine, it does not sit in a stack. I pay good money to make sure that doesn’t happen.” The glass shows me my face in a pale strip—the kind of reflection that makes a man look like memory. “What else does he say?”

“That he did what he could. That he wants to explain it to you in person.”

William Belfour has been on my payroll five years. He started as a pair of hands who could keep a schedule and keep his mouth shut. Now he signs receiving slips and talks to foremen. Useful, but not irreplaceable. No one is.

I look out at the tree trunks rushing past, straight and close, like bars. Belfour asked for a face-to-face. He will get one. He will bring a reason. I will decide if it is a lie. This is the way of things in my business.

Fyodor inclines his head, the respectful nod of a man who taught you how to stand and still lets you stand on your own. “You do not like him.”

“I don’t have to like him to employ him.”

He smiles a little. He was there for all the years when that answer was different. He changes the subject. “Other matter. The Korsakov boys tried to sniff around the river. We turned them away.”

“Good. They can sniff a different river.”

We roll past a bridge that no one has bothered to light. The water under it takes the moon and makes it a mirror.

Fyodor clears his throat. “Roman, they could be useful.”

“No.”

He presses his hat brim once as if to hold back a thought and lets it go. I know he’s aggravated by my answer, but I don’t employ hoodlums. I keep a certain amount of class in my operations. It’s the only way to keep the government off our backs.

Fyodor isn’t a quitter. “The oldest one is a crack shot⁠—”

The windshield pops. A white star appears left of center, small as a coin, bright as a fuse.

One shot could be a drunk hunter.

Marcus doesn’t flinch. He speeds up. “Windshield,” he says, quiet, to mark the moment. He looks past the beam of the headlights into the trees. Nothing to see.

My window takes a hit and sings. The new laminate earns its price. No hole. Just a sheet of spiderweb that throws the dashboard glow back at me.

“Left side,” Fyodor says. He already has his jacket open, his old-man hands faster than most boys. His eyes are clear. The lines around them hold a history I owe him for.

“Hold steady,” I tell Marcus. “No brake. If you kill the speed, you kill us.”

“Yes, sir.” He threads us through a bend. The trailing motorcycle stays back, hunting for angles that don’t exist on this road.

Another impact, higher, then one on the passenger side. Whoever is out there has patience. A man who wants to scare you shoots too much, too fast. This one is taking his time.

“Far tree line,” Marcus says. “No muzzle flash.”

My gaze goes to the shoulder. Ditch, brush, then trunks. No guardrail. Plenty of roots.

The glass in this SUV is new. I replaced every panel in the fleet last quarter after a rooftop lesson I did not ask for. Laminated fronts. Composite side panes. My other trucks too. It was a line item that made my accountant frown and helped me sleep.

“Two percent off the gas. Not more.” I reach under my seat for the case. The Desert Eagle has the weight I like. I check the chamber and magazine even though I checked them in the garage. Fyodor glances at the gun and gives me the smallest lift of his chin and his pistol. Ready.

“You want the shoulder?” he asks.

“Not yet. It’s⁠—”

The world lifts.

It’s a clean, wrong sensation—like stepping for a stair and finding air. Then the slam. Metal screaming, plastic popping. The flash. Light where the road should be. Treetops where the horizon should sit. We tilt and spin. The belt yanks me across the ribs. Glass sparkles in the air.

We roll. The nose whacks into a tree, sending us spinning faster. The third hit is a slide—a rush of brush and dirt and bark under our side. We hit another tree and stop with a long, sick groan. My window is now the roof. The dashboard ticks and settles like a stove cooling.

“Answer me,” I say. My voice is calm. It always is after the world tries to take it from me.

“Here,” Marcus says. Cough. “Belt jammed. Legs okay.”

“Present,” Fyodor answers. He inhales slow, like a doctor checking the dark. “Shoulder angry. Nothing broken. Shit. My arm might be broken. Head ringing.”

“Do not move.”

He starts to anyway. “Are you⁠—”

I stop him. “No.”

He knows why before I say it. He still wants to argue. “If they planted a mine⁠—”

“Then they want bodies,” I say. “They want to see them, they want to make sure we’re dead. Doors will be their targets. We are loud if we open anything.” I close one eye and leave the other slitted, the way a man plays dead without surrendering. “Play dead. Both of you.”

Marcus understands and makes himself heavy in the harness. Fyodor goes limp, slowing his breaths. He angles his pistol up and away from me and Marcus, ready for whatever comes next. He mutters something that could be a prayer.

Waiting is a job. I taste copper and sweat. My lip is raw—must’ve banged into my teeth somehow. Adrenaline keeps the worst of it at bay, but my head is ringing too. Hardly my first concussion. It won’t be my last.

I’m going to get this piece of shit.

The forest moves around us—leaf, twig, wind. The engine gives up its heat. I smell burned earth and our own coolant. Someone built this trap for me. They know the weight of my car and where I am likely to put it. Sap smells sharp where a branch snapped.

“Hear anything?” I whisper.

“Leaves,” Fyodor murmurs. “My heart.”

Marcus is quiet for a count of ten. “Motorcycle,” he says finally. “Coming in.”

I hear it too, the thin snarl, then the cut to silence. A man could park on the shoulder, kill the light, and approach through the ditch. He would want to look into the cabin. He would want to see that he took me down.

If he’s a hitter, he needs to prove the kill. If he’s not, this is personal and he’ll wanna know he got me. Either way, he’s coming to me.

His last mistake.

I tilt my head so my line of sight covers the broken rectangle above us—the blown window that looks like a skylight. The tree line is a dark page. The stars are a handful of salt. Time stretches thin enough to see through.

A footstep in leaves. Fabric whispers against bark. A twig snaps underfoot. Whoever it is, he learned to move quiet but didn’t practice much in the woods. A city boy.

A head rises in the window.

For a fraction, the face is only a shape with my gun aimed at it. He leans down to look closer, and the light catches his face. The years fall away and a day in a hospital returns. Tiny fingers, a mouth that searched my knuckle like it could drink from it. That memory is as fast and useless as a flashbulb. I let it go.

Vitaly.

He looks older and younger at once—cheeks a little hollow, eyes too bright, not enough sleep, not enough peace, too much cocaine. He holds his pistol proud and high, the way he held his first knife at twelve when he wanted me to see it. He thinks this will make him a man. He thinks this will make me small. He learned from me how to move. He refused to learn when to stop.

He scans our faces. He doesn’t see mine until the angle shifts and the stars do their bad trick of lighting what should stay dark. I feel the hesitation rise in me because I am not a monster. He’s my son.

His muzzle dips. He chooses a target. Me, of course. It has always been me.

I shoot first.

Thunder in the cabin. The tempered glass above me shatters and showers us. Vitaly whips sideways. My round takes bark from a tree trunk where his head was a breath ago. He’s quick. He always was quick. He rolls out of sight the way a boy drops from a wall when his father opens the back door.

A shot answers, wild and high. Another hits the undercarriage with a dumb clang. Then nothing. The woods breathe like they’re relieved to be left alone again.

No one in the trees moves to flank. No second engine starts. I count to three, to five, to fifteen, the old script of staying alive. The motorcycle coughs awake, closer than I like, then climbs the road in a rising whine and disappears.

“Coast is clear,” I say.

Marcus lets out a long breath and then laughs once, sharp and tired. “I hate that phrase. Every time we say it, I don’t believe it.”

“Believe the silence,” I tell him.

Fyodor opens his eyes. He looks at the broken window and then at me. “You hesitated.” It isn’t a rebuke.

“I did. Then he raised his gun.”

“You shot first.”

“I’m his father. Not his shield.” I set the safety with my thumb and keep the pistol low. My hands are steady again. “If I had been slower, you wouldn’t be asking me questions.”

He nods once. It’s the nod he used to give me when I was sixteen and lying about something small—approval for the honesty, warning for the lie in the first place. He listens to the road the way I do. It stays empty. The trees go on being trees instead of places for my son to hide.

“Think he’ll climb a tree to get a better shot?”

I huff a laugh at that. “Vitaly? No chance.” A useless memory keeps returning. Vitaly at six, standing under the old apple tree in our yard, small fists on his hips, looking up like the trunk has insulted him.

He’s afraid of climbing. Not of height. Branches talk back when you put weight on them. He hates that.

I show him how to do it. Hands flat, not grabbing with fingers. Three points on the tree at all times. Keep your chest close. Test the next hold with more patience than pride. He nods, bored. He wants a ladder. He wants certainty under his feet that comes from someone else’s work. I make him try anyway.

Halfway up he freezes. His breath goes thin and fast. He won’t look at the trunk like I tell him. He looks down at me and the ground opens under his eyes. His nails bite my wrist when I reach. I press him to the bark and tell him to breathe into my shoulder. Sap gets on his shirt. He cries because the shirt is ruined.

“I will buy you a new shirt⁠—”

“I like this one!”

My father stands on the path and says let him drop or he will never learn. Bridgette laughs and says he was born for rooftops, not trees.

I carry him down. He learns two wrong lessons. I will always take his weight. He never has to take mine.

The next week he wants apples again. He brings a stick and a boy from the neighboring plot. He orders the boy up the tree. He stays on the ground and smacks branches until fruit falls. When the boy hesitates, he calls him a chicken. The boy slips, and Vitaly steps back so he won’t be under him. The boy breaks his arm, while my son eats an apple and laughs.

I try again. He goes up three moves and stalls. He doesn’t listen to me, only to his pulse. Another disastrous lesson in panic and fear.

Tonight, he is the same boy, only this time trying to instill panic and fear in others.

People say sons are their fathers’ echoes. For years, I listened for myself in him but mostly heard other voices. My father’s contempt. Bridgette’s mocking laughter. The part of me that should live in his hands never took root.

He fears things that bend instead of breaking. Anything that has its own will is a threat to his mind. He would make slaves of everyone, if he had his way. That is why he breaks what he cannot stand on. If he can’t use something or break it, he’d rather burn it down.

The other two are twitchy about being shot at, so I add, “He will not climb a tree to get a better vantage point on me now. He would rather run away and try again another day. We’re clear.”

“What if he had help?” Fyodor asks.

“He wouldn’t do that. He wants to kill me himself.”

I wake before the babies. The quiet feels like a lie. Pipes tick. A bus sighs to a stop outside. Time to start the day.

My mother is already in the kitchen with the light on low. She pours coffee into my mug before I ask. That’s how we say good morning now—actions first, words after.

The babies rustle in their room. One small sound, then the matching one. Two heartbeats in stereo. My mother glances down the hall, then back at me. “It’s your long day. We’ll go to the park before lunch.”

“I’ll be home by six.” I try to make it true while I say it. She nods. She doesn’t tell me it’s usually seven.

I change diapers and measure formula and hand each bottle to a small fist that grips. Xander smells like clean cotton and sleep. Yuri yawns. When they stare at my mouth, I talk about nothing. The weather, the bus, the way I left my sweater at work yesterday and found it on the back of my chair. I keep it light when I’m with my boys. My mother smiles without looking away from them. A typical Wednesday morning.

I dress in the navy I keep for days with judges and partners. Flats. Hair back. Cardigan in my bag. The mirror shows a woman whose mouth tilts a little to the right now. She looks tired and focused.

I’ve never been able to lie. My face gives away my thoughts.

Our apartment is a rental that reminds me it’s temporary every hour. Paint flakes near the shower. The kitchen window rattles when trucks hit the pothole at the corner. We live here, but we don’t belong to it. We used to have a house—porch, lilac bush, pencil marks on a doorframe where my father measured my height. After he died, bills piled on the hall table until the table disappeared under them. A bank took the rest. We carried our life down the steps in boxes and made a new one with cheaper locks. My mother moved in with me, and we’ve been treading water since.

I kiss each baby and my mother’s hair and leave. The elevator stops on three for no one. I walk the last flight. Outside, the sky is bright and cold. The train is on time. I breathe and watch stations roll by like the names of people I will never meet.

At work, the lobby guard says good morning, and I say his name because saying people’s names matters. I badge in. My screen wakes up to fifty-four unread emails. I start with the ones I can kill in under a minute: confirm a reporter, push a meeting, track a courier. Mr. Kerr wants binders redone with new tabs for a noon pitch. The junior associate wants me to “work my magic” with the clerk—which means flirt until he gives in. The paralegal asks for a signature page that never existed. I line them up and do them in order. The copy room hums.

At ten I take mail to Records. The clerk stamps and sorts and always pretends not to notice my scar. I like her for that.

Back at my desk I open the Mitchell draft and start cutting the extra words lawyers use when they want to sound like they’re worth what our clients pay them. I leave comments in calm language so no one feels corrected, only improved. It’s a skill I earned by dating bad boys. You can’t tell them they’re wrong about something—you have to coax them into thinking the right idea was theirs all along.

Biker gangs, doctors, mafia, Bratva, petty criminals, lawyers, they’re all the same. Big ego, tiny fortitude. And none of them can take being corrected by a woman. It’s annoying as hell.

Mr. Kerr swings by and points at the cabinet where the binders sit exactly where I left them. “Good,” he says, like I just now produced them.

The junior associate drops a file and calls it urgent. Everything is urgent to him. “Can you get us in on Friday?”

“Not without a reason, and you don’t have one. I have other work to do. Sorry.”

He tries to use his salesman smile on me, and when it doesn’t work, he utters, “Right.” He carries the file away and will call the clerk himself. She’ll tell him the same thing I did. Maybe he’ll learn. Maybe he won’t. Either way, my day moves.

Between tasks, the night I won’t think about pushes in. It isn’t the heat of it. It’s the way it shifted the floor under me. I thought I knew where home was. When I was with Vitaly, I thought I had it made. After all the other bad boys, this one was different. This one was going places.

So, I learned Russian phrases. I cooked his grandmother’s dishes. I stood at the back of rooms and memorized who nodded to whom. He talked about being pakhan one day, when his father was gone, like it was weather you plan around. I thought if I knew the customs, I would be safe inside them. I was dead wrong. Almost literally.

When I think of him, I feel his knife on my jaw. I see the almost-loving look in his eyes as his men held me down while he cut me. To his mind, scarring me was proof of his love.

It was proof of his ownership. Or, so he thought.

Screwing his father was stupid of me. I know what could happen if Vitaly ever found out. I knew it then too, and I didn’t care. I was so angry about the damn scar…I wasn’t thinking straight. But it’s been a year since that night, and Vitaly hasn’t made himself a nuisance, so I assume he never found out.

I consider that a favor from the universe, and I’m grateful every day. If he ever found out that I slept with his father and had his father’s twins, I’d be a dead woman. And I won’t let myself think about what he’d try to do to my sons.

At noon I eat half a sandwich and text my mother. She sends a picture of two sleeping faces and writes, Like angels when unconscious. I laugh. No one hears me but the plant on my desk. I work through the rest of lunch because that’s what you do when your phone isn’t ringing and your hands can stay busy. Busy is better.

The afternoon is a string of small fires. A client shows up early and scared. I make tea and listen until she remembers her own strength. The copier jams. I fix it. Court calls with a question. I answer it and send the corrected exhibit by four. Being good at things is a kind of shelter when the rest of your life feels like a storm.

At five I close my inbox and open it again because I don’t trust the quiet. I look out at the city. Glass, water, roofs, smoke. Somewhere in that mess, a man sits on a throne in a room where privacy comes at the touch of a button. I touch the edge of the scar and take my hand away.

It was a hell of a night with Roman. But it feels like a lifetime ago. Not just a year.

I leave at six, which counts as on time here. The elevator brings me down with a handful of associates who whisper about a bill they forgot to send. The lobby guard nods. “Night, Ms. Harbor.” Outside, the air is softer. People loosen their shoulders on the sidewalk. The light at the corner changes. I step off the curb with the group.

Halfway across, I feel it. Not a sound. A pressure. The sense of being looked at by a hunter. I raise my eyes, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight.

Vitaly stands on the far side behind the newspaper boxes. Black jacket. Hands in pockets. Hair cut yesterday. His attention locks on me the way it always did, like a hand closing around my throat.

I don’t stop. I don’t speed up. I pass him with two people between us and keep going, as if I didn’t see him. He doesn’t call my name. He never has to. I turn at the next corner with the crowd and go down to the train. I don’t look back. If he follows, I don’t give him the pleasure of watching me check.

On the ride I stand with my back to the door and keep my bag in front. I count stations. I don’t check my phone. I take deep breaths instead, trying to look normal instead of how I really feel. Sick. Breathless in a bad way.

A woman reads. A man naps and wakes right before his stop with practiced timing. Two teens trade a pair of earbuds and make each other listen to a chorus, then swap back. The normality of it calms me and hurts at the same time.

I’m tempted to avoid going home, but he’s Vitaly Ekimov. He’s found my route, which means he knows where I live already. So I go home, because there’s nowhere else to go. Nowhere else to hide.

Home smells like soap and rice. The TV is low. Toys strewn across the rug. My mother sits with the babies and looks up only when she knows I can see her face. I wash my hands and pick both babies up and hold them until I can breathe at the pace they breathe.

“I saw him,” I say when I set them down. “Across from work. He didn’t come over. He watched me.”

My mother’s mouth goes flat. “Did he follow you?”

“I don’t think so. I went straight to the train.”

“We can go to Jo’s,” she says. “Tonight. She has the pull-out.”

“She’s too far. Work is here. The pediatrician is here. And he knows every address I’ve ever said out loud.” I keep my voice even. “If we run, he’ll smell it.”

“What do we do, then?” Her voice is careful, like she’s trying not to wake something.

“I don’t know.” The honesty scrapes, but lying to my mother helps no one, and I’m bad at it anyway. “We change routines. I text you when I leave and when I arrive. We don’t open the door unless we’re expecting someone. We keep the chain on. We keep the stroller and a bag by the door in case we need to go fast.”

She nods because she is practical, even when she hates the plan. She gets up and stirs a pot she doesn’t need to stir. Motion is medicine too.

My mother says they watched a dog in the park today. We laugh in the soft way you laugh after a long day. We clean up. Baths. Pajamas with clouds. A board book twice because once isn’t enough. We put them down and stand in the doorway to make sure their breathing takes the shape of sleep. It does. The monitor glows a calm green.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” my mother says.

“Sleep in your room⁠—”

“I’d rather be here in case that front door gets kicked in.”

I can’t argue against that.

She pulls a blanket from the closet and shakes it out. She tucks a pillow into the corner like she plans to wrestle it. She looks small and stubborn and entirely mine. I have her hair, though her reddish brown is going gray. I have her eyes too—blue with too many brown flecks in them.

The only things I got from Dad are the big feet and a taste for danger. He was an accountant by day and a motorcycle racer by night. He said it was for extra money for the family, but it was for the thrills, and we all knew it.

I set my bag by the door next to the stroller. I check the deadbolt and the chain. I check the windows even though they hate to open. My nighttime routine is the barest comfort, but I’ll take what I can get.

In bed I stare at the ceiling and let the day unspool. Work. Trains. A man across a street. A man across a club. I think about what I owe myself and what I owe the two small people asleep in the next room. I make two lists in my head of things I can control and things I can’t. The first list is short. The second tries to be a book. I close it.

I don’t know what to do next. That is the truth. I say it out loud because secrets turn heavy when they sit inside. Tomorrow I will get up. I will wear the forest-green dress. I will take the train. I will do my job. I will watch corners. I will come home. I will keep breathing until the next problem appears.

And if I see Vitaly Ekimov, I run.

I keep the office cold. It suits my mood.

Vitaly is my only son. People keep offering that sentence like it solves anything. Family tradition would make him my heir because he exists and because his blood is mine. Fyodor likes tradition. He believes it has kept worse men from making worse choices.

I use it when it serves me. I set it aside when it doesn’t.

Vitaly takes after his mother. Quick hands, quicker temper. The urge to kill. Her cold green eyes, staring back at me when he raised his gun through the car window…

I keep replaying the night he tried to kill me. I fired first. He ran. The only part that surprises me is that he didn’t finish the job.

It wasn’t kindness that stayed his hand. It was calculation. He knows Fyodor has been pushing me to anoint him as my successor. If there was a cross fire that killed him, Vitaly wouldn’t have anyone in his corner anymore.

Fyodor loved Vitaly when he was a boy. He called him volchok, little wolf. He told me a wolf needs training, not taming. I told him a wolf in a house learns when not to bite. That was our first argument about my son.

It lasted years, and even now, I see it in his eyes when he tells me the boy should inherit my position.

Fyodor took Vitaly for his first trip to the range. He learned to strip a pistol with his eyes closed. He grinned when metal clicked right where it belonged. Fyodor clapped his shoulder like a coach with a champion.

I stood behind them and felt the ground tilt. The grin was not pride. It was appetite. Bridgette’s appetite. Fyodor thought it could be honed.

It should have been starved.

Fyodor told him a pakhan must be a father to his people and a knife to his enemies. He left out the part where a good father hides the knife until there is no other way. Vitaly took the wrong lesson from his speeches, choosing the knife over everything else.

This was the fight between us for years. Fyodor thought Bridgette left a dangerous spark in our son and a forge would make it useful. I told him that spark would burn our house down.

We did not stop loving each other while we argued. He is still my second father. He still believes my blood should inherit because that is how the family stories go. The old man is naïve, and I fear that naivety will end badly for him.

Over the years, Vitaly’s taste for cruelty wore down Fyodor’s defense of him. My son hurts things that do not fight back. He lies even when the truth would cost less. He once pushed a disabled friend into a half-frozen river and called it a joke.

I saw Fyodor’s face change that day. He started telling Vitaly no. But it was too late. You can’t give absolute freedom, then expect rules to be followed.

I remember the day Fyodor came to me with his concerns. “You were right. I thought we could sharpen him. But he is not a blade. He is the hunger blades have for blood.”

I nodded once. “A knife you can sheath. Hunger eats the sheath.”

We still tried. But by the time I had Fyodor on my side, Vitaly was a fourteen-year-old with keen eyes and too much taste for pain. When Fyodor stopped teaching him, he learned on his own. Arguably, that was worse.

Vitaly should never have been left to his own devices.

He made friends by throwing my name or money around, then laying traps for his new friends. Sometimes, literally. To my knowledge, he didn’t have his first kill until he was seventeen, but there are a lot of ways to torment people without killing them.

Some of them are worse than death.

When we intervened, it was too late. Vitaly’s hobbies, as he liked to call them, were an expensive pastime, and I was left holding the bag. Either paying off their families, or relocating them, or both.

Fyodor tried to make a soldier out of Bridgette’s urge. I tried to make a man who could put the urge down. In the end, Fyodor came down on my side. But with his inclination to family tradition, sometimes I wonder if he’s still there.

The door opens without a knock. Only one man does that in my house. Fyodor steps in faster than his age should allow, hat in his hand, breath steady but not calm. He closes the door and stays standing.

“You should be asleep,” I say.

“So should you.” He looks at me to see how much of me is still here. “I bring a rumor.”

“Since when do you trade in rumors?”

“Since the world’s gone to hell in a handbasket.” He sits on my guest chair on the other side of the desk.

“Say it.”

“The attempt on your life. Vitaly.” He shrugs. “Evidently, it was revenge, according to the grapevine. One year to the day since you went to your club and chose a scarred woman from the floor.”

“Who says this?”

“Vitaly’s guy, Lorenzo. He likes to talk when he drinks, and he was at Fernando’s tonight, running his mouth.” He clears his throat like he doesn’t want to say it. “The scarred woman you hooked up with was Mina Harbor. Vitaly’s ex-girl.”

I sit back, hands flat. “Fuck.”

“You didn’t know,” Fyodor says.

“No. I never got her name, and he didn’t tell me.”

“He would not,” Fyodor says. “He would expect you to know without asking.” He swallows the rest. Then, “There is more. About her.”

“Go on.”

“She has children. Twin sons. Alexander and Yuri.” He pauses, before his voice drops. “About three months old.”

The math is quick. One year since the night at Rope. Three months since birth. I do not need a calendar.

Mina wanted very specific revenge on Vitaly. That being the case, I know I’m the only man she slept with that night. I’m the only one who would insult him enough to satisfy her vengeance quest. That was cold of her. I respect it.

But since I’m the only man she slept with that night, those twins are mine.

He waits, then offers the clean path. “We can make it certain without asking. Quietly. A lab. Something from the trash. A swab. It keeps you from being wrong in public.”

“No.”

“It is safer.”

“It is cowardice. I was there. I know what I did. I do not need paper to tell me those infants are my own. We will act as if they are mine because they are.”

He absorbs it and moves on. “The boy will do the same arithmetic. He is not a fool.”

“He is cruel and vain. But he is not stupid.” I drum my thumb on the desk, thinking. “He will try to turn them into leverage. Or into a headline. Or a pair of obituaries, because he will see them as a threat.”

“And the woman?”

“She is the one who has kept them fed for three months while he counted the days and planted a mine. We keep him away from her. Away from them. He does not get to use them against me.”

Fyodor nods once. “And Miss Harbor?”

“Thinking…”

He loves tradition more than I do, but he loves order more than both of us. “Whatever the case, there will be noise. Vitaly blew up a road. Our guys did what they could to patch things up with locals out there, but if he gets bolder, there’s only so much we can cover up.”

“I’ve spent that boy’s entire life covering for his mistakes. I’m done.”

“Worse men than him have turned around. You wanted him to come right by himself. There’s still a chance. Perhaps the title, the responsibility, would weigh down his darker urges.”

“That chance is spent.” I hate that it’s true. But that doesn’t make it less true. “I will not put my house in a boy’s hands because men before me did not know how to say no to their blood.”

He bows his head, the old, small nod. “Then there is another question.”

“Ask it.”

“Do you tell her about any of this? He will likely go after her.”

“She does not need my history. She needs my action.”

“She may not want your help.”

“I am not offering help,” I say with a shrug. “I am recognizing a fact. She bore my sons. That makes her my business.”

I think of the night a year ago. I remember a woman who did not ask for permission to exist in my world. She was bold, fearless. I remember the way she said yes. The way she craved me without knowing me. I didn’t know why then, but it makes sense. She came to Rope on a mission. I should have seen it that night, but I was entranced.

I was a horny fool.

I draw a long breath because I know he will not like what I have to say. “Vitaly will not inherit. Not because I am bored with family tradition. Because he will harm what I am obligated to keep whole.”

His jaw tightens. “This will be a fight.”

“It always is. But it will not be a fight my sons will have amongst themselves. It will remain between me and Vitaly.”

“Understood.” He thinks for a beat, then adds, “Do we tell anyone?”

“Marcus and Tanner. I want them close for now.”

“Do you make this public?” he asks at the door. “The boys. You could keep it quiet. Apartment on another street. Money. Visits on Sundays. Rumors fade.”

“I will not hide my sons. They are not some dirty secret.”

“Business in the morning?”

I nod once.

He leaves. I pour one drink and set it down. I do not touch it. I open my notes and write her name. Mina Harbor. The second line is two names. Alexander and Yuri. I stare at the line until it stops being a sentence and becomes a duty. Then I add a third.

Vitaly—officially disinherit.

I stand at the window. The glass shows my face and the room and the dark beyond. I tell the reflection the thing I tell men before they move. There is no perfect time. There is only the next hour and what you do in it.

I sit and make two lists. Control. No control. I put the boys on the first. I put the boy on both. That is the plan.

I don’t know where to put Mina. She’s an adult with agency and clearly a determined mind of her own. There’s no wrangling a woman who seduces her ex’s father for revenge, then never tells him he has two new sons. She’s used to doing things her own way, and while I respect that, she’s robbed me of three months of my children’s lives.

Though, from her point of view, it was probably a matter of survival. Staying as far as she could from me and Vitaly likely sounded like the smart play to her pregnant mind. I hate to admit it, but she was right to do so. She’s kept them safe through her caution.

But Vitaly has a weird thing about anniversaries, and now, they aren’t safe without my protection.

On the edge of the blotter is a photograph I never framed. Vitaly at nine, arms thin, eyes bright, chin tilted for approval. I slide it into the drawer and close it. I am not throwing him away. I am putting the past where it belongs so the present can stand.

Perturbed is the right word for what I feel about the woman’s history with my son. I did not know. I should have known sooner. Should have thought with more than just my cock that night. But I can’t change the past, and I won’t let it dictate my future.

It’s true of myself and Vitaly. He doesn’t get to call the shots here. He is not now, nor will he ever be, pakhan. Not even over my dead body.

Tomorrow is coming whether I plan for it or not. I prefer the first. The house is quiet. I sit with the lists until the clock tells me it’s late enough to stop pretending I will sleep. Then I turn out the light.

And stare at the dark, forming a plan. I know what I must do.

I wake at five because the boys stir and then settle again, and once I’m awake I stay that way. The apartment is quiet. The heat ticks. I run a finger along the thin line on my jaw. A morning ritual of sorts, I guess. I shower, dress, and step into the kitchen where my mother is already at the stove warming bottles.

“Morning,” she says without turning.

“Morning.” I check the formula level, rinse, wipe, move in the narrow space we share without bumping her. She hands me Yuri first. He gulps like the world is late. Xander is patient and then not. Their eyes track my face. Three months old, all appetite and sound.

“You’ll be late?” my mother asks.

“Usual time.” I pack my lunch and then unpack it because there won’t be time to eat it. I pack it again anyway. Habit helps when courage feels thin.

I don’t know what Vitaly’s up to, and it’s ruining my sleep. Hers too.

We have a system for mornings, and it gets us through the chaos of it all. On my way out, I kiss the boys’ warm heads and my mother’s cheek. “Text me if you need anything.”

“I always do,” she says. “Be safe.” She looks at my face for a beat. She doesn’t say his name. She doesn’t need to remind me to watch my back.

The stairwell smells like dust and someone’s toast. I keep my keys in my fist, aimed down. People always tell you to put your keys between your fingers like Wolverine claws. But funny enough, it was Vitaly who broke me of the habit. “You do that, and the keys will hurt you more than your attacker.” He positioned my keys in my hand like I was holding a dagger. “That’s better. You have more control that way—always keep them pointed down, and it’s harder for someone to use them against you.”

Never thought I’d be using his advice against him.

At the front door I scan the block through the glass without looking like I’m scanning. No black jacket at the corner. No motorcycle. A delivery truck idles half a block down. A woman pulls a toddler by the hand. The street is just a street. I step out and walk.

I take the earlier train to avoid the crowd I know too well and switch cars at the last minute. I stand with my back to a wall and keep my bag in front. It looks like normal city habits. It’s also what I can control. At my transfer I go up one staircase and down another. I am not running. I am not hiding. I am making it harder to follow me without being seen. Fear sits in my throat. I swallow it and keep moving.

Work is the same beige it was yesterday. I like that. The lobby guard nods. I say his name. I take the elevator with a woman from HR who’s always cheerful before nine and quiet after. She compliments my cardigan. I thank her. I sit at my desk and open my inbox. It fills as if I’m feeding it, little fires I can stamp out without asking permission.

Between tasks I check the glass of the front doors. Vigilance can look like boredom if you do it right. At ten I change the toner in the west copier because no one else will admit they know how. At ten thirty I fix a typo in the header of a motion that would have made us look sloppy.

At eleven I text my mother: All good?

She sends a photo of Xander asleep with one hand flung over his head. Yuri awake and scowling at the camera.

All good, she writes. Eat lunch.

Lunch is my job today. Twelve people in a conference room want sandwiches and one wants soup and one wants to be difficult. I read the list twice. I grab my coat and head for the deli two blocks down because their line moves and their rolls don’t crumble.

The sidewalk is busy. I don’t want to look for him. I tell myself not to. I do anyway. A man in a black jacket crosses at the light. He’s the wrong height. Too many black jackets out here, and knowing Vitaly, he’d be in a different color today to throw me off. I walk fast enough to look like a person who’s late and slow enough to scan the glass of storefronts as I pass.

The deli is bright and loud. The chalkboard lists specials that are never special. I order fast, pay, and stand to the side as the counter guys stack paper-wrapped rectangles into bags. A fly drones at the window. A toddler smears a hand on the glass. I look up to kill a second, and I see him on the sidewalk.

Vitaly stands across the street, face angled away from me, but I know the line of his jaw. He wears a cap low. He pretends to look at shoes in a window. He keeps his body at an angle that would photograph well. It always did. He is exactly where he can watch the deli door and also where he can turn and vanish if I move toward him.

My body answers before my mind does. My throat tightens. My fingers go cold. I do what the nurse taught me after the clinic when she saw my face and didn’t say anything, just told me to breathe through the nose and out through the mouth until the pulse lets go.

“Order for Kerr,” someone calls. I move. I do not look at the window again. I stack bags. I thank the man at the register. I step out into the sun and turn left without pausing. Vitaly stays where he is like a shadow you try to step on. I don’t look at him. I walk.

At the first corner I join a group crossing and then I cut through a lobby I know has a back exit to a different street. I don’t run. My heart does. The door is heavy. I push through and join a line of office workers who don’t know they are my cover. The sandwich bags are heavy, but I hardly feel it. I keep my face neutral. I don’t look back until I’m under our awning. When I finally glance over my shoulder, he isn’t there. He could be anywhere. I go inside and badge in with a hand that wants to shake.

“Hero,” says the junior associate when he sees the food. He has no idea. I pass out lunch and keep one for myself even though I can’t taste anything right now. I take two bites because my mother told me to eat. I drink water. The day moves like it always does, a straight line of tasks that keep others from falling apart.

All afternoon I think about the deli window and the angle of his shoulders. I think about the way he smiled when he wanted something and how it looked exactly the same when he was about to hurt me. Look at the clock. Count to ten. Answer an email about misplaced exhibits and I find the exhibits and I put them where they need to go. Check the front doors again at three. All of it automatic pilot, because I’m not here right now. My body is, but my mind is a million miles away.

By five the floor starts to empty, and the silence makes me itch.

I text Mom to let her know I’m heading home, and I change flats for sneakers. The train platform is a wall of coats. He could be any of them.

I choose the car with the most light. I stand near the door but not at it. Every man is a problem for the first two seconds and a stranger after that. I get off one stop earlier than usual and ride the bus for three blocks because that’s what I planned. It slows me down. It also means no one can pace me from the station to my apartment without being obvious.

The block looks normal when I turn onto it. The bodega owner has the door propped open. Two kids argue about a scooter. A woman drags a trash can to the curb. I let my shoulders drop a little. In the lobby I check the mailbox I already checked this morning, like I always do.

“Hi, Ms. Harbor,” says the super when he passes me on the stairs.

“Evening.”

At the apartment door I listen. Inside, my mother is singing under her breath. It’s the song she used to sing when I was small and scared of storms. I unlock the deadbolt. I lock it again behind me. A deadbolt won’t stop Vitaly, but the inconvenience will annoy him. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

My mother looks up from the floor where she sits with the boys. “Good?”

“Good enough.” I’m not lying. I’m home. The bad thing didn’t happen today. That counts.

We feed them together. Xander kicks and laughs milk at me. Yuri concentrates like eating is work. These boys are the reason I’m still breathing. After my catastrophic breakup with Vitaly, I needed a reason to keep going, and they gave it to me. They mean everything to me, and I will do anything to keep them safe. Even if that means facing the man of my nightmares.

Mom and I talk about nothing. The pediatrician called. Shots next week. The formula brand downsized but the price didn’t go down. My mother saw the neighbor’s cat on the fire escape and thought it was a raccoon. She’s tired. The usual. Neither of us say his name.

There is a knock at the door.

It’s a simple sound. It empties me. My mother’s eyes snap to mine. We don’t speak. She lifts Yuri and I lift Xander and we put both boys back in the playpen. My mother wipes her hands on a towel. I wipe mine on my jeans. We stand still for a second like the floor might tell us what to do.

The door is wood and old. The chain is thin. The lock is a lock but not a shield. If it is him, the door is not the thing that will keep him out. I know that. I also know that if it is him and I don’t open the door, he will go around me. There are two babies in this room with my eyes and a little of his father’s chin. I can’t let him in.

If I can talk to him, maybe I can keep his attention on me long enough to think. Maybe I can bargain. Maybe I can remind him of something human. Maybe none of that will work.

There’s only one way to find out.

“Stay back,” I tell my mother. She nods and moves to the side, phone in one hand, butcher’s knife in the other.

I go to the door and put my eye to the peephole. It’s too dark to see anything but a shape. I take a breath to steady myself. “Who is it?”

A beat. And then, a low growl. “Roman Ekimov.”

I stop breathing.

I look at my mother and shake my head so she doesn’t call or stab anyone yet. I open the door just enough to see him. He fills the hallway without moving. He looks exactly as he did the night he pressed a button and made the world smaller. Controlled, eyes on mine and nowhere else. He takes in my face, my hands, the apartment behind me, the sound of the boys, and he doesn’t flinch.

“What are you⁠—”

“I know the twins are mine.”

The room tilts in a way that isn’t physical. Everything in me tries to split at once, and every word in my head eddies away.

Perhaps I should have opened with something less abrupt than “I know the twins are mine.” But I’ve wasted enough time.

Mina looks bewildered, wide-eyed. But she steps aside to let me in and does not retreat.

I step in first. Tanner holds the landing, and Marcus waits by the stairs to cover me and give us privacy. Not sure we’ll get much of that here.

The apartment is small and relatively clean. The orderly chaos of babies decorates the floor, with toys here and there. A plastic mat by the door, a double-deep stroller folded against the wall, a bowl of keys and coupons, a green light on a baby monitor. Soap scent in the air. Thin door, thinner chain. The kind of wood a strong breeze could break.

I don’t say that out loud, but it’s dismaying.

Mina stands with her chin high. The thin scar along her jaw catches the light and vanishes when she turns. She is more striking than she was that night at Rope. The bright lights of the miniscule apartment afford me a better look at her than the club’s colored lights ever did.

She’s thicker now, and the weight of carrying twins suits her. Her long hair isn’t auburn like I thought, but brown with red undertones. Devious blue eyes that sparkle, or they would, if she weren’t trying to size me up. Simple jeans and a tee shirt and somehow prettier than the night she came to me in a little black dress and fuck-me heels.

I am angry she didn’t tell me about my boys. I’m also drawn to her. The fates have a wicked since of humor. I’m not sure why they enjoy laughing at me, but I’ll silence them soon enough.

Mina clears her throat. “Roman, this is my mother, Jennifer.”

“Good evening,” I say as the older woman steps from the living room. Fifties, I think, with wiry, tired eyes that miss nothing. Truly, it’s hard to know her age—taking care of twins in midlife sounds daunting enough for me, and I have the money to hire help. I imagine the twins have added to the grays in her ash-brown hair. She wipes her hands on a dish towel and nods instead of offering a hand.

“Pleasure to meet you.” Her tone says otherwise. “We were just feeding the boys.” She measures me in one pass and sets the measure aside in favor of immediate work.

The boys are awake, making small, satisfied sounds. A playpen sits under the window. Two bouncy seats, folded blankets, bottles drying on a rack. Two faces turn toward me as I draw closer.

I stop at the rail. Up close, one has my eyes and both have Mina’s mouth. The one on the left is heavier through the shoulders. The one on the right has a crease at the chin that will become a dimple. I count fingers. Healthy. Seemingly happy.

Mine.

Mina stands beside me. “This is Alexander,” she says, touching the larger boy’s foot. “We call him Xander. And this is Yuri.”

“Russian names,” I say.

“It felt fitting.” She meets my eyes.

I leave the words where anger wants to spill. I am angry at time lost. I’m angrier at myself for not finding her sooner. None of that helps a child, so I put it away. There are bigger concerns at hand.

Jennifer gestures to the table. “Tea?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Jennifer moves in the small kitchen with practiced economy. Kettle, cups, tea tin, sugar. The apartment is meager. It is cared for, but small and falling apart at the seams.

Mina’s place is clean the way a ship is clean before a storm. Surfaces scrubbed to a shine. Corners swept until the broom bristles splay. Lemon and bleach haunt the air.

The cleanliness does not hide the age. It only proves her effort.

The baseboards tell the truth. Paint is nicked to the wood where a vacuum chewed too close. In one stretch the molding has a crack that runs like a river on a map. The ceiling carries water stains in two rings above the kitchen light. They look like continents. The landlord chose a coat of cheap white and a promise. The stain pushed through both.

The floor is scuffed in a path from the door to the little table and back. They keep a folded postcard under one leg to stop the wobble. The cabinet hinges squeak when Jennifer opens them for tea. The refrigerator hums too loudly, and every few minutes, there’s a rattle.

Everything she owns is neat. The couch is worn, but unstained. The curtains are sun-faded, washed, and ironed. It is a modest room held together by care and stubbornness.

I hate that my sons are being raised in a place with a door I could break, windows that should have been replaced twenty years ago, a chair that wobbles, and chipping—possibly lead—paint.

But I do not voice it. They have done the best they can with what they have, and I don’t fault them for that. I take the chair and make it steady by shifting a leg onto the rug.

From the hall I hear the soft step of one of my men as he trades places with the other. They do it without speaking. Good. The building carries sound. Neighbors laugh and it echoes through a wall. I count the seconds between elevator dings. The fire escape is an entry point. The lock on the window is bent.

I add it to the list in my head: lock, bar, light, chain replaced, door re-hung in a steel frame.

“Three months,” I say, eyes still on the boys. “How do they sleep?”

“Badly together,” Jennifer answers, amused. “Better apart. We rotate. White noise helps.”

“We bought a fan,” Mina adds. “Cheaper than the fancy machines and louder.”

“Good. Loud is better.”

Mina takes the other chair. She waits for me to explain why I’m here.

Fair enough. “I have men outside. They will be in the hall and downstairs. Quiet. Respectful. They will not enter without your say or mine.”

“During this unannounced visit, you mean, right?” she asks, arching a brow.

“During your residence here.”

She blinks. “My neighbors will notice.”

“Good. Let them tell everyone you are protected. It’s better that way.”

Her mouth tilts and flattens. She doesn’t smile for me. Good. “How long have you known about the boys?”

“I found out last night. I should have been here sooner, but I needed to make some arrangements before I came.”

Jennifer sets a cup in front of me. “What do you intend to do?” No ceremony. A direct line to the point.

“Provide. Protect. Acknowledge. Decide next steps with Mina.”

“Words,” she says. Not unkind. A test.

“Deeds,” I answer, and put a card on the table. “This number is always answered. There is a car and driver close by. Two men on the building starting now. A doctor on call. Money for what you need.”

Mina touches the card and leaves it on the table. “No strings?”

“There will be obligations. They will be clear. They will be about the boys and about keeping you safe from Vitaly.”

“I don’t know about this⁠—”

“Vitaly planted a land mine in a road and took shots at me. He has gone off the rails, Mina. My son…he has always been unstable⁠—”

She huffs a laugh at that, but says nothing. The laugh is empty. More shock than amusement.

“But he’s never made a full attempt on my life before. If he’s willing to do that for revenge, he will do worse to you. To them. I am here to ensure that does not happen.”

Jennifer’s mouth tightens. She knows enough to be afraid and not enough to waste words. She drinks her tea and watches me.

Mina nods once. “He followed me today. Outside a deli. He stood across the street and watched. I don’t know how he knew I’d be there. It’s not my office’s usual order or anything like that. But there he was.”

Everything in me narrows. “Did he speak?”

“No. He wanted me to see him. He also wanted to be gone if I moved toward him.”

“That is his pattern. He will escalate. He thinks fear will make you sloppy.”

“He’s good at that,” she says. Flat.

Jennifer lowers her cup. “Roman, you say protection. Describe it without turning this place into a prison.”

“You keep as much of your routine as you can,” I say. “But you don’t walk alone. You vary routes in ways that look ordinary. You text when you leave and when you arrive. You don’t open the door unless you’re expecting someone. We add a real lock to this door by morning and a camera that looks like a light. The men outside will behave like neighbors.”

“Like saints,” Jennifer says dryly.

“Yes.”

Mina watches my face. “Are you angry with me? For not calling.”

“Does it matter?

“It matters to me.”

Fine. “I’m angry I wasn’t there when my sons were born. Angry that you found a pediatrician alone, and I carried none of the weight. Angry that I couldn’t help you through the pregnancy. Angry at my son for scaring you. Angrier at myself for not knowing sooner. But I’m not here to scold you. I’m here to fix what can be fixed.”

“I didn’t know how to find you without finding him,” she says. “And I didn’t know what you or he would do with the news.”

“I would have been there for you.” I blow out a breath, trying to diffuse my anger. “But you didn’t know that.”

Jennifer watches how I say it. She gives a small nod. “What about tonight? If he comes here?”

“If he comes, he meets two men who will tell him to leave and make him leave if he doesn’t. You will not open the door. You will not talk through it.”

“The door wouldn’t stop him,” Mina says.

“I know. That’s what my men are for.”

Somewhere above us a neighbor drags a chair. A siren lifts and fades. One of the boys sighs in his sleep. I see my life split into two lines: the one where I look at this room and leave, and the one where I refuse to leave them here another night. Only one of those lines exists after this minute.

“You look different,” I say before the thought can stop. “Stronger.”

“I’m tired,” she says. “Maybe that reads as strength.”

“It does.”

Mina glances at the door again. “Do you always travel with guards?”

“Yes.”

“Does that mean you bring trouble with you or keep it out?”

“Both.”

She nods like she expected that and would have distrusted a softer answer. Her eyes flick to mine. The room changes. Not warmer. More exact. Mina’s hand flexes once on the table. She isn’t a woman who cries in front of a man she doesn’t trust. “What you’re asking is a lot, Roman.”

“I’m not asking, Mina. These are my sons. They will be protected.”

“You will put your name on their papers,” Jennifer says. Not a question. A condition. “We left the father’s name on the birth certificates blank.”

“Yes. I want them legally tied to my family.”

Mina studies me. “What else do you want?”

It’s the question that snaps everything into place.

This apartment will not keep Vitaly out. My men are good, but useless if he comes through the fire escape when they’re in the hall. Or worse, if he pulls the same maneuver he did in Prague and gases the entire building at night. There, no one woke up in the morning. I cannot allow that to happen here. Vitaly isn’t one to repeat his methodology, but maybe using a different gas would satisfy his creative urge.

Regardless, my sons are not safe here. Neither are their mother and grandmother.

“I want you to pack a bag. Both of you. All four of you are leaving with me tonight. You will live with me.” I pause, because I need another breath to say the words. “We will be married.”

I laugh. It isn’t pretty. Maniacal, really. “I’m sorry—what?”

He doesn’t repeat himself. He looks past me and lifts two fingers. The door opens. One of his goons stands in the doorway. Another man I don’t know steps in behind him with a canvas duffel.

“No,” I say, moving between them and the boys. “Nobody touches anything until I understand what’s happening.”

Roman lowers his hand. The men pause. The room goes quiet except for the low baby noises and the building air kicking on. My mother sets her tea down carefully, like it’s a prop that has to be returned intact.

“What is going on?” I ask Roman.

He holds my eyes. “My son is consolidating power. He is pushing men who like tradition and men who like a fight. He will use anything that looks like leverage. The twins are not safe outside my compound. Neither are you.”

“Your compound.” I almost smile. “You mean your house.”

“I mean a place I control. Walls. Cameras. People who answer to me.”

“And the marriage?” I ask. “That part you tossed in like a gift with purchase?”

“Not a gift.” He doesn’t blink. “Cover. Legitimacy. Legal protections. If we are married, you have rights that no one can talk you out of. Next of kin, decisions if I’m hurt, access to lawyers and doctors and money if someone tries to shut a door. The boys become my named heirs by default. I have disowned Vitaly. Right now I have no legal heir. That is dangerous for a pakhan. People test what looks weak. This benefits us both.”

The word hits my chest even though I already knew it. Pakhan. The first time I heard it, it was a title my ex tossed around like a crown he’d already measured for his head. Now it is a problem in my living room in a charcoal suit.

“My sons would inherit illegal businesses,” I say, because if I don’t put it into air it will turn into a stone in my stomach.

“They will inherit what I choose to make theirs,” he answers. “Companies. Real property. Enough structure to protect them. As for the rest—what is illegal does not sit in a will. But men will still look for an heir. If there isn’t one, they will make one out of themselves. That means war. War ends up in places like this.” He lifts his chin toward the thin door, the rattling window, the stroller parked for flight.

“Say the part about Vitaly without euphemisms,” my mother says, cutting through what’s left of my shock. “You said ‘disowned.’ What does that mean in your world?”

“It means he does not inherit a thing from me,” Roman says. “It means I will not hand him my people. It means if he uses you or the boys to force my hand, I treat him as an enemy, not as a son who deserves patience.”

My hand finds the table without looking. I feel the worn wood under my palm and the old paint rubs off like chalk. “And marriage fixes that?”

“It closes a door he wants open,” Roman says. “It tells men who are counting that I have a family under my protection. It gives you a leash on me too—legal standing. And it puts the boys in a place where their names are not a question.”

“I’m supposed to trust that you’re thinking about my leash on you?”

“You are supposed to do the smart thing and survive. I do not ask you to trust me tonight. I tell you to move in with me now. Trust comes later.”

His man hasn’t moved since Roman’s gesture, but his eyes skim the apartment like he’s memorizing an evacuation plan. The other man watches the hall. I can hear our neighbors’ TV through the wall and the rumble of the elevator. Everything ordinary keeps going while my life changes shape.

“You come into my home after a year,” I say, fury waking up under the fear, “and you tell me to play wife because your house looks soft from the outside?”

“I tell you to move because the deli was a preview,” he says. “The boys are leverage and trophies in his head. I am not waiting for him to choose the hour.” He glances at the playpen and then back at me. It isn’t soft. It is exact. “You wanted plain words. Here they are. If you stay here, he will test this door. Or that fire escape. Or your windows. Barring that, he may kill your neighbor so he can access that wall and come through it.” He drags his fingers through his dark and silver hair. “But if you come with me, he will test my door. And my door is heavier.”

I look at my mother. Her face is tight, but she doesn’t look surprised. She nods once—ask the rest. So I do.

“What about my job? I can’t just vanish. I have to tell them something.”

“Your job will be wife and mother. I will pay you triple your salary to manage those duties. Not that you’ll need a salary, as you’ll have access to some of my accounts.”

I swallow hard. “Money doesn’t come without responsibilities.”

“As I said, wife and mother. Wife when other wives would be around—birthdays, holidays, and the like. Mother, full time. Other than that, you are free to do as you wish.”

It still sounds too easy. But there are bigger concerns. “And my mother?”

“She comes,” he says, like the question is insulting. “If that is what you want. I will set up an account for her, as well. You will want for nothing.”

“All of this sounds neat when you say it,” I tell him. “Then I think about putting my babies in a car with strangers, and neat disappears.”

“They won’t be strangers,” he says. He looks at Tanner and the other man. “Names.”

“Tanner,” the hulking one by the door says.

“Marcus,” says the other. He’s older than Tanner, hair too short, eyes steady.

“My men will escort us in my bullet-proof SUV to the compound.” He says it as fact, like there aren’t a thousand questions in my head.

My mother is watching him over the rim of her cup like she watched a contractor once when he said a repair would only take a day. She sets the cup down and stands. “If we go, we pack ourselves. No one rummages through drawers. We hand you what you carry.”

“Agreed,” Roman says immediately. He looks back to his men. “Do not touch anything unless asked. Help when asked.”

Tanner nods. Marcus nods. My shoulders loosen a fraction. Then they tighten again. “You don’t get to decide this and have me say thank you like a good girl,” I tell Roman, because I’m not about to roll over for this. “You didn’t ask. You told.”

“I told because the time for asking is long past. I wasted that time. I won’t waste another night.”

Silence stretches, thin as a wire. Then Xander fusses, a small complaint with a big voice behind it. The sound snaps something in me back into place. The part that gets formula measured correctly and bottles rinsed and sleep found even when the world refuses.

“What do I pack?” I ask, because anger is a luxury and I don’t have time for luxuries.

“Three days of everything you can’t find in a store,” Roman says. “Documents. Medicine. Comfort things. The rest we will replace tomorrow.”

I move. My mother moves with me because we’ve done this before in other times—evictions, hospital bags, the kind of nights that sort people into those who panic and those who work. I go to the boys’ drawers and start with the ridiculous quantity of onesies small bodies require. Socks. The hat Yuri refuses and the one Xander tolerates. The soft blanket that calms them both. My mother grabs diapers because she knows how fast a day eats them.

“Bottles,” she says, and I’m already at the sink. The drying rack is full. I pack the clean ones and the brush. Formula goes in next. I toss in the baby wash because unfamiliar soap can start a rash and I don’t want to discover that at two in the morning in a new bathroom. My hands are steady.

My heart is not.

I stop long enough to text the office: Family emergency. Out tomorrow and likely the week. I’ll confirm as soon as I can. I could add details. I don’t. Mr. Kerr will bluster and then enjoy telling someone else to adjust a calendar. Work will survive without me.

I’m not sure about Roman’s “wife and mother” thing. Having no money of my own sounds like a recipe for disaster. No matter how appealing the thought is. Money with no strings attached sounds too good to be true.

Back in the main room, Roman has taken one step closer to the door like he’s holding a wall up with his shoulder. He watches without interfering. He doesn’t ask where anything is. He doesn’t tell me I’m packing wrong. It makes the packing easier to bear.

“Birth certificates?” he asks. “Insurance?”

“In the drawer,” I say, and I go to the narrow dresser by the door and pull the accordion folder that holds our lives. The paper feels thin in my hands. I slide the folder into my bag.

“What about the crib?” my mother asks, practical to the bone even now.

“You’ll have one there,” Roman says. “Two, actually.” He says it without looking at a phone, like he assumed we were coming the second he walked in and set men moving.

“And the stroller?” she asks.

“Marcus will carry it,” he says. “Or we can buy a second.”

“We’re not rich,” she says automatically.

“I am,” he says, and it doesn’t sound like a boast. Just a simple statement of fact.

I pick up Yuri and he quiets. I turn back to Roman. “Ground rules.”

“Say them.”

“My mother comes,” I repeat.

“Yes.”

“My name on the paperwork,” I say. “On theirs. On mine. Nothing hidden. Nothing in somebody else’s lockbox.”

“Yes.”

“No guns near them. I know you live in a world where that sentence is a joke. I’m not laughing. No guns where they sleep. None where they eat.”

“Agreed.” He looks surprisingly unruffled by this demand. “Security is separate from a nursery and a kitchen. The house is big.”

“I keep working,” I add. “Maybe not tomorrow. But I’m not becoming a decoration.”

“You don’t become anything you don’t choose.”

“And if I hate it there? If it feels like another kind of cage?”

“You tell me. We fix it, or we build you a separate house and lock a different door.” He looks around my apartment. “But we don’t pretend this is good enough while a man who thinks he owns you is lurking and looking to collect heads.”

My throat hurts. “You’re very good at being reasonable and terrifying at the same time.”

Xander fusses and my mother trades me. I settle him against my shoulder and he sighs like he’s rearranging his tiny soul. The room looks smaller with the bags open and the men’s shoulders near the door. My list runs again in my head—bottles, formula, wipes, blankets, pajamas, chargers, keys—it’s all here. “Ready.”

Roman nods to Marcus. “Car two to the back. We go in three minutes.” Marcus slips out, quick and quiet.

I turn back to Roman because there is still the boulder in the middle of the room with letters carved into it. “The marriage. We don’t know each other.”

He lifts a shoulder. “We know enough. We can know more with coffee tomorrow.”

I look at the boys. One dozes. One stares, serious as a tax form. Memories flash to the forefront. The deli. The knife a year ago and the clean sting and the kind, bored nurse who handed me a new strip of tape and said, “Press here.” How thin our front door is.

“This is nuts,” I say, because it is. “It’s reckless and fast and it sounds like a bad soap opera.”

“Yes. And it’s the only option.”

I breathe. I kiss Xander’s head. I hand him to my mother and wipe my face with the back of my hand, annoyed at myself for the damp there. I face Roman so he can’t mistake me. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Was it the most romantic proposal?

No.

Was it necessary?

Absolutely.

I bring them in through the underground entrance. Marcus takes point. Tanner carries the stroller. Marcus holds the door. The elevator opens into the service hall. The sconces are low and the heated floors radiate through gray stone. The babies cry when the door closes behind us.

Jennifer keeps Yuri on her shoulder. Mina has Xander, one hand cupped at his neck. She looks at the hall, then at me, and nods once. I feel better having them under my roof. I also feel the weight of what I’ve done.

I am marrying this woman. I am going to be a father to these children. Neither will be an easy task. But this is the only way to keep them safe.

It’s a heavy thing, taking on a young family. I’m fifty-three. She’s twenty-seven. Though, to be fair to her, she seems to have aged a bit since I saw her last. Being a single mom will do that to a person.

I clear my throat and my thoughts. “Rooms are ready. Nursery first, it’s next to yours. Your mother has the room on the other side of you.”

I walk and they follow. Inside the nursery are cribs, monitors, a rocking chair, and a changing table with drawers that shut themselves. All in soothing blues and greens—it looks like a baby spa in here.

Mina stops on the threshold. The twins stop crying for a breath, then restart, confused. She crosses to the nearest crib and sets Xander down. Jennifer kisses the top of Yuri’s head and does the same.

“Diaper pail,” Mina says, scanning. She finds it and lets out the smallest breath.

“There will be more of everything by morning.”

“I don’t need more. I need familiar.” She touches the soft blanket she packed and lays it over the sheet. Xander’s hands open. He stares at the ceiling and makes a sound like a complaint he forgot to finish.

The house is quiet in the way big houses are. Sound is swallowed fast. The boys don’t like it. I add white noise on the monitor. A low, steady rush fills the room. The twins go quiet, listening.

Jennifer looks around, eyes quick. “Bathroom?”

“Two doors down. Everything is stocked. You also have en suite bathrooms.”

She nods, moves with purpose. Mina stands still and listens, memorizing what the room sounds like when her sons breathe here. I step back and give her space.

“Okay,” she says softly. “What’s next?”

I take them through the kitchen on the way back to the main hall so Mina can see where bottles will come from at night without waiting for staff. The night fridge is stocked. Formula is stacked behind a cabinet door a child can’t open. She checks the labels and the expiration dates without thinking about it. Good. She is not dazzled by the marble or the square footage.

We don’t linger. The house is a maze the first day. People get lost in it. I walk them back toward the bedrooms. The twins make new noises—short, uncertain—then settle again.

At the door to her room, Mina stops. “Thank you. For everything.”

“You’re here because it is necessary. You don’t owe me gratitude.”

“That’s not why I said it,” she says. Her eyes are tired and sure. “Good night.”

“Call if you need anything.” I look at the small screen on the wall with the list of rooms and the call buttons. “You too, Jennifer.”

She nods. Jennifer nods too, both of them ready for sleep, it seems.

In my office, the house feels different. Fuller. Marcus checks in on the internal channel. The night team is in place, perimeter is clean. Tanner is on the nursery hall.

I give the order I always give. “No chatter. Eyes open.”

I should feel victorious. I do not. I have my heirs secured under my roof. I have their mother and her mother. I also have two infants who smell like soap and warm cotton, a woman who is trying not to show fear, and a grandmother who has already decided how to fight me if I become another problem.

Fyodor arrives without knocking. He closes the door and keeps his hat on until he sits. I pour him tea to mark that we are going to talk like family and not like boss and advisor for three minutes. “This is unusual,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Unusual is expensive,” he says. “Expensive attracts eyes.”

“They were already looking. Now I choose what they see.”

“They see a man who brought a woman and two small sons into his house and said ‘marriage’ without a season of courtship.”

“They see that a boy who failed to kill me also failed to frighten her.”

“They also see a woman who used to belong to the boy,” he says. He leaves the ugliness of the word belong hanging until I cut it in half by looking at him. “Your enemies will not swallow that down.”

“They can choke, for all I care.”

He doesn’t smile. “You want my counsel.”

“I asked you here.”

He folds his hands. “Wait. You can protect them here without a ring. Name the boys in your heart and in the house, not in court. Prepare the papers. Do not sign them yet. We need time to bring the boy to heel.”

“He tried to kill me, Fyodor. He planted a mine in a public road. He is stalking her. There is no time to bring him to heel.”

“Even dogs come to heel when the leash is tight.”

“He is not a dog. Dogs are loyal. Vitaly is a son who wants to be king without temperance. If he became pakhan, the other bosses would not stand for it. We did everything we could to turn him around. We tried patience. Correction. Bribery. The boy is wired wrong. He has no care for family, for friends, for this organization. Vitaly is out. My sons are in.”

He looks down at the tea he hasn’t touched. When he looks up again, he has the face he wore when he told me my father was dead. Practical. Dry. “Then you must make the marriage work in the eyes of men who will use any excuse not to accept it.”

“I know.”

He watches me for a long breath, then nods like he had to verify that I am not blinded by the same fever that killed men before me. “You like her.”

“I do.”

“That is dangerous. For you. For her. For the boys. Liking is soft. Soft is deadly.”

“I am not a child, Fyodor. I know.”

He leaves. The office is quiet again except for the camera feeds and the low hum of systems that never sleep. I look at the house plan on the wall. The hallway where the nursery sits is a clean line between my room and the guest rooms. I can reach it in ten seconds. Fewer, if adrenaline is a factor.

I can’t sit still.

At the nursery door, I stop. The white noise is a soft rush. The room smells like laundry. Tanner sits on a chair in the hall. He nods once. I nod back.

The door next to the nursery, Mina’s room, is open a hand’s width. I hear her quiet voice, counting under her breath, then humming without a tune. I knock the way you knock to not startle. “Roman,” I say, so she doesn’t have to ask.

“Come in,” she answers, low.

She stands by the bed in a nightgown that is more practical than anything else—soft cotton, narrow straps, nothing theatrical. Her hair is loose. She holds Yuri against her shoulder and pats his back with two fingers. The room lamp is on the lowest setting.

“How are you?”

“It’s too quiet.” She shifts the baby and he sighs. “They don’t like quiet. The white noise helps.”

“You can make it louder,” I say.

“I did. I also sang the theme song to a show I hate because it’s the only thing that stuck in my head.” She glances at me, amused at herself and tired. “Don’t judge me.”

“I’m not judging you. I am grateful you know how to keep them calm.”

“That’s my job, right?”

“Indeed.”

She takes a breath, as if to speak, but then hesitates. After a beat, she asks, “Do you want to hold him?”

“Yes.” The word is out of me so fast, as if it was waiting on the tip of my tongue. Maybe it was.

She transfers Yuri into my hands, and I support his head, shift him higher, and feel the weight settle into the place I didn’t know was waiting. He is warm and solid and serious even in sleep. He looks like he is considering a problem.

“He makes that face when he’s almost asleep,” she says. “Like he’s bargaining. Xander is easier. Or he was tonight. He’ll punish me tomorrow for daring to say that out loud.”

I try for a smile to comfort her. Not sure if it lands. “He can try. He’ll find I’m stubborn.”

“I believe you.” She watches me with mild amusement. “You look natural with him.”

“I had to learn with Vitaly. His mother was often absent. I did night feeds. Changed diapers. All of it.”

Her eyes meet mine at that sentence. Something in her relaxes a notch. She reaches up and wipes a spot of milk from Yuri’s cheek with her thumb, efficient and tender. “I was scared to bring them here. I’m still scared. But this place feels secure, and right now, I need that more than not feeling scared.”

“The doors are heavy. And so am I.”

“I noticed,” she says, dry, and I smile before I can stop myself. She looks at the bed and then at the chair. “You don’t sleep?”

“Later,” I say. “When I know everything is safe.”

“Control freak,” she says, not unkind.

“Survivor.”

“Sometimes you have to be a control freak to be a survivor,” she says.

I nod once, feeling the truth in her words.

Yuri sighs again and lets go, drifting deep into sleep. I hand him back. We walk into the nursery, and she sets him in the crib with a hand on his chest for the two seconds that keep him from startling. When she lifts her hand, he stays asleep.

We stand by the door and listen for a count of ten. Silence, except for the machine and the baby rhythm you only hear when you’re listening for it. She closes the door halfway and steps into the hall with me. Tanner looks past us, not at us. Good man.

“Thank you for the room next to theirs,” she says. “And for my mother’s room and…everything.”

“No thanks necessary.”

She looks past me at the dark end of the hall. “This house is too big.”

“It is.”

“I’m going to get lost,” she says.

“You’ll learn it faster than most. You see how things connect.”

“Compliment?” she asks.

“Yes.” I don’t add that I like how easily she moves between fear and humor. I don’t add that watching her hold a child is the most dangerous thing I’ve done in a decade.

“Good night,” she says, and her voice is softer but not weak.

“Good night.”

I walk back toward my room. I do not look over my shoulder. I don’t need to. I feel her step into her doorway and stand for one more breath before she goes to bed.

When I walk into my room, I close the door quietly and lean against it for a breath. Foolish of me to be moved by the sight of the mother of my children. Reckless, even. Fyodor would say I’m being irresponsible. My father would cuff the back of my head, at best.

I blink, and the image of her nightgown is seared in my brain.

This cannot be good.

I sit at the vanity with the lights set low. The mirror is too honest. It shows the thin line on my jaw where a thicker story lives. I trace it once with a clean fingertip, then stop touching it. Makeup first, memories later.

Or never, if I get a choice in the matter.

My mother stands behind me with a comb. She gathers my hair in her hands and starts to work on me. The rooms they gave us are neat and quiet. The boys are next door in the nursery with the monitor humming on the dresser. Outside the door, Roman’s men—Marcus and Tanner—speak in low voices and stop when they realize the sound carries.

They said something about watching for him, then fell silent. It’s okay, I want to tell them. I know what him they’re talking about.

Vitaly.

If Vitaly shows up at our wedding, he’s an idiot. Security is out the wazoo. Guests brought guards, and Roman’s team layered them like wedding cake tiers. Perimeter, inner ring, floor walkers, rooftops. Cameras everywhere. The gates log every plate. The kitchen has its own checkpoint. You can’t sneeze here without a man in an earpiece offering a tissue.

The wedding is at Roman’s family home, which is basically a small country with better lighting. He knows every blind spot because there aren’t any anymore. He had the house reworked. Paths rerouted. Sight lines cleaned up. The grounds look like a magazine, but the hedges hide sensors and the roses hide wire. Vitaly doesn’t have that map in his head. Roman does. He’s lived it longer, and he’s the one who kept upgrading it while Vitaly was busy telling people he was born to rule.

So, despite growing up here, Vitaly won’t have the advantage. He doesn’t know the code names or the sweep schedule. He doesn’t know about any of the upgrades, but I do. Roman told me about them to make me feel safe.

It worked.

A little.

Funny thing is, there was a minute when I thought I might marry Vitaly. When we started dating, he sold me a future with a crown and a house that bowed when he walked in. He said he’d be pakhan. I learned his language, his rituals, the shape of the role standing next to that title. I pictured myself as a pakhan’s wife because he told me that’s who I would be.

And here I will be. Just not his.

I don’t kid myself about the danger. But if Vitaly tries to crash this day, he won’t be the wolf at the door. He’ll be the stray who wandered into the wrong yard.

“Too much under the eyes,” my mother says. “Let them be eyes. You’re not auditioning for television.”

“I’m trying to look awake.” I dot concealer and tap it in. “They were hungry every two hours last night.”

“They’re in a new place.” She sets the comb onto the vanity and separates another section of hair with her fingers. “We all are.”

“I know.” I set the bottle down and pick up powder. I keep the strokes light. Mom’s right—I don’t need to cake it on. That’ll make it look like I’m hiding something.

My mother meets my eyes in the mirror. “You’re quiet.”

“There’s a lot to think about.” I check my liner and start again because the first line is never the line you keep. “I didn’t picture getting married in a house with guards in the hallway.” I didn’t picture getting married at all.

“Normal people don’t picture their daughter marrying a pakhan either,” she says, but her voice is even. “Do you want to talk or do you want me to tell you how to fix the left side of your eyeliner?”

“Both.” I breathe out and let the room settle back around us. “I like him, Mom.”

“I could tell the night he came to our door.” She pulls a pin from between her teeth. “I know better than to try to talk you out of liking him.”

“You always said I had a type.” I twist in my chair enough to look at her without glass between us.

“You’ve always liked the bad ones.” She shrugs. “I hate that for you.”

“I know.” I lean forward and put mascara on slow so I don’t blink it onto my lid. “Then I met Vitaly. He told me I was exciting. He told me I made him brave. He said a lot of things.”

“And you believed enough of them to keep going.” She doesn’t say it to wound. She says it because we promised we would tell each other the truth.

“The start was fun.” I put the wand down and rest my elbows on the table. “He was loud and bright and dramatic. Exciting. Dinner felt like the middle of a movie. I learned Russian dishes. Stood in rooms where I didn’t belong and made myself useful so no one would ask why I was there.” I glance at the scar. “Then he showed me who he was. It didn’t happen all at once. It arrived in pieces and excuses. I tried to end it three times. Each time he convinced me I had misunderstood the bad parts or invented them. The last time was the final straw.”

She meets my eyes again. We don’t need to say knife. We don’t need to say clinic. “I know.”

“He said no one would want me now,” I say, not whispering. “Not with what he did to my face.”

My mother’s mouth flattens. “And you proved him wrong.”

“I did.” I open the blush and add a little life back to my cheeks. “Roman.”

“That night changed everything.”

I roll lip balm over my mouth and press my lips together. “I thought it would be one night. Proof that he couldn’t own my life. Then the boys came…”

“Do you regret it? The boys. Any of it.”

“No.” The answer is immediate and solid. “Not for a second. I don’t regret it. Roman is who he is. I know what that means. He can protect them from Vitaly. He can put walls between us and whatever that asshole thinks he can do to us.”

“And you think that’s truly possible? That he can protect you and the boys?”

I hear the desperation in her voice. I feel it in my bones. “I have to believe it. It’s the best chance I have to protect them. They saved me once already.” I look at the line on my jaw in the light. “When I found out I was pregnant, the doctor said pregnancy hormones can change how you heal, and the scar softened fast. It was ugly. Now it’s a thin line. That’s thanks to them.” I swallow. “By marrying Roman, I save them. Circle of life, I suppose. They saved me from a nasty scar. I’ll save them from their nasty brother.”

“Stand,” she says, tapping my shoulder. “Time to dress.”

Behind the room divider, everything is white and elastic. I hang the dress where I can reach it without dragging it over the floor. Then I set the garter on the chair and breathe once to clear my head. Underclothes first. I step into them and pull them up by inches. The fabric is cold from the air-conditioning and then warm with me. Stockings next. I sit and roll them on carefully, matching the seams, smoothing out the fabric. The garter is last, a band that means nothing and everything, and I slide it into place with two fingers.

“You good?” my mother asks.

“Almost.” I pull the corset around myself and hook it without swearing, then thread the ribbons and pull until I feel held, not caged. I stand and check the mirror. I look like a woman who made a choice, not a woman being carried.

My mother lifts the dress off the hanger and angles it so it doesn’t knock into the screen. “Ready.”

I hold the bodice and step in. The fabric rises and settles. The skirt falls and remembers its shape. I wiggle a little to get the waist where it needs to sit. “Zip, please.”

Her hands are careful. She works the zipper up and stops once to smooth a fold. I feel the dress close along my spine, a final line. She hooks the little eyes at the top and steps back.

“Turn around,” she says.

I do. The dress is simple and clean. No jewels, no lace, just good seams and a square neckline that leaves my collarbones bare. I check the mirror again. The dress sits on me perfectly. By all looks, I’m ready.

My heart says I’m anything but.

But that doesn’t matter.

My mother is quiet. That scares me more than anything. “You look like yourself. I was afraid you would disappear in this place. I know it’s only been a few days, but you haven’t disappeared. Even in that gown, you look like you.”

“I’m not going to disappear.” I straighten the straps and smooth the sides. “He promised me that part.”

“You know promises are cheap.” She moves to the chair and sits, then immediately stands again like the chair offended her. “Tell me what you like about him, because I don’t trust any of this yet.”

“He listens. When I told him no guns near the babies, he didn’t balk. He agreed without hesitation, even though I know that guns are everywhere in his world. He’s gentle with the boys. He’s not performing gentle. He has a father’s instinct with them, and that’s valuable to me.”

“And with you?”

I draw a long breath and let it out slow. “I feel safe with him. Not because he’s dangerous, though he is. I don’t deny that. But because he doesn’t lie to me. He doesn’t hide things from me. He’d rather let me know everything, then let me decide what to do. I know the marriage thing is fast and he was pushy about it, but he’s also right. This is the best way for all of us to stay safe.”

My mother exhales. “That’s a start.”

“It is.” We finish hair the way we always finish hair—her at the back, me at the front, no fuss. I pin the last piece behind my ear. She pins the other side. And then, we’re done.

One more step to the aisle.

“Do you really want to do this?” She asks it at the exact moment when backing out would be possible and the exact moment when it would hurt the most.

“Yes.” The word comes out steady. “I want to protect them. I want a house where I can sleep.” My throat tightens. I swallow it down. It’s my wedding day, not a day for emotions.

She studies my face. “Okay.”

Someone knocks gently. “Ms. Harbor?” Tanner’s voice, calm. “Ten minutes.”

“Thank you,” my mother calls. She looks at me again. “Shoes.”

I slip into them. I walk once across the room, then back, to make sure the dress doesn’t fight me. It doesn’t. The monitor shows two green lines, then a light blink when one boy shifts and gives up on it. The sound doesn’t change.

“I’ll check them before we go down,” my mother says. “If they need anything, I’ll text.”

“That’s our deal.” I take her hand and squeeze. “Thank you for being here. For all of it.”

“Always.”

Marcus and Tanner straighten when I walk out. Marcus’s mouth twitches like he wants to say congratulations and won’t. Tanner’s eyes flick to the monitor in my mother’s hand and back to the hall. Professional. Appropriate.

“Ready?” Marcus asks.

“Yes.” I step into the quiet hall that leads to a louder decision. My mother goes into the nursery, and Marcus escorts me. The house smells like polish and something green from the courtyard. I pass a mirror and catch my reflection. I don’t slow.

As we round the corner, I feel something I haven’t let myself feel since the boys were born. It isn’t joy. It isn’t relief. It’s a steady kind of rightness that doesn’t depend on dresses or judges. It comes from the choice I made and the reason I made it.

I will keep us safe. No matter what.

It’s not the morning’s coffee that makes my heart stutter. Nor is it my blood pressure medication. Vitaly may brave a showing today, but my entire security team is here, we’ve made many upgrades to the grounds, and he will not get far if he acts so irrationally.

None of that is making my heart skip in my chest.

Every time I think of Mina and me saying our vows, something inside of me lifts.

Odd, to be nervous. The feeling amuses me. I don’t remember the last time my hands bothered themselves over anything that wasn’t a weapon. Not a fight, not a shipment, not an ambush. Today I can feel my pulse in my throat and I know exactly why. Not the guest list. Not the security plan.

Her.

There is something about Mina Harbor that vexes me. She is heat and sex and muted grace all at once. There is a fire in that woman, and I want to stoke it. I want to see what she could become with the right tools. And when she smiles, something goes tight in my chest.

That shouldn’t be. We are practically strangers. But even the night we met, when she was so bold as to approach me on my throne, there was no fear in her eyes. Only seduction.

How does someone from such a normal background become the person she was that night? I’m lost in thoughts of her when my houseman, Sergei, steps into the doorway and waits until I look up. “Morning.”

“Morning.”

“Perimeter is set. Street teams in position. Gate screening running. Caterers are ready. Tanner wants to know if you want the north lot closed early.”

“Close it now and make the cars use the south entrance. Less line of sight from the park.”

“Copy.” He doesn’t write it down. He won’t forget. “Fyodor asked if you’ll walk the floor before the ceremony.”

“I will.” I check the time. The ceremony is public because it has to be. The legal part happened last night with a judge who came through the service entrance. Today we dress the decision in a way men like to see it. The aisle, rings, music, witnesses who will enjoy the spectacle.

The house changes faces when it hosts. Staff have moved furniture since dawn. The winter garden is a hall now, with other rooms rearranged and prepared to host guests. Today is one of the few times I have an excuse to be pretentious enough to have a ballroom. It’s been set up for the reception.

I walk the path she will walk. The aisle is long by design. The men who came to be seen will have time to look. I want them to finish their looking before the vows. If they keep looking at her after the wedding, they’ll lose an eye.

Among pakhans there is a rule older than our oaths. Wives are off-limits. You can appreciate their beauty, but there is a difference between appreciation and making plans. You greet, you nod, you move on. A man who forgets that earns enemies faster than money can fix.

The truth under that rule is uglier. In my world, wives are often treated like property that happens to breathe. Displayed. Moved. Traded in exchange for peace. My father believed in that. He called it order. My mother was a product of that environment.

He called her ornamental, and she became ornamentation.

And she gritted her teeth every time he complimented her dress. She resented her role, and that resentment ate away at her as much as the alcohol did. When it stopped working to numb her resentment, she turned to pills. My father didn’t care, so long as she was still pretty. And quiet.

That will not be our life together.

Mina will be my wife, in full. The situation is not ideal, but it need not remain that way. I will treat her better than my father treated my mother. I will give her keys, not cages.

She will be a partner, not a pretty decoration.

In the small glass gazebo off the garden, the clerk arranges the book for signatures. Fyodor is with him, hat in his hands, watching the door. He looks me over the way he used to when I was a boy and had scraped both knees on the same day. “You slept?”

“Enough.”

He lifts a brow. “Today is the loud part.”

“It is.”

“It paints a target,” he says, because he will not stop saying the thing no one else will say to me.

“The target was painted a long time ago.”

He doesn’t smile. “You were born for sentences like that.”

“I was born for my father to have an heir. Nothing more.”

“This situation is unusual. A big production like this invites tests.”

“The tests were coming either way.”

“And you,” he says, “are nervous.”

“Yes.” I don’t lie to him. “Not about them. About her.”

He sits with that for a moment, then nods as if the answer satisfies a rule he keeps. “Good. It will keep your attention where it belongs.”

The guest list is a map of the city’s power. Captains and their wives. Rivals who want to see if they made a mistake staying rivals. Old men who remember when I was young and expected me to become my father. New men who think they are the future and will learn otherwise.

The invitation did not include babies. We will announce the twins, not parade them in front of these people. Not until Vitaly has been dealt with.

My suit is dark. My tie is one shade from black, unlike the very formal tuxedo I wore during my first wedding. That one was not for love.

This wedding is for…love of family, perhaps.

This marriage is a plan. It protects Mina. It shields our sons. It steadies the organization when others are watching for weakness. Practical, dry reasons to marry a stranger.

Romance later, if it comes at all. Considering how all of this came together, I doubt it ever will.

I was a romantic once. I thought being pakhan would mean I could marry for love and bend the world to make room for it. My first marriage taught me how wrong that was. Power does not buy freedom. It only buys better illusions.

If life had taken a gentler road, I would not have chosen Mina now. Not like this. Not with danger at the door and a clock ticking. I choose her because she carried my sons. That is the truth, and I do not dress it up.

But another truth sits beside it. I look at her and feel something open that I thought was shut for good. Respect. Heat. A stubborn hope that refuses to die. Maybe love can be built. Brick by brick.

Maybe after everything, I am still a romantic.

It doesn’t matter now. Whatever comes of this, I do it for my sons and the hope of a better future. Romance has been off the table for me for a very long time.

I stroll through my home toward the garden where the ceremony will be held in a few minutes. Heads turn the way heads do when they expect to be seen turning. I greet who I must greet. I nod at men who mistake proximity for friendship. I hold back enough that they remember the line.

The noise dimples and then smooths. The music begins, not loud, not sentimental. Tanner gives me a small nod from the back. He has eyes on the doors and a voice in his ear. Fyodor is at my right shoulder.

When she steps through the French doors at the entry to the garden, all thought evaporates.

She is simple and exact in ivory, a square neck, shoulders bare, hair pulled back. No veil. She doesn’t look intimidated or worried. She looks at ease. Gorgeous, in fact. That is the part that surprises me. Entering a space filled by criminals and bosses, she shines instead of shrinking.

My chest does a thing it hasn’t done since I was young and allowed myself certain fantasies. I’m being ridiculous, and I know it, but somehow, I cannot stop the electric thrill I get when she walks toward me. I can count the guards and the exits and still let my heart beat too fast because my bride is here and I want her to reach me soon.

I sound like a hormone-riddled teenager in my head, and yet, I cannot slow my heart down.

She stops at my side, and all I want to do is stare at her. But we face the man who will say the words to make today complete. I take her hand. It is warm. It doesn’t shake. I allow myself to look at her for a breath longer than is polite.

I am not polite today. I don’t have to be.

The official says a few sentences about intention and law and the meaning of love. I’ve heard these words for other men and watched them nod like they were performing. Half of those men had their dicks in other women before their honeymoon. That will not be me.

Our marriage might be a sham, but I take my vows seriously.

The rings come from a tray. I slide one onto her finger. It sits there like it belongs. She slides mine on and looks up into my face while she does it.

The kiss is brief by necessity. It is not performative. It is not hungry. It seals the vows. A handful of claps begin and swell because people want to be part of our big day.

It’s almost the wedding I once imagined when I allowed myself the stupidity of believing life could be good. When I was young I thought a wedding meant the rest would be easy. That a wedding portrait means the people in it were happy forever, and nothing bad ever happened to them. That’s how all the movies end, isn’t it? With a big wedding, and the happy couple departs while people clap.

Real life, in my experience, is rarely like the movies. I knew better than that—I had grown up under my parents’ marriage, and yet I allowed myself the fantasy of a Hollywood ending. Being a romantic is the perfect way to set yourself up for failure.

My first wedding portrait lives in an old photo album, warped and worn at the corners. Everything bad that can happen happened to the people in that picture. I refuse to let that be the story of my second wedding portrait.

We walk into the house, while the guests wait outside. Her ring catches the light. She smiles, but it is not a smile for others. It is for me only. An acknowledgment that we did the hard part. I feel something like relief move across my shoulders and settle.

“Are you all right?” I ask, low, for her and no one else.

“Yes,” she says. “Are you?”

“More than I expected to be.” I still feel the small tremor of that first sight of her at the door. Good. It reminds me I have something to lose. Men who forget that think they are gods and die like animals.

We enter the ballroom and take our places at the head table. “My father hated this room. Said it was too formal. But my mother loved it. She’s responsible for the décor.”

“She had good taste. Very classic,” Mina notes.

“Good taste in décor. Not in men.”

She smirks at that, but says nothing.

Our guests enter the ballroom. I can tell who wants to break protocol and speak with me. But they find their tables or the bar, knowing now is not the time. I am certain many of them want to ask about my eldest. Even now, it’s strange to think of marrying without Vitaly here. Psychotic or not, disinherited or not, he’s still my son.

The day is not done. We have to be seen, again and again, until the room is satisfied. We have to survive the toast a rival’s wife will try to give even though no one asked her to speak. We have to say good night to the handful who matter and send the rest home with full stomachs and full mouths.

But the ceremony is over. He didn’t come. No shots. No sprinting. No blood on white cloth. I let myself be grateful. I hold the feeling in place and promise myself not to mistake luck for strategy.

Now to survive the reception.

The reception is festive. Warm lights. Loud laughter. Every table has its own orbit. Glasses clink and people expect me to remember ten names a minute and a story for each one. I keep my smile steady and try to keep up, but the walls are closing in. The band plays a song I know and then something I don’t. Cameras hover and retreat.

Roman’s compound is built to impress. Tonight it does more. It contains us. I feel the perimeter in the way the room breathes. His security is everywhere, both men and women in dark suits with bulges beneath the jacket. They drift, all eyes, no smiles. Some guests brought their own men. The air has a hum under the music. It says behave.

I do my part. I shake hands. I accept blessings from grandmothers. I nod through a story about a fishing trip that ended in a storm. My cheeks ache by the time we reach the third cluster of laughing drunk people. The ringing in my ears won’t die down.

Then Fyodor arrives at my shoulder, takes one small step forward and the knot of people in front of us loosens without knowing why. “This is Mrs. Malinova,” he says, low enough that only I hear it. “She remembers faces. Say her name twice.”

I do, and her eyes brighten. We move two steps.

“Mr. Korsakov,” he murmurs next. “He invests in harbors and grudges. Smile. Promise nothing.”

I give a polite smile and promise nothing. He beams.

We slide to a pair near the lilies. “Judge Becker,” Fyodor says. “First name today. He prefers it when there are no robes. Robin.”

I thank the judge for coming. The judge takes my hand like I rescued him from paperwork.

A server appears with water. Fyodor intercepts and presses a glass into my palm. “Drink.”

The water cuts through a layer of nerves I could not swallow. “Thanks for that.”

He stays at my side as a guide and a shield. He jokes once, gently, about the way I say a certain surname. He is kind about it. I am grateful for how easy he makes this look.

Roman moves through the crowd like a steady current. People bow toward him without bowing. He says very little and means all of it. When our eyes meet across the room, my shoulders settle without me telling them to. It is less stressful knowing I have him in my corner now.

The twins are upstairs in the nursery with a house nurse from Roman’s staff, but I feel the tug of them in my ribs. I lean toward Roman. “I need to feed the babies.”

He nods at once. “Use the sitting room by the winter garden. Marcus will clear the path.”

Marcus is already moving. The band swells to cover the shift. Tanner signals two more of Roman’s team to watch the corridor. Guests’ bodyguards glance up when we pass. They note my face, note Marcus, and return to their corners.

The sitting room is two turns off the main hall. It’s quiet when the door shuts. A low lamp. A couch and a chair. A table with water and a neat stack of cloths. Roman must have known I’d need this space. It is odd. I’m not used to someone anticipating my needs.

It makes me suspicious of him. But he’s already gotten everything from me. What more could he want?

A minute later the house nurse wheels in the double stroller. “They’re hungry. I’ll be right outside.” She leaves me alone and pulls the door shut.

Peace lands like a blanket. I unclip the top of my dress and settle in the chair. Yuri first. He burrows and latches, loud with relief. I breathe through the first ache and touch his hair. His body goes heavy. Xander fusses in the stroller, then accepts the bottle I tuck into the crook of my elbow. I hold them both for a moment because I can. The noise of the reception turns to a soft vibration through the wall.

Mom was right. Combining breastfeeding and bottle feeding was the right way to go for twins. I close my eyes and count breaths. Everything is ordinary in a way I crave. My shoulders drop in the quiet of the sitting room. I can finally breathe deep in here. No more eyes on me, other than my boys.

It hasn’t been a minute when I hear voices through the wall. Not loud. Carried by the old vent near the ceiling. Russian. Two men.

I do not move. I haven’t told anyone here that I understand Russian. I learned it for a different life, when I thought Vitaly’s future would need me to bridge rooms for him. The language stayed after everything else went bad.

“Is it ready?” one man asks.

“The happy couple won’t make it through the night,” the other answers.

What did he just say?

“The poison works that fast?”

“It works that slow,” the other says. “It’ll take hours with the dose on their wedding goblet. But if I put more on it, they’ll notice the taste is off.”

The room tilts. My mouth dries. I press my tongue to the back of my teeth to keep them from clicking.

“No antidote?”

“Not in this country,” the other answers.

I know that voice. The exact tone. The measured way he shapes consonants. It is Fyodor. The man who has been a constant at Roman’s side. The man who guided me through this chaos for the last hour. What the hell is going on?

The other voice is familiar. The room fuzzes around the edges while my brain turns the sound until it clicks into place.

“Good work,” the first man says.

“When you’re pakhan, Vitaly, you owe me,” Fyodor replies.

My stomach drops. The man who wants to kill me is on the other side of the wall.

“You’ll get what’s coming to you,” Vitaly says.

A muffled sound follows. Not a shout. Not a struggle. A soft pop and then a heavy slide. A body meets carpet. The silence after is the wrong kind. Fyodor is dead. Has to be.

Yuri startles at a tremor only babies feel. He unlatches to protest and then latches again when I murmur his name. Xander kicks and grumbles. I cue the bottle back into his mouth and pat his leg with my knuckles.

I do not cry. I cannot. And I cannot let them cry either.

Vitaly will hear.

The door next door opens. Footsteps cross carpet. The door closes.

I wait three more slow breaths because fear begs me to freeze. Then I tuck myself away, fix my dress, and ease Yuri into the stroller. I settle Xander next to him. I check the straps with hands that want to shake. The buckles click. I open my door and step into the hall.

The corridor is empty. The air has that hollow feel a hallway gets after something heavy leaves it. I press my palm to the door of the room next door. It gives.

The room is a twin of mine. Same couch. Same lamp. Different air. Fyodor lies on the rug by the chair. One hand is close to his throat. His eyes are open. A red hole near his heart has ruined his suit. Keeping one hand on the stroller, I take one step in and one step back. I do not touch him. I do not call for help. I look once more to make sure my brain is telling the truth. It is.

Two words flash in my mind.

The goblet.

I move. Not a run. If I run, I could trigger a panic.

A quick, controlled walk that looks like a happy bride rejoining her guests with her children. Marcus steps into my path two corners later. His eyes go to my face. He does not ask out loud. He turns and matches my pace. Tanner leaves his post by the window and falls in behind us. Two more from Roman’s team drift to cover the far end of the hall. A rival’s bodyguard watches us pass and lifts his chin at Marcus. Marcus does not return it.

Roman stands with a man whose laugh is too loud. A server approaches the dais with the wedding goblet on a small tray because someone insisted on tradition. It catches the light. The room anticipates a toast. My lungs seize.

I keep my face arranged for photographs. I smile prettily at anyone who looks my way, and at anyone who coos toward my sleeping sons. I touch a woman’s elbow in passing and thank her for coming. I nod at a man who wants to be seen near me. I never take my eyes off Roman.

I reach him as the server dips the tray. I place my hand on Roman’s wrist like a wife asking for a word. He looks down at my fingers, and then at our sons, and then at my face. His brows relax by a fraction that only I would see.

“Everything all right?” he asks for the benefit of the men near us.

“Yes, of course,” I say in the same tone. I lean in so my lips are near his ear. I keep my smile in place. I whisper only what he needs. “Do not drink. The goblet is poisoned. The dose is already on the cup.”

His pulse jumps once under my fingers. He does not look at the tray. He does not look at the doors. He keeps his face smooth and his posture easy.

“One more photograph before we toast.” He turns to the server with a pleasant nod. “Set the cup aside. My wife and I will use water.”

The server stutters. He recovers. He slides the tray back. Marcus has already stepped up to intercept. Tanner is a shadow in motion, peeling away to handle the piece I cannot watch. The band plays on. Guests keep talking. No one notices that the center of the room just shifted.

Roman lifts a plain glass and raises it to the room. “To our guests,” he says. “To quiet nights and long, happy marriages.” We toast, and so does everyone else, none the wiser.

We pose for one shot and then I use my hand on Roman’s sleeve to steer us three steps away from the table. It looks like affection. It is strategy.

He keeps his voice low under the hum. “How did you know?”

I don’t want to say it, but I must. “When I was in the sitting room, I overheard a conversation between Fyodor and Vitaly, discussing poisoning us with the goblet.”

He arches a brow at that.

“They were next door. Fyodor…served his purpose to Vitaly by getting the poison into the cup, and Vitaly shot him. His body is still in the room. I got here as fast as I could.”

“You did well,” he says. He does not change expression. He looks past me at nothing in particular. He nods toward a man as if he agrees with a story he did not hear. His hand covers mine for one second, then lifts. “Stay with me.”

“I will.” I tip my chin like I am agreeing to try another canapé. I keep my smile steady for the guests who are watching my mouth. I know how to act normal when the world tips. I learned that a long time ago.

We move together along the line of tables, pushing the stroller along with us as if it was the plan all along. We accept congratulations. We thank people for their gifts. We speak about the courtyard and the band and a dessert that has not come yet. I do not look back at the tray. I do not look at the door to the corridor. I do not look at the wall behind which the room sits with a body on a rug.

Roman squeezes my fingers once more as we pass the arch. It could be for show. I know it’s for me. I breathe in. I breathe out. I stay pretty. I whisper nothing more until he asks. I keep us upright while the evening rewrites itself around a cup no one will touch.

I have pretended to be normal more times than I can count. Today is just another time, I tell myself. Ignore the shaking hands. The heart palpitations. The sweat trickling down my spine. None of that matters.

The show must go on.

I don’t let the room see it. I smile for a man who wants to tell me an old story about my father. I lift a glass of water. I let a captain’s wife kiss my cheek. Inside, my hands want to choke the life out of Vitaly.

Right now, I think I could actually do it.

Mina stands close. Her face is perfect for this moment. Calm. Bright. She looks like the bride everyone wants to see. Sunshine and happiness personified.

Even though she just told me the goblet is poisoned. And that Fyodor met with my son to murder my wife. I don’t know how long he has been betraying me to Vitaly, but there’s no way my son entered our grounds without the old man’s help. Which means Fyodor has likely been working in secret with Vitaly ever since I disinherited him.

Fyodor was my closest, most trusted advisor. A second father to me. The pain of this betrayal is searing, and I must force it down to continue the charade of this wedding day, or the guests will know something is wrong.

Something is wrong. Fyodor is dead. Mina, my new bride who has already been through too much for one lifetime, found him after overhearing his plans to murder her. She should have never had to know about any of that, let alone hear it firsthand while she was alone and vulnerable with our infant sons.

And Vitaly is here somewhere.

Fuck.

I do the one thing I can do without breaking the illusion I built. I raise my glass again. “To absent friends.” The crowd salutes to that and drinks. The band starts another song, and the crowd moves to follow it.

I lean to Mina’s ear. “Walk with me.”

My hand covers hers on the stroller handle for one beat. I do not take my eyes off the room. I turn us like any couple who wants air. Marcus steps into the current and opens a path. Tanner closes the space behind us so no one drifts the wrong way. Two more of my men split off and cover the far corners. Sergei attends invitees.

Guests’ guards watch and pretend they are not watching. They keep their distance. They also count my steps. Let them count.

We reach the corridor, and the noise falls away. That is when I allow the first breath that feels like breathing. I take us past the service door. We stop at the room Mina mentioned. A man I trust stands by the stroller now. He gives me a nod and keeps his eyes on my sons.

“Marcus, Vitaly is here. Get eyes⁠—”

“On it,” he says before texting the eyes I have on our cameras.

Inside the room is a light. A couch. A lamp still on. A hat on a chair. A body on the rug.

Fyodor is on his back with his head turned a little to the left, like he started to listen to something and then forgot to finish. There is a small hole next to his sternum. The blood is not everywhere. It has soaked into the wool rug and darkened a circle under him. Close range. Suppressed. Clean. He did not have time to stand. He did not expect the shot from the man he thought he could trust.

The old man never listened to a damn word I said about Vitaly, and it got him killed, just as I feared it would.

No one should experience their worst fears coming true, particularly on their wedding day. If we make it to our first anniversary, I hope to forget the next few minutes and focus on how beautiful my bride is, how nice it is that everyone came out to see us on our special day.

I hope I do not recall Fyodor’s bullet hole.

I cross the room and kneel. I touch his wrist out of habit even though I know. No pulse. I take his hat from the chair and set it by his head. He liked his hat.

For one long second my vision narrows. It is not grief alone. It is the sensation of a foundation you trusted turning out to be made of spiderwebs.

He was with me since I was tall enough to sit in a meeting and not be told to go to bed. He taught me how to read a room. He stepped between me and my father when that was the only way to keep us from tearing each other apart. He kept my secrets when I was nineteen and too sure of myself. He told me when I was wrong and he was right about half of those times.

He was also a believer in the old order. Our family’s traditions. Firstborn son. Title by blood. He wanted a world where I die and Vitaly takes the chair because it is his birthright. He could not imagine that tradition can be a weapon in the wrong hands. He could not stand the thought that I would name anyone but my eldest son as heir even after everything.

Clinging to the old ways got him killed. Betting on the wrong man got him killed. Both can be true at the same time.

My gut twists at the sight of his body. At the thought of all the years between us. Fyodor always did what he thought was right, and that’s the worst insult of all in this. It is betrayal, in its purest form. Fyodor betrayed me. My son betrayed him.

It is also an answer to a test I have been running for a long time. Ever since Vitaly went rogue when he found out I was not planning for him to succeed me. I didn’t have someone else in mind at the time, but I knew he was not the man for the job. He overheard an argument with Fyodor on the matter, and ever since then, he has been a madman.

No. That’s not true. He was a madman long before that night.

Mina is steady. Her hands are small fists at her sides. I do not want this to be the first lesson she learns about my work. But I do not get to choose the order of her lessons.

“We will continue,” I say, quiet and even. “You and I will go back to the room and finish what we started. The guests will finish their plates. The band will play. You will not leave my side unless I ask you to. We will dance if we must.”

She looks from me to Fyodor and back. “Even though we know Vitaly is here somewhere?”

“If we do not, he knows we know he’s here. He will know his plan has gone sideways, and he will act irrationally. He must think we will fall into his trap eventually.”

“And when we don’t?”

I nod once. “We will go on our honeymoon. With him out there, knowing he missed his shot at us.”

She lowers her voice. “But he will try again.”

“He will.” I do not soften it. “I cannot kill a shadow, Mina. But I can kill a man. Tonight he tried a cup. Next he will try a roof or something else he thinks is clever. I will meet him there.”

Her mouth opens and closes. “Your calmness is for show, isn’t it?”

“It is for protection. If I break in front of them, I pay for it. We all do. Authority and power are stories we tell each other, and little more than that. So, I will not break, and neither will you.”

She steps closer. She is not afraid of me or the body on the floor. “I won’t. You don’t need to worry about that. What about your men?”

“I need to see who locks down and who runs his mouth. If we see any of the families leaving early or acting oddly, we need to know who spoke up.” I glare at Fyodor one last time. I taste bile. “Fyodor chose my father’s tradition over my judgment. He thought Vitaly was owed my title upon my death. He brought my son into my house and helped him set a trap for my wife on our wedding day. There is only one end for that. Fyodor got what was coming to him.”

She shudders. “That is exactly what your son said. I heard him say it. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you.’ Then the sound. Then the fall.”

I do not want her to see me the same way she sees Vitaly. Not even for a breath. But on this point, the truth is the truth. I meet her eyes and do not look away. “I never want to have anything in common with my son, but on this score, he is not wrong. He saved me a bullet, because I would have done the same thing once I found out.”

Killing Fyodor myself would have hurt worse than finding his body here now. In that respect, Vitaly did me a favor.

A wretched favor.

Footsteps approach. Two of my men step in without glancing at the body. They carry the folded shroud from the estate kit and a black bag. They do not talk. It’s not the first time they’ve processed a dead body in this house. It won’t be the last.

I turn back to Mina. “We have five minutes before someone important decides to be offended that we aren’t there to entertain him.” I keep my voice soft. “Here is what we do. We walk back. You keep your hand on my arm. You smile and nod and look like a woman who is happy to be admired. If I stop, you stop. If I go left, you go left. You get me?”

“Yes,” she says. Her chin is high. She is holding it together remarkably well for a woman in her position. “What about the boys?”

“They return to the nursery. Two men are at that door. One woman who works for me is with them who knows how to hold a gun and a baby.”

She breathes once. Twice. She nods. “Alright.”

We step into the hall. Marcus takes the stroller and pushes it to the nursery with one of the men. Tanner holds the line at the far end. Traveling the halls of my home, knowing Vitaly could be here, is unsettling. I have the best security, and he managed to get past all of them.

Fyodor must have helped him get in somehow. That hole in security will be filled one way or another.

“I am scared,” Mina mutters. “I’m also relieved you’re not pretending this didn’t happen or trying to keep me from the truth. Thank you for that.”

“I will always tell you the truth, Mina. And fear keeps you alive. Listen to that instinct.”

“How do we know he isn’t just going to burst into the garden and mow everyone down with a machine gun?”

I huff a laugh at that. “First of all, he wouldn’t get far. Most of the people in there are armed. Secondly, he wants to be pakhan, and the people inside are the ones he wants to impress, not murder. Trying to kill us all would only end his chances faster.”

She takes half a breath. “So, he could wait until the party is over and then come at us?”

“He won’t get the chance. Do you trust me?”

She stops walking, so I do as well. Her sparkling blue eyes meet mine, and for a moment, I’m that nervous kid again. Her soft face is serious now. “I trust you with my life, Roman.”

It feels like the highest honor until she adds, “I trust you with our sons’ lives too.”

That is the highest honor. Something in my chest goes tight, and I stop breathing. I rasp, “Thank you.”

She starts to walk, so I keep up. We step back into the edge of the reception. The lights are warmer now. The music is a familiar song. Men turn their heads because men like to clock the moments when something might happen. Nothing does.

I take her hand and guide her back toward the head table. We pass three faces I will speak to later. They all get a nod. None of them gets more. My wife has all my attention.

She stands with her hand on my arm. She smiles for a woman who wants a picture. She looks like nothing is wrong. She is the reason I will set everything right.

The reception is still going strong, and Roman already has a plan.

But I don’t want this. I don’t want to be bait. I don’t want to hand my babies to anyone and watch a door close between us. My body knows before my mouth does. My grip locks on the stroller. There isn’t enough air in here.

My voice scrapes out of my lungs. “Are you sure this is the only way?”

Roman’s voice stays even. “He can’t be two places at once. So, we divide the targets. It’s the safest plan for them, Mina, and it will help us handle him.”

I hate that it makes sense. I want to argue the logic, and I’ve got nothing, other than a mother’s instinct to keep her babies close to her.

The house is a maze of quiet halls and fast steps I try to keep pace with. Wedding noise bleeds away. A female team waits by the service door. Dark clothes. Flat shoes. No matching anything. They look like the women who arrive first when a flood hits and nobody else has a plan. Stocky, for the most part, with freshly trimmed hairstyles and nothing flashy on any of them.

So purposefully plain that they almost stand out.

Roman introduces me to Carol, who gives me a firm nod and not much else. But she looks like competency given form. “Our route is ready. Three cars. No stops.”

Roman faces me, not them. “Your mother goes with them. Among them are drivers, medics, guards, and nannies. They look like retreat staff because they are. We own the retreat. It’s far. No men on the grounds. No reason for Vitaly to look there.”

“Far where?”

“The woods, three towns over. It’s isolated private property. You’ll have two check-ins a day through a line that only rings to me.”

I want to say no. The word is useless. I know it. It still sits on my tongue and burns. This is madness, or maybe it just feels like madness because I’m going crazy every time I think of my boys being so far away.

Mom appears with the diaper bag and a set of knit hats. Her mouth is tight. Her eyes are clear. “I don’t like this. I get it, but I don’t like it.”

“Same here, Mom.”

Roman’s smile is small. “Thank you for protecting our boys, Jennifer.”

She takes a deep breath and nods. “I won’t let them out of my sight.”

I slide the hats on. Yuri scowls at the elastic and then forgets. Xander makes a breathy sound that could be a laugh or a complaint. Their cheeks are warm under my palms. Looking at them rips my heart out, knowing what’s coming. But not looking at them would be worse.

Roman stands so I can see him and the door. “The boys ride separate. One per car. Your mother with one. The house nurse with the second.”

“No,” I say before I can think. It comes out hard. “They stay together.”

“Not on the road,” he says gently. “If a tire goes. If a driver faints. If a branch falls. We do not risk both at once.”

He’s right. I hate him for being right. I appreciate him for being right. I nod and swallow the bitter taste of it. I’m queasy, and I don’t think that’s going to improve anytime soon.

The team moves like a single thought. Blankets. Extra formula. The small phone that only calls two numbers. Mom smiles, but it’s sad and complicated and I know precisely how she feels. “We’ll be fine. You finish this. Then you come get your sons.”

“I will.” Roman looks to Carol. “Five minutes.” Then to Marcus and Tanner behind him. “Clear the back. Quiet.”

Marcus is already moving. Tanner is already on the stairs. The door opens to the service garage. Night air pushes in. It smells like wet metal and cold stone and missing my babies.

Sergei helps them load up, and the first car rolls. The second brakes light. The third sits ready to cover. The nurse climbs in with Xander. My mother settles with Yuri and keeps her eyes on me as the door shuts. He’s moodier than Xander, so I get why she picked him to ride with. But I worry Xander will feel abandoned, surrounded by strangers.

I hear the soft grinding of rubber on concrete. Then nothing.

The space they leave is loud. I have to hold the stroller handle to stay upright.

Roman doesn’t speak at first. When the worst part passes, he touches the back of my arm and takes his hand away. “They will be fine.”

“Say it again.” It is not a request.

“They will be fine.” He keeps his voice level, and I didn’t know I needed that as much as I do.

We bid our farewells to the remaining guests, and the reception is over. The staff is invisible. Security isn’t. My body feels heavier. Air sounds different. Wrong. Empty.

My babies are gone.

In Roman’s office, a lamp glows on a neat desk and a phone that belongs to another decade. He points to the chair by the window. “Next is your job at the law firm.”

I sit because my legs don’t like standing anymore. “I should go in after the honeymoon. Pack my drawer. Give a week. Find someone to hand off to.”

“No. You say the truth that keeps you safe and ends the conversation.” He nods at the landline. “Use that. Untraceable.”

The number is in my bones. Mr. Kerr answers on the second ring like always. “Hello?”

“It’s Mina. I wanted to tell you in person, but there’s no time. I got married.”

A beat of surprise. “Congratulations. You sound…like there’s more to it than that.”

I sigh. “I won’t be coming back. We have a family emergency with no end date. My husband’s son is having a mental breakdown. We don’t know what the situation will require.” Not entirely a lie.

His words come out slowly, like he’s concerned. “Are you safe, Mina?”

“Yes, it’s nothing like that.” It’s exactly like that. “I can send notes to make the Mitchell handoff easy. Or at least a list.”

“No need, I’ll handle it. Sounds like you have your hands full as it is. When you want back in the rat race, I’ll welcome you with open arms or a glowing reference.”

My throat gets hot. “Thank you.”

“Go be married. And good luck.” He hangs up before I fail at being concise.

I put the handset down. “I hated that. Kerr was always good to me.”

“You okay?”

“Does it matter? I’m breathing, and that’s what I’ll settle for at the moment.”

“It matters to me.”

I meet his gaze and sigh again. He really does care, or near enough. “I’ll be okay, Roman.”

“Good.” He opens a drawer and takes out two passports and a slim folder. “Plane’s ready. We’re going to Fiji.”

“Fiji?”

“We’ll be at a private resort. Friendly police. Enough cameras to make tracking him on the island easy.”

“Will he come there?”

A simple nod is all I get. Not an apology—not that I need one. None of this is Roman’s fault. Nor do I get I’ll keep you safe forever and nothing bad will happen.

I appreciate that he doesn’t sugarcoat this for me. He doesn’t treat me like I’m fragile. It’s more respect than I’ve gotten from anyone I’ve dated.

We move through a service corridor that opens to a small underground garage. The car is plain and dark. The windows show a pinstripe of the world and nothing else. My chest wants to climb out of my ribs. I count streetlights to slow it down.

At the private terminal, light spills in strict lines across concrete. The plane waits with the stairs down. Marcus talks to the crew. Tanner checks a list. A man and a woman dressed like us step into a van and disappear toward the wrong gate to be seen by the right camera. Decoys, I imagine. I keep my face blank because someone could be watching from anywhere. It’s too open here, too exposed for my liking.

Hopefully, the decoys work.

I imagine walking into the tiny plane and facing Vitaly with nowhere to run or hide. My lungs don’t want to do their job. But I walk up the stairs anyway.

Inside, the cabin glows warm and quiet. My eyes take in the sights in flashes, still on the alert for our killer. Pale wood. Soft tan leather that doesn’t squeak. A blue runner of plush carpet on the aisle and between the seats. Water bottles lined up like soldiers. I touch the back of a seat because I need to touch something that will not move when the rest of this does.

No Vitaly in sight.

Roman speaks to the pilot and sits across from me. He buckles. I buckle. If I do what he does, I don’t have to think, and right now, thinking is doing me no favors.

He suggests, “Call your mother now. The line will go dark after takeoff.”

He pulls a small secure handset from the armrest and taps two buttons. My mother’s voice fills the small room. “Hi, honey. We’re just fine, almost there. They made me turn in my phone. The women are not chatty. They know what they’re doing.”

“Are the boys okay?”

“Dead to the world,” she says. I hear her swallow. “We’ll call on the house phone when they let me.”

“Okay. I love you.”

“Love you,” she says. The line drops. Roman tucks the handset back and looks out the window.

The plane moves, and I take a quick breath. I’m not a fan of flying. It’s not on my worst fears list, but it could be, depending on the day. And this plane is tiny. The runway lights scroll under us like stitches. I grip the armrests and try to relax my jaw. No success. The engines lift. The city tips backward and falls away.

I close my eyes and see the things I don’t want to see. A cup that almost touched his mouth. A body on a rug with a hat near the hand. I open my eyes before the images stick.

“Tell me about yourself, Mina,” Roman says.

“I hate this.” The words spill out. I can’t stop them—my heart is too wound up to stop now. “I hate that I’m leaving them. I hate being bait. I hate that your son is a hurricane we have to fly into on purpose. I hate that I quit my job on a landline like it was a bad affair. I liked that job.”

“You will have another when you want one. Or something you like better.”

“I don’t want better. I want normal. I want a printer that jams and a bus stop view and a clerk who knows me. I want to count calendar days until my next vacation that I know I lied to myself about getting, but I use it as inspiration to go to work anyway.”

He looks perturbed. I can’t tell if I hurt his feelings by rambling all of that at him, but he asked, and if he’s going to be honest with me, I’ll be honest with him. He clears his throat before saying, “You’ll have whatever you want when this is over.”

I almost believe him. But I’ve never had whatever I wanted before today, and I can’t picture that happening now or ever in my future. I also cannot stop rambling, because my pulse and my brain are conspiring against me. “I like you. I wish I didn’t. It would make this simpler.”

That earns a flicker of a smile at the corner of his lips. It’s hidden by a day’s worth of stubble, but I catch the ghost of that smile, and I wonder how handsome he’d be if he ever actually smiled fully. “It would be simpler, but I’ve never had simple a day in my life, and from what little I know of you, neither have you. What would you do with a simple circumstance, Mina?”

I think my husband is flirting with me. But the question blanks my mind. “To be honest, I’m not sure what I’d do with a simple life. I got close to having one briefly…” I take a breath, trying to sort through the few thoughts I have. “But then your son showed up again, and now I’m here.”

The flight attendant appears long enough to set down water and vanish. The plane levels. The engine hum becomes a blanket I can live under for a while. I drink, and the world tastes less like metal.

“Tell me about the retreat Mom and the boys are at.”

“It’s for women who…need an escape from the life.” An escape from the Bratva, he means. “Some left bad men. Some left their own bad days. They tend a garden. They walk in pairs. The fence is for wolves and for men who think they are wolves.”

“Does he know it exists?”

“No. Few know about it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work.” He pauses, and I can’t tell if that’s because he doesn’t want to tell me more, or if there’s even more to tell. “My mother…she could have used a place like it. She died, and then once my father had passed, I set the retreat up for women to tell their captain husbands that they were going to an exclusive spa or whatever lie they thought would work.”

“And the husbands buy that?”

“It is not uncommon for their wives to go overseas for the latest in plastic surgery or what have you. So, a few days at a spa is nothing to them.”

I nod, but it’s hard for me to imagine separate vacations like that. “Go on.”

“When they’re free, I send the team to meet up with her and ensure she doesn’t have a tail. She can spend a few days there, or weeks, or we can help her fake her own death and relocate her. Whatever she needs. Some merely need a break, but others…they need a new life. If I let it be known that I offer such a thing, I would be a dead man. So, I keep that resource a very guarded secret.”

“Oh. Then it’s as safe as it can be, I guess. They all are.” I let that settle me, even though it’s hard to believe my sons are okay without me. Leaning against the window until the cold sinks into my skin helps. The ocean is black below us. The map screen draws a thin line over it and writes one word at the end. Fiji.

I text my mother even though I know the phone is off. I love you. It goes nowhere. It helps anyway.

Roman moves to the seat beside me after the belt sign dims. He doesn’t touch me until I lift my hand. Then he covers it. Warmth moves from his palm to mine. It doesn’t fix anything.

I don’t know what could.

My bride is nervous.

I do not like sending my sons away either. I understand her nervousness. This is all built on a foundation she is unsure of. She doesn’t really know me. To be fair, I don’t really know her. But I have more security in this arrangement than she does, hence her nervousness and my lack of it.

The plane is steady. The belt sign is off. No one comes into this cabin unless I permit them. It is the one part of today that feels like a clean rule. After everything else, it gives me peace of mind to know we are here together, just the two of us.

I have never been truly alone. Growing up under my father’s roof, there were always servants and guards and associates coming in and out of the house. I never left for school, never moved out. He died, and I inherited the house and the servants and the guards. Even the associates, or their successors.

And now, I am married once again. Being alone was never in the cards for me. But alone time with my bride? That is something I can have now and then.

The quiet hum of the plane is low enough to allow for conversation, but Mina’s not especially chatty since she got out all her nervous thoughts. She stares out the oval window and pretends she is not counting minutes. She is. I can see it in the tight line of her mouth and the way her fingers press the armrest when the plane shivers. She is pretending for me and for herself. She needn’t do that.

But she doesn’t know that. How many times has she pretended to be okay for other people? I suppose I should get to know her better, since we’re married and will be for the foreseeable future.

“We are alone for now. Tell me something you like.”

She blinks. “Like what?”

“Anything. I will start if you want.”

She lifts her defiant chin. “You start.”

“Very well. I like kitchens that smell like coffee at five in the morning. I like when a plan is so simple my captains cannot break it. I like the way you stand when you’re angry. You plant your feet like you’re telling the floor to answer to you. And I think it does.”

Her mouth tilts. “I like to finish things before anyone remembers to ask me. I like being the person who knows where the good stapler went. I like the weight of my boys when they fall asleep and I don’t want to put them down even if my arms go numb.”

Tanner taps twice on the frame, so I click the button that allows him into my part of the cabin. He sets a silver bucket on the credenza and leaves without speaking. The bottle wears a strip of tamper tape I can read from here. I tear it and check the cork for holes. I fill two flutes and set one in front of her. I also set water next to it.

“To your health.”

She touches my glass with a click that is more firm than polite. She takes a sip, and I hope the bubbles do their small trick. The tight lines at the corners of her eyes ease. “I like champagne too.”

If all it takes is a little buzz, I’ll be sure to keep a drink in her hand. “Tell me something you hate. Get it out of your mouth.”

“Thin doors,” she says at once. “And stairs that make noise. And men who think kindness is a weakness. And women who call me sweetheart in a tone that makes it an insult.” She drinks again. “Your turn.”

“Long meetings. And men who copy old mistakes because they think old men cannot be wrong. When someone has something in their teeth or a spot on their clothes, but you can’t comment for fear of being impolite.”

“Because it’s awkward?”

I nod. “I don’t do well with awkward. Or unpredictability.”

She’s quiet for a breath. “I bet today didn’t help with that.”

“Today helped quite a lot, actually. Awkward and unpredictable as it was, it told the truth about Fyodor, and that was a truth I needed.” I keep seeing his dead eyes in my head and try to reconcile his betrayal with the man I thought I knew. But there is no reconciling betrayal, particularly when the betrayer is dead. “Sometimes, I hate the truth. But it is useful.”

She sits back. “I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to say his name and make it bigger.”

“Then, we will not.” I don’t mind the change in topic. I’m glad for it. Perhaps thinking of other things will replace the image of his dead body in my mind. What do normal people ask when getting to know someone? “Favorite food?”

A smile slashes across her face in an instant. “Tomatoes, picked from my mom’s garden from back when we had a house, with salt. Fresh baked bread to sop up the juice. One of my favorite summertime memories from childhood. You?”

“Cabbage soup. The way my grandmother made it. No one has hit the taste since.”

“Not something fancy?”

The question makes me chuckle. “No. I’ve had fancy on three continents. It doesn’t hold a candle to a simple cabbage soup. What did you want to be at twelve?”

She laughs and sips her champagne. “A translator. I grew up with Spanish-speaking neighbors on one side and German-speaking neighbors on the other, so I learned some of both and translated between them, and loved it. I pick up languages pretty easily.”

“That’s a hell of a skill to master.”

“I don’t know about mastering it, but it’s a little like dancing.” The sly smile at the corner of her pink lips tells me I’m onto something. Her gaze goes wistful. “You listen to the rhythms, follow their eyes, and it’s easy to figure out what they’re talking about even when you don’t know a language. Same with dancing—you can follow someone’s lead if you hear the rhythm and follow their eyes.”

“You’re a quick study when it comes to a lot of things, and that is a skill most people do not have. Bravo.”

She smiles and looks at my hands. “What did you want to do at twelve?”

“To replace my father with a new one. And get a basketball hoop in the yard.” I take another small sip and set the glass down. “I have neither. It worked out in the end.”

She rolls the stem between her fingers. The ring flashes and makes the cabin look warmer. “What will you call me when we are alone?”

“Mina. Unless I’m trying to make you smile. Then I call you wife.”

She does smile. “That works.”

“What will you call me?”

“Roman. Unless I’m trying to win an argument. Then I call you darling and make you coffee.”

I smile, despite the obvious manipulation. “That works.”

She looks out at nothing. The window reflects her face back to her. The scar is only a thin line. In a strange way, it suits her. If she didn’t have it, she’d be too perfect.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I say.

“I keep imagining the boys with my mother and that one woman with the steady voice. Carol. She seems very competent.”

“She’s ex-CIA. She better be competent.”

Her eyes widen at that, before she says, “I keep listing in my head what’s in the diaper bag that Mom has and wondering whether she has enough of everything with her.”

“If not, they’ll make a run into town. It will be careful and quick, and no one will know.”

That assurance lowers her shoulders half an inch.

“Tell me something nobody knows about you.”

She thinks. “I like pigeons.”

“Pigeons?”

“I know people hate them, call them rats with wings, but I like them. Their feathers shine like oil slicks, and I like the way they coo, and I like their pathetic nests and that their babies survive despite those pathetic nests. They’re survivors.”

No wonder she likes them. She can relate.

“I like ironing shirts.”

She laughs again, freer this time. “Do you actually do it or do you have Sergei do it and you supervise?”

“I do it myself. When I cannot sleep, it soothes me. It’s a good return on investment—just a few minutes of work, and you look like a million bucks.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“You married me.”

She takes another small drink. “Tell me who taught you to kiss like that.” She looks at the table like she didn’t mean to say it out loud.

“That is my line. You’re a hell of a kisser.”

She laughs musically. “Tell me.”

I sit back and consider the question. “My grandmother told me to pay attention to a woman. To everything. That’s the answer.”

“That’s cheating. I meant, what woman taught you to kiss like your life depends on it?”

“I merely pay attention to what gets the biggest reaction from the woman I’m kissing, so…” I shrug. “It was my grandmother’s advice that showed me the way. What do you like? Intimately, I mean.”

“Not rushing,” she says, very matter-of-fact. “Taking the time to feel everything out.”

“Good. I can do all of that.”

“You already did.” She leans into my shoulder. She fits there like I planned it. My hand closes around her knee through the fabric of the dress. I do not move it higher. I don’t need to. The heat from her skin is enough for now.

“Twenty questions,” I say. “Fast. No thinking. Ready?”

She nods.

“Beach or city.”

“City,” she says.

“Cook or order.”

“Cook. I hate waiting for someone else to feed me.”

“Dogs or cats.”

“Neither,” she says. “We have babies. Could you imagine taking care of a pet on top of them too?” She reaches up and touches my jaw. Her thumb slides over the place I should have shaved this morning. But my hands weren’t as steady as I need for a good shave, so I skipped it. Her eyes go darker at the feel of it. My mouth heats. I don’t move. I let her do it again. She does. “What do you think when you look at me?”

“That you look like trouble. It’s how you looked the night we met, and how you look now. The thing is, I like trouble. Always have.”

Her hand draws back half an inch like she burned herself on me, then retreats to her champagne flute. I pour a little more. She takes it and makes a face that is half pleasure and half grief. “Champagne when my sons are in the woods without me. I feel like a bad person.”

“You are not. You are allowed to enjoy the moment.”

She nods. She puts the glass down and takes my water instead. “Water is probably the better call right now. I’m terrified, Roman.”

“Fear is a tool. Learn to wield it, and no one can use it against you.”

Mina smiles at that. Her hand finds mine on her knee. She threads our fingers together and squeezes once. “I want to be a good wife,” she says without opening her eyes. “Whatever that means.”

“It means you tell me the truth. Our marriage is…not anything I planned⁠—”

She laughs. “Same here.”

“But I enjoy your company, Mina. We will make our marriage whatever we both need. I would prefer we have a friendship. If something else blooms from that, all the better. If we remain only friends and we keep our sons safe, I would still call that a good marriage, given our circumstances.”

“I can do that.” She opens her eyes. “Ask me one more. Make it hard.”

“What do you want out of our arrangement?”

She looks at the window. She looks at me. “To live a boring, long, happy life.”

“I will do my damnedest to give you boredom and happiness and many years.”

She laughs again. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“I’m thanking you in advance for all of that.” She pauses, then adds, “And for letting me hate your good plan and not punishing me for it.”

“You can hate my plans. I will still make them if it means keeping you and our boys safe.”

Her head finds my shoulder and her breaths go steady, as though she’s finally breathing again. She smells like the last frost before springtime—frost and flowers beginning to bloom. The weight of her head on me feels right. I like being her support. I like that she feels comfortable enough to lean on me.

Something in my gut tells me I could also lean on her, but Fyodor’s voice in my head begs for caution. I wonder when his voice will die too.

The plane hums. The map creeps across black water. I watch the thin line crawl and know it is only a guess. The rest of this night is a guess. He was right about that. We don’t know what comes next. We only know we are here.

I let that settle in my chest. It feels like a knot at first. Then it loosens. A little. I picture my boys asleep under thick blankets in a room that smells like soap and wood. My mother arguing with a kettle. Guard women circling outside. Everyone safe.

Roman sits next to me instead of across. His knee brushes mine. No words. He pours a small amount of champagne and more water and sets both on the table. His fingers are steady. The plane shifts. He does not.

“You were right.” The words taste strange and honest as I say them. I’m not sure if I like that combination. “We don’t know what will happen. We should enjoy what we can.”

He studies my face. “What does that mean to you?”

“Live in the moment.”

“We can do that.” He lifts my left hand and studies the ring. It sits there like it has always known my finger. He kisses the base of my thumb. The kiss is not a test. It is a question. I nod because my mouth is busy trying not to shake.

He kisses me then. Slow. Careful. Not because I am fragile. Because he knows I’m tuned tight and wants to retune me. I lean in for more. Heat runs up the back of my neck and across my scalp. His hand slides to my jaw. He pauses. He is asking again without asking. I say yes against his mouth because I don’t want to speak and stop this.

“Tell me to stop anytime,” he says against my lips.

“I will.”

His palm cradles my jaw. My fingers slide to his collar and learn the line of muscle beneath the fabric. He tastes like the champagne. His kisses go deeper, like he’s tasting his favorite fruit. I press closer. The armrest gets in the way, and he laughs under his breath. I do too. It breaks something brittle inside me that needed to break.

I swing a leg over his lap and settle there. He is strong and solid under me. I feel grounded for the first time in a long time. I’m not sure how he does it—how he makes me feel safe even now.

The truth is, the night I met him at Rope, I felt safe. Reckless, yes. Wild, yes. But safe in a way I had not felt in years. Maybe ever. He looked at me and I knew that while he was in the room, nothing bad would reach me there.

That certainty scared me more than the club ever did. It made me feel young in the worst way, like a girl playing at being grown. I did not know how to sit across from a man like that and hold a conversation without giving myself away. So I took the easy out instead of facing a post-sex conversation. I crawled out the bathroom window and told myself it was because I had gotten what I came for.

It was my ego. Leaving was simpler than speaking to someone like him.

There is no sneaking out now. We are married. He’s not going anywhere and neither am I.

His hands travel the safe places first. Spine. Waist. The curve where my dress fits and then lets go. No rush. We have hours. We can take our time and still feel greedy for it.

I touch his hair. It is rough where it’s salt and softer where it’s pepper. He makes a low sound when I scrape my nails lightly at the nape. I file that sound away to use again. He maps my shoulders with his mouth. I tip my head so he can.

He stops at the line of my scar and kisses just below it. “Come here.”

“I am here,” I say, but I move tighter to him anyway. He checks the door with that glance that reads the world. He presses a button. The cabin lights dim one more step. The shade slides down over the window. The hum deepens. The rest of the plane goes away.

It’s just me and him now.

I want skin. I say it with my hands. He understands. He unbuttons. Slow again. He’s not teasing me. He’s setting a pace that keeps my head clear. I help. We make a mess of the shirt and his pants on the cushion and forget it. Same with my clothes.

I slide my hands under his shirt where it’s rumpled around his waist. His skin is hot. He is cut and thick and built to take hits. I trace over a scar I do not know. It’s small and round, and I want to know if it was made by a bullet or a stab wound, but asking now would ruin the mood. He shivers when I touch there. He does not tell me the story.

Tonight is not for old stories. Tonight is for a new one.

He reaches into the drawer in the side table without taking his mouth from mine. A small packet appears. He tears it open with a movement so practiced it barely exists. Relief rolls through me hard enough that it almost hurts.

We will be careful this time. I’m on birth control, but I was when we met, and that had twin consequences, so I’m happy for more protection this time.

He pulls my hips to him, and for the second time, I wonder how that’ll fit. When he wedges against me, it feels like heaven. I glide up and down his length, letting him spread my wetness across the condom before entering me. Finally, I settle myself onto the head of his cock and start the excruciatingly slow journey of taking him inside.

Roman’s jaw is tense as I take him inch by inch. He watches my face for anything but yes. My eyes sting for a second from the rush of it. I blink and ride it out. He wipes a tear with his thumb. It is not sadness. It is pressure leaving. He kisses me until the heat becomes unbearable and we both must breathe as I sink all the way down.

And then, he’s unleashed.

I do not want poetry. I want this. I want the feel of his hands. The way he rocks up into me rougher and harder with every stroke. The way he says my name like it’s the only word he knows.

He shifts and presses and changes the pace until I am off-balance in the best way. The impact of his thrusts sends my body spiraling inside myself. His length hits every spot I need hit, and his pubic bone does the rest to my clit. I can’t breathe, and I don’t care. Something big is coming.

The world goes white around the edges and then comes back with sound. I’m beneath him now, on my back on the seat. The edge of my orgasm shines in my bones. I hold on to his shoulders and ride this out, begging, “More, harder!”

“Always,” he vows and proves it. Our bodies smack together, wet, hard, loud.

I come hard enough to bite my lip. He kisses where I bit and swears under his breath in Russian, then in English like he’s trying to pick the right syllables for the moment. My voice wobbles. “Come for me!”

He growls, “Fuck, Mina, now!” He buries his face in my neck and holds still where he can, but his body jerks inside of me. I hold still around him. The plane hum fills in where the noise was. We don’t move for a minute. I like that minute more than anything before it.

When we separate he takes care of the details. Quick. Clean. He tosses the evidence into a small bin and closes the lid. He brings a warm cloth from the lavatory and hands it to me without being precious about it, and we dress. He hands me water next. His chest rises and falls like a man who finished work that mattered.

It did.

I curl into his side and listen for footsteps that do not come. No one knocks. No one asks if we want anything. The cabin stays ours.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Better than okay.”

He checks anyway. He looks at my eyes. He watches my mouth. He wants to be sure I am not saying it for him. I like that about him more than the ring. “We will not pretend here. Not when it’s just the two of us. Not when it matters.”

“I promise. I’m great, Roman.”

He kisses my forehead, then brings a blanket from the cabinet and shakes it out over our legs. He drags a finger down the side of my thigh. Not to start something. To keep me anchored. It works.

I rest my cheek on his shoulder. Silence folds around us. Not empty. Full.

I have been with other men in the past who feign intimacy. I know what that looks like. This isn’t that. Roman, for all his flaws, isn’t the type to fake anything. He says what he means. He doesn’t shield me from the truth. Only from harm.

I like him. That scares me. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to like someone like him. But how much do I really know about him? Most of what little I know about him came from Vitaly, and most of what he told me was bullshit.

I owe it to Roman to get to know him on his own terms. This isn’t a traditional marriage by any means, but maybe we can make something that works for us.

The sex definitely does.

Roman brushes my hair back from my face. “Sleep.”

I shake my head. “If I sleep, I will see the wrong things.”

“Then watch the window. It’s a nice view.” He keeps talking until my breathing matches his. Not about plans. About small things. Where the sun will be when we land. What the first step down the stairs will feel like in this heat. I let those pictures stack up until they feel real. My eyes close without asking me.

Before I drift off, I mutter, “Tell me a secret.”

“I do not keep many.”

“You keep all of them. That’s your job.”

He laughs. “I wanted to be a teacher once. Before any of this was forced upon me.”

“You still teach. Different students.”

“I need better students.”

“You have me.”

“I have yet to need to teach you anything.” He kisses the top of my head.

“What did you want to teach?”

His smile reads surprised. “Chemistry.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s fascinating.”

“I bombed my high school chemistry class.”

He laughs and looks away. “Bombs are how I got into chemistry in the first place.”

I snort at that. “Well, that makes sense, I guess.”

“Why don’t you doze off for a while? We may not sleep much when we land.”

“That seems smart. Just not sure if I can.” I touch the ring with my thumb. Warm metal. A simple circle. It is not magic. It is a tool. Like the plan. Like sleep.

Roman rests his head against the back cushion and closes his eyes. Not asleep. Resting. I’m not sure he ever sleeps. He doesn’t look like it. He has those sleepy hound dog eyes I’ve always liked.

His hand never leaves me. I look out the window and try to see the curve of the world. I cannot. I can see my face faint in the glass. My mouth looks soft. The line on my jaw is only a line. My eyes are a different woman’s eyes. Brighter. Tired. But alive.

I slide my fingers between his and drift away.

We drop through warm air in the late afternoon. The light turns the wing gold. Mina watches as the runway rises to meet us. The wheels take the ground. The engines throttle down. The cabin holds a new silence, the kind you get when the worst part is over and the next part has teeth.

The next part makes us bait.

The crew opens the door. Humidity pushes in, full of salt and plants. We step into the heat. A small reception team waits at the bottom of the stairs. Two people place flower garlands around our necks. The transfer is a short drive and a longer glide by boat.

I hold Mina’s hand and let the sun touch my face. We look like exactly what we say we are—just unassuming newlyweds here for a good time. Not two people waiting for an assassin.

Marcus rides in the boat behind us. Tanner stays with the plane to handle the paperwork that will make it look like we’re here longer than we are, and also shorter. Both rumors will travel. Both are useful. I do not make one story when two will serve me better.

The truth is, we leave when I say we leave.

The resort sits on a private islet. Coconut palms. Sand that wants to be a postcard. The main lodge rises out of timber and glass. Boardwalks stand tall from the lodge out to the oversea bungalows. Mesmerizing blue water laps at the white seashore.

The manager waits with the smile of a man on a dental billboard. We shake hands. “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Black.”

One of many aliases. I keep my voice quiet and my eyes on the sight lines. “We appreciate privacy. We reward it.”

“You will have it, I assure you.” He walks us down the boardwalk. The water under the planks is clear enough to see the shells on the sea bottom. Fish flash through shade and light. A stingray lifts and falls like a breath.

The bungalow is the last one on the line. That was not an accident. It sits over a shoulder of water that deepens fast. There is one walkway in and a ladder into the lagoon. Glass runs across the far wall. The bed faces the horizon. It is the kind of place I’d like to bring my wife back to, once this is all over.

I want to give Mina every vacation a map can hold. Sun that warms her bones. Snow that makes the world quiet. Corner tables where no one knows our names. Trains, ferries, tiny planes that land on water. She deserves that and more.

She carried my sons and walks through fire. Unlike me, she was not raised with the threat of violence constantly over her head. This is all new to her. She grew up normal, and despite the fact that she’s scared, she does the scary things anyway. I will reward that bravery.

I want to plan weeks she does not have to plan. Take her places she’s always wanted to see. To pack first aid and snacks and make the sleeping bags face the view, so she can wake up to beautiful wilderness. Let her be pampered within an inch of her life in some foreign hotel’s spa. Try the finest dining in existence.

We are still learning each other. I do not know what her ideal vacation is, or where she’s always wanted to go. I do not yet know all her habits or half her favorite places. Still, the urge to give her everything knocks at my chest like a fist. If she asks for a horizon, I will give her ten.

Mina steps inside and stops. The room is wood and white linens. A basket of fruit on a low table. Nothing fussy. She goes straight to the glass and presses her hand to the view. The late sun throws a path across the water. Her face loses a line I have been looking at since we left the city.

“It’s so quiet,” she says.

“Good quiet?” I ask.

“Yes.”

The manager leaves us to it, and I check the place out. The deck is three strides by eight. The rail is low. The line of the boardwalk reaches us and stops, which means one watch is enough. I note the screws on the hinges and the lock pins on the sliders. I lift the lid on the storage bench by the door. Towels. I close it. I tap the frame where I’ll have my people place what looks like a decorative bracket but is really a sensor that notices weight where weight should not be.

Mina turns in a circle and lets the view pour over her again. She closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sun. A breath later she is at my side. “Tell me what you see.”

“One long approach. Three ways off the deck. A white boat anchored a hundred meters off starboard that is not a tourist. That’s one of ours. The resort has one camera on the far pylon. We let it be. We put our own in the palm behind the last hut. No one will see it unless they climb the tree. The wind is good. It pushes sound away from us.”

“What about the ladder?”

“It is fine. If he comes by water I want him to think a choice is his, and that I don’t have contingencies for exactly that.”

She looks at the open curtains again. “It would make sense to close those.”

“It would,” I say. “We leave them open.”

She breathes out through her nose. “To make it look like we’re careless?”

“Yes. We make a picture he cannot resist. Honeymoon. Private deck. A pair of people who think the coast is clear. Too few men. A long walk for the wrong ones to do anything about it.”

She takes my hand and squeezes. “I can do this. I think.”

“You can. You are.”

She swallows and nods. The manager sends a cart with a tray. Cold towels. Fruit cut into clean circles. Two flutes and a bottle of the good stuff. I pour two glasses and hand Mina the champagne. She sits on the deck with her bare feet on the warm wood and exhales like the air is finally good enough to live on.

I step inside and call the retreat. Carol answers, “Sleeping. All is quiet.”

“Thank you.”

Jennifer takes the phone a moment later. She does not waste time with comfort. “They ate. We walked. We’re behind a gate I dislike in the right way. Do not call again unless you have good news.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t you sass me either.” She hangs up.

I like that woman. She doesn’t accept bullshit. Reminds me of her daughter.

Mina keeps thanking me for being honest with her. That thanks lands like a bruise, but I’ll never say that to her. It tells me other men did not give her that courtesy, and saying that to her would only dig up a past she has yet to share with me. I’m not sure she’s ready to speak on that.

I wonder if Vitaly was one of the liars in her past. What lies he did he tell her to make control look like care?

As of this moment, we have bigger concerns than her past, and I will not dig her past out of her. For now, I watch what she does when the ground shifts. She steadies. She does not flinch. She might complain the whole time, but she still pushes forward. That is who she is to me. A partner I can trust.

When she is ready, I will give her the chance to trust me too.

I walk out and give Mina what she needs in one sentence. “They are asleep. All is quiet.”

Her eyes close. The line between her eyebrows softens again. She sets her glass down and holds the rail. “Thank you.”

We eat what we can. Mango. Pineapple. Crackers that taste like nothing and everything at once because we did not eat breakfast and the time zones have our bodies confused. The sun drops fast at this latitude. The water turns metal and then ink. Resort staff light torches along the sand. The main lodge sends music into the air that sounds like a heartbeat from far away. I put an arm around Mina and let her lean into me.

She sighs. “I could sleep for a year or not at all.”

“Either is fine. We can get bowls of rice and grilled fish now. Or we can get nothing and call for broth at midnight. Or we can do both.”

“Both sounds right.”

We order nothing yet and stay where we are. The boards creak under the weight of heat leaving them. A fish slaps the surface and disappears.

Her body goes tense against me. “This looks safe. Almost.”

“Almost is the point. Too safe and he will smell a story. Almost safe and he will make his presence known.”

“And end it,” she says quietly.

“And end it.”

Night deepens. The bungalow glows like a lantern. The glass reflects us back at ourselves. We leave the curtains open. If he is here, he will watch the picture and convince himself this will be easy. He will see a man and his wife on a deck. He will count two glasses. He will think he is the only person doing math, because I must assume I’m safe here.

Vitaly will underestimate me, and I may overestimate him, but only one of us will be ready.

Mina touches the ring and looks out over the dark. “I want to see morning from this bed.”

“You will.”

She breathes out and smiles, small and real. “You’re going to make me believe we have this.”

“We do. He can be lucky once. He will not be lucky twice.”

“Do you think you could be lucky twice?”

“In what way?”

A sly smile quirks her lips to the side just a little, before she drops to her knees before me.

“Are you alright?” I reach down for her.

But she bats my hand away. “Better than alright.” She reaches for the button on my trousers.

Is she…? No. She was scared a moment ago. “What are you doing?”

“Performing my wifely duties.” She unzips me.

“No need for a performance, Mina⁠—”

She silences me with a look. “But I want to.” Her hand is warm on my cock, and I can’t help but suck in a breath.

“Then by all means, don’t let me stop you.”

Her grin steals my attention, before her lips part to swallow me down. She can’t take all of me, so she uses her hands to make up the distance between her lips and the root of my cock.

It’s all I can do not to fuck her face. She shuttles back and forth on my length in full view of anyone who could be watching from the water. I’m not shy, and apparently, neither is she. Should have known that from the first night we met.

She does something with the back of her throat that feels incredible when she takes me there, and it sends my eyes rolling back. I hiss, “Fuck, baby, that’s…” I can’t speak and finish the sentence with a groan.

One hand stays around my cock, but the other goes for my balls, and I jolt. It’s too much, too damn good.

“Keep that up, and this’ll be over quick.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Well, I am a man who gives a woman what she wants. I relax, knowing she wants this too. As gently as I can, I pump into her face, and she moans around my cock. That does it. A surge shoots from my balls, up and down my spine, and out. “Mina, move if you don’t want⁠—”

But she sucks harder, and I shoot straight into her throat, my body jerking with every spurt. She takes it all, with only a slight glossy smear on her lips. She locks eyes with me and licks her lips clean.

“Fuck,” I utter before falling to my knees to kiss her. How did I con this woman into marrying me? She’s a damn succubus, and I will happily let her suck the life right out of me.

When we come up for air, I try to lay her on the floor, but she says, “I want a shower before anything else happens.”

Damn. “If you insist.”

She nods. “You first. I want your eyes on the door when I’m in there.”

I go. I am fast. When I step back out, she’s standing by the glass with a towel wrapped her and a hand on the rail. She moves past me to the shower without dropping her gaze from the door. She is learning my habits. I am learning hers. I like the mix.

When we’re both freshly showered and feeling safe, we move to the bed and fall asleep. She fits against me like she was made for it, and that bit of comfort is enough to knock me out completely.

My body does not care that the room is quiet and the ocean is a soft shush under the boards. It knows who is missing. My breasts ache like a bruise that warms and sharpens by turns.

I stand in the bathroom with the fan on. I turn the shower to a steady run so I have cover noise. It’s not that I’m embarrassed—I just don’t want to wake Roman. He’s sleeping well, and I think that is a rare thing for him. The pump hums. Pull, release. Pull, release. The relief crawls in and then breaks open. I brace my palm on the tile until the ache eases and the sting gives way to a loose, tired ache.

After dumping the milk, which feels like such a waste, I walk into the main space of the bungalow. Outside, late sun turns the water copper and then dark. The deck boards hold the day’s warmth. Roman sits up. Guess I woke him anyway. His eyes read my face without making a project of it.

“Better?”

“Yeah.”

“Dinner,” he says. “We should eat.”

Food feels like a dare. In my head I see a silver tray and a single cup that could have killed us. My stomach flips. “If Vitaly is here, won’t he try again? The food could be poisoned.”

“He tried that once and failed. Vitaly doesn’t try the same failed tactic twice.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. And I taste the food first. No arguments.”

The walk to the main lodge is short. Torches line the walkways. Somewhere a guitar strums peacefully. We sit at a corner table that reads as romantic and lets him see the door, the water, the boardwalk. He’s observant, my Roman.

Odd to think of him as mine, but he is my husband, so it counts.

Odd to think of myself as married too.

The server brings water in frosted bottle. Roman opens it himself. He drinks first. He makes a face that says it’s fine. I let out a breath. He keeps it simple. “Soup. Grilled fish. Rice. Fruit for dessert. Nothing that needs a sauce.” The server races away for our order.

“You picked some simple dishes.”

He nods. “Any idea why?”

It’s a test, so I think about my answer. “Because simple is fast, and fast is good, if we need to take off suddenly. And because it’s harder to hide poison in simple dishes.”

His proud smile hits somewhere low in my spine. “Precisely.”

True to his word, he tastes every dish before letting me eat. It feels ridiculous, especially because the restaurant is full enough for this to be awkward. But I’d rather be awkward and safe than normal and dead.

I’m curious about my husband. It’s weird to think of him as a stranger, but we practically are in most ways. “Tell me something about you. Something I don’t know.”

He turns the stem of his glass once and sets it in the sand-filled candle tray. “You deserve a gentle story. I do not have one for this.”

“Gentle stories never interested me, Roman. Not even when I was a kid. I always preferred the truth. History, mythology, that kind of thing. Try me.”

He folds his napkin in his lap and takes a deep breath, before knocking back more wine. “Very well. Do you know I was married before?”

“Vitaly’s mother?”

He nods. “Did he ever tell you about her?”

“He said he had more in common with her than you, and that’s why you didn’t want him to take over your role.”

His laugh is short and bitter. “He’s not far off. Bridgette was her name. My father’s favorite assassin had daughters. The assassin, who went by Caine, had been hired by my father’s rivals to take him out. He said I could save his life if I married Bridgette.”

“You married her to save his life?”

“He was my father. He was pakhan. I did what any good son in the Bratva would do.”

“That’s nuts.”

He smiles. “I married you to save four lives. Our sons, yours, and mine. Is it all that different?”

The realization makes me laugh. “I guess not. What was Bridgette like?”

“She was never asked what she wanted. I think that grated on her more than anything. She was raised by an assassin to be one herself. Powders. Tinctures. Timing. She was a sharpshooter, as well. And skilled with knives, both throwing and standard. Sitting next to her was like sitting in a tiger’s cage.”

The thought makes me cringe, and sarcasm comes naturally. “Sounds like fun.”

A mirthless laugh. “Worse still, the threat was a story. My father and Caine made it up between them. They wanted me married, settled. They wanted a line old men could call legitimate.”

A breath blows out of me. “That’s messed up.”

“Indeed.” He sighs, gazing over the darkening water. “I didn’t find out until after Vitaly was born and my father was considered to be “safe.” Upon Vitaly’s birth, he and Caine had a big laugh, telling me how my father had never been in any danger—it was all just a story to form a blood bond between our families and make the other pakhans fear us. After all, who would attack a pakhan with an assassin in his family?”

“Damn.”

He sips his wine, as if he needs it to get through the story. “Bridgette wanted power with her name on it. She hated that I held the power between the two of us. She had the training to make me fear sleep. I watched my back. For years.”

“Did you ever love her?”

“No,” he says with weight. I can’t tell if he feels guilty about it. “I loved another. Olga. A rival’s daughter. We were young and foolish and thought we might be able to bridge the rivalry with our love.” His eye roll makes me smile, despite the sadness of the tale. “And then I married Bridgette to save my father. Olga hated me for it, not that I blame her for that. I hated myself too, after I found out the truth.”

“I hope you don’t hate yourself anymore.”

“No. But it’s hard not to blame myself for Olga’s death.”

“What happened?”

“She married an ambitious man in New York, who thought he could use a pakhan’s daughter to bolster his image in the Bratva. A bomb took her car apart in the first year of their marriage.”

I cover his hand on the table. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I. It was a bad end, but at the very least, it was a quick one. She would have been ground down by this life. Olga had a kind heart. She was a genuinely good person who lit up every room she entered. It was impossible not to love her.” His sigh is heavy. “She would have suffered a slow demise if we had been together. She had no taste for what I do, too many morals and qualms, not enough ruthlessness.”

“Am I anything like her?” I ask. It’s not a fair question, but I can’t hold it in.

He squeezes my fingers once. “No. You know where to stand, when to move. You do not break when men tell you that you will. You are defiant and strong-willed. A good person, but one with enough seasoning to know how to watch her own back and protect her children. That is the difference.”

My throat burns. So do my eyes. He does not look away. He rubs his thumb over my knuckles once, then lets me fix my face without forcing comfort on me.

I’m not used to being seen that way. “Vitaly said I was weak. He said I needed him. He said I was lucky he would take care of me. He said I wouldn’t last a week alone.”

“And yet, a year later, here you are,” Roman says. “Vitaly sees what he wants to see. Tries to manipulate people into seeing it too. He is not as smart as he thinks he is.”

The server brings fruit. Pineapple and papaya arranged like a sun, and I nibble at the papaya. “Thank you for telling me. For not sanding the edges off.”

“I won’t lie to you, Mina. I’ll give you the unvarnished truth, if you’ll do the same for me.”

“Deal.”

We walk along the water’s edge after dinner. The torches on the sand make small circles of light. The path to our bungalow is a line of boards and shadow. Marcus and Tanner trail us at a distance. They look like men killing time, not personal bodyguards. Not that it matters—no one else is around this part of the beach.

I want them gone. The want is not smart. It is hot and simple and lives low in my spine. I stop. Roman stops because I stop. He follows my eyes to the guards. “Tell them to give us the beach.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I want my husband to have his way with me here. Now.”

The word husband puts heat in his eyes. He looks at the men and back at me. He hates that he wants what I want, because he knows how irresponsible it is to send them away.

“Marcus, back to the boardwalk,” he calls. “Tanner, eyes on the path. Any sound from the water, you call the dock.”

No smirks. No jokes. Positions shift. Space opens.

We step into a clearing between some of the clustered palm trees. They’re tight enough to provide the illusion of privacy. They tick in the breeze like quiet applause. My back finds a warm, mostly smooth trunk at a perfect angle for leaning against, with my legs spread wide. I lift the hem of my dress for him.

He looks at me, splayed there for him. “You’re definitely trouble.”

I giggle as he steps up to me, lowering his linen trousers. He toys with me a moment, ensuring I’m ready for him. “Mm, yes, just like that.”

His fingers leave me wanting for only a breath before his cock fills me up. I’m tender from before, and that heightens the sensations. “You said you want me to have my way with you.” He pulls me onto him, so I wrap my legs around his body. “This is my way.” He bounces me on his cock so hard that I see stars.

No wait—those are the actual stars.

My head tipped back at some point, evidently. When I make eye contact with him again, I take his mouth as he fucks me roughly. This is stupid—he isn’t wearing a condom. But I don’t care.

I have never felt so seen in my life. Roman understands me. He knows what I’ve been through and sees the person it has made me into, and he likes me anyway. There’s something alluring about that. I can’t explain it.

I think I’m falling for my husband.

He kisses me in a way that leaves a mark. He listens to my breath and answers it. I hook my fingers in his hair and tug until he laughs into my throat. His palm lands above my head on the bark. His other hand finds my hip.

The resort is not empty. Life hums. Far away, someone sings. The guards are shadows. I stop caring. This is ours. I press into him. The tree holds. The sand gives, but he’s steady on his feet anyway.

Roman drives harder and deeper, and my orgasm strikes without warning. When I cry out, he kisses me savagely, biting my tongue. The pain makes my orgasm into something more primal, more animal. My whole body jerks and throbs and soars inside my skin. The moment I find myself again, he lays me on the tree, pulls out, and shoots onto the sand with a snarl.

When the world sharpens again, the night is deeper. He finds my sandal half-buried and kneels to slide it on. Didn’t realize I’d lost it. It’s a small gesture that almost breaks me. He tears me apart and puts me back together again, and I’ve never had that.

We head back to the bungalow on shaking legs, and our shadows reappear, still seeming like fellow tourists instead of guards. We’re quiet on the walk back, so my mind drifts. He said Olga was too nice for this life. He said I am not. He meant it as respect, and I take it that way. I was not built for dinner parties with polite chitchat or a house with a dog and a white picket fence. I am built for this night and the morning after. I will survive this and he sees that in me.

I won’t let him down.

Dawn thins the dark to a gray edge. I wake the way I always wake in a place that could turn on me. I lie still, fully awake, eyes closed for the first minute, just in case someone stands over me. This way, I can get the drop on them.

One part of me listens for weight on the boards. One part counts the small knocks of the tide on the pilings. The rest holds still and lets the room report.

There is nothing out of the ordinary in here. Nothing to be on high alert for. But I wake this way regardless of reality.

In films, I’ve seen scenes of drowsy people, slowly finding their way to being awake. When I was young, I always thought that was the oddest thing. Who wakes up like that, when sleeping is the most vulnerable time of your life, and enemies could be standing over you?

I was in my late teens when I found out that most people wake up like that. Normal people, that is.

Normal people don’t spring to alertness for fear of an attack. They don’t listen for enemies in their bedroom. They don’t wake with a jolt of adrenaline that spikes every sense just in case. They don’t fall asleep with a gun under their pillow and a knife tucked between the mattress and the box spring.

The morning after I slept with Olga the first time, she gave me a slow, satisfied smile as she rolled over and wished me good morning. I knew then that the movies weren’t always as fake as I thought they were. She wasn’t on high alert. She wasn’t afraid the moment she woke, despite being in a hotel room instead of her own bed.

I was never so jealous of someone as I was of her that morning.

The bed is cold on Mina’s side of it. My eyes pop open, and she’s no longer there. On the nightstand sits a folded square of paper that was not there when I closed my eyes. I flip it open.

Went for a swim. Join me.

I cross the deck. The lagoon is flat and pale. For a breath I see only water. Then I find her. Thirty yards out, inside the ring of bungalows. Face down. Still. Perfectly still.

Two long shadows circle below her.

Sharks.

My chest goes cold. I take the short knife from the drawer by the slider and vault the rail.

Salt water closes over my head. Cold, then warm. The shadows dart. I cut toward her. Wake folds against her back. She lifts her face at the push of it. A snorkel tips from her mouth. Mask. Wet hair slicked back. Her eyes blink clear behind the lens and then she smiles like I am the surprise.

“You scared them,” she says through a laugh. She spits water and pushes the mask to her forehead. I stop hard, take a mouthful of lagoon, swallow wrong, and cough. The wrong word in my throat changes shape.

Not dead. Alive. She’s alive. Thank fuck.

“You were face down around a bunch of sharks⁠—”

“Snorkeling,” she says, still amused, not unkind. She holds up the cheap snorkel like proof.

I tread water and let my brain catch up to the fact that she’s fine. Mina floats on her back now, hair fanning, the mask sitting like a tired crown. The sharks are gone to wherever old dogs go when a stranger claps. I reach and touch her hip with two fingers because my hands need to feel her.

“I’m sorry I broke up the party. What were they like?”

“Curious. Careful. One had a scar on the fin, one a pale blotch behind the gill. She let me pet her sometimes until you showed up.”

“I owe you for that.”

“You do,” she says, and the smile turns from amused to invitation.

The last of the cold drains out of my chest. A different heat takes its place. “Come on.” I slide a hand under her ribs and tow her toward the ladder. She lets me.

The bungalow rises above us, wood dark with pale morning light. At the ladder she grips a rung and climbs two steps. The view of her bikini-covered ass, wet and round, is exquisite.

“Sit right there on the edge.”

“Um, okay.”

I move my hands to the backs of her thighs and lift until her knees find the slats where the ladder kisses the lower deck. Water runs off her in thin lines. The snorkel dangles and drips. I stand in the lagoon and rest my palms on warm wood.

“Take your bikini bottom off.”

She snorts a laugh. “Are you serious? People could⁠—”

“Off. Now.”

She bites her lip mischievously and takes it off, then leans back on her elbows. I lay her legs over my shoulders and feast. The salt water adds its own flavor—clean and briny—to my breakfast. I mash my tongue against her clit until she’s purring for me. Her fingers dive into my wet hair as she moans my name.

The lagoon is a quiet room. The water carries sound away. I keep one hand on her hip and one on her thigh to hold her steady. I make good on what I owe her and take my time.

I want her to remember this.

I listen to the small changes in breath and note the way her fingers tighten on my hair. When I go more to the left, her fingers grip and her breath goes still. That’s the spot. I center my focus there, and soon, her legs shake on my shoulders.

Curses pour from her lips now, and as much as that makes me happy, smiling would take me off course. Instead, I add two fingers inside of her to raise the stakes. Her keening whine pierces the quiet. “There, oh god, right there!”

Her orgasm has a taste all its own as she gushes on my face. Waves squeeze around my fingers and different waves slap at my waist, but I keep going until she starts to pull away and squeaks, “Too sensitive!”

It’s impossible not to feel proud of that.

I climb the ladder and lie down beside her as she pulls up her bikini. “Was that worth losing the sharks?”

“Yeah,” she says with a giggle. “You ruin things well.” Her voice scrapes and smooths in the same breath. She looks blissful.

I am no longer sorry I chased away the sharks.

“I know why you panicked,” she says without turning. “You have your own ghosts.”

“I do.”

She goes inside and returns with two towels and the bottle of water we left on the table. She wraps me up, and the towel smells like sun and soap. A small wet curl tucks under her ear. “I have ghosts too, so to speak. But I think mine are more metaphorical than yours. What happened to Bridgette? Vitaly told me his mother was dead.”

“That’s hardly appropriate pillow talk.”

“Well, there aren’t any pillows out here. So talk.”

I chuckle at that and shrug. If my stubborn bride wants the story, so be it. “Ironically, food poisoning.”

She blinks. “Someone poisoned her food?”

“No, E. coli. We slept separately, due to the fact that I expected her to kill me in my sleep. I didn’t know she was sick until she was too weak to leave her bed one morning. I called in our family physician, and he demanded we take her to the hospital immediately. We did, but it was too late. Sepsis. She died within hours of getting to the hospital.”

“Why didn’t she tell anyone she was sick before it got that bad?”

“Bridgette hated doctors. Her mother had died in childbirth when she was a little girl, and she blamed them her whole life. If she hadn’t been too weak to fight me, she would have fought me about going to the hospital.”

Mina shakes her head. “That’s crazy.”

“That was Bridgette.”

Breakfast waits when we walk into the bungalow. No idea who was watching us to ensure it’d be hot when we walked in. But it is. So, I take first taste of everything to be sure. “Not from him. From the resort.”

We sit and eat, and there’s a comfortable silence. I don’t get many of those in my life, and the underlying tension of waiting for Vitaly to rear his head is always there, but as things go, the moment is…for lack of a better word, cozy.

I have never been this comfortable with another person in my entire life. Not even Olga. With her, I was always worried about being good enough to deserve her. I didn’t want to be my father—he was a cruel man who enjoyed making others suffer. That’s never been my way, so I thought I might have been worthy of someone as kind and sweet as Olga Valivova.

Funny. Mina is nothing like her, yet she has me wrapped around her finger all the same.

She is kind, but there’s a world wariness beneath it that says her kindness comes with boundaries. She has a good heart, but she’s also seen things and been places Olga would have never experienced. It’s not fair to compare the two of them, but it’s impossible not to.

Olga would have been the perfect wife, had I not become pakhan.

Mina may be the perfect wife for a pakhan.

Between bites of mango, she says, “I’m not fragile, you know. The sharks wouldn’t have hurt me.”

“I daresay they should fear you, not the other way around.”

She quirks a glance my way. “Oh?”

“You’re right—they wouldn’t have hurt you. I should have known that all along, but seeing you in the water face down like that with them circling you, I panicked. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“You promise?”

I nod. “I know you can handle yourself. I’ll still protect you when things get hairy, but under normal circumstances, I know you’ll be okay.”

She kisses my cheek and continues with breakfast.

“But next time you decide to go swimming in the morning, wake me. I’d like to join you.”

“I’d like that too.”

The foundation of our marriage might be fraught with complications, but this is simple. I trust her. I’m not sure I’ve ever trusted a partner more. Olga was too fragile, and our love was young and foolish. Bridgette was too volatile, and we never had love. All we ever had together was Vitaly, and he was entirely her creature when he was young. She taught him too much too young, and he never learned to value other people because of it.

To him, other people are toys, waiting for him to play with. Their humanity means nothing to him. There is no line he won’t cross to get what he wants.

And there is no line I won’t cross to protect Mina and our sons.

My mother answers on the second ring. I hear clinking cups and a small voice in the background, then the hush of a door closing.

“We’re fine,” she says before I ask. “We ate. We walked. They napped like champions. No visitors. The only wild animal was a squirrel with an attitude.”

My shoulders relax before I do. “Thank you.”

“You have nothing to worry about. Your husband thought of everything. The women here move like a chessboard. I tried to sneak into the kitchen to wash a bottle and three of them beat me to the sink and handed me tea, while another washed the bottle for me. Go enjoy your day.”

“You swear?”

“I swear,” she says. “If anything changes I will call. If nothing changes I’ll still call, because you’re you, and you won’t stop worrying unless I call you.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Look, I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through. When I had you, I was worried about everything from germy strangers trying to hold you to whether your dad thought to start the washer, since we were going through so much laundry. I had normal stuff to worry about.” She pauses and when she speaks again, her voice cracks a little. “What’s happening now…this is so far out of my experience that I’m just doing my best to keep up with it all. Thankfully, the women here are more experienced in this bullshit, and they know what to look out for. They’re letting me deal with the boys, while they handle everything else for me. Honestly, I’m feeling kind of…pampered here.”

I snort a laugh. “Then why do you sound upset about it?”

“I’ve never been pampered, Mina. It’s weird, and I’m not sure how to process any of it.”

“Ah.” Her words hit too hard. “Yeah, it’s damn strange here too, as far as that goes. We’re at a resort⁠—”

“Don’t tell me where. You know the rules.”

“I know, I know. But I get what you mean. The people here do everything for us. Hot food shows up in our room. Clean towels too. Everything is clean, and I didn’t have to do any of it myself. It’s like that at Roman’s house too, and⁠—”

“You’re married to him, Mina.”

My brow lines at that. “So?”

“It’s your house too, now.”

That thought takes the breath right out of me. Something in my brain breaks a little bit. “Well…not really.”

“Yes, really. Didn’t you read all the paperwork? If something happens to Roman, the house and his money, it’s all yours. Well, yours and the boys’.”

“You know something? I’m trying to make all of that fit inside my head, and it won’t.”

She giggles. “It feels too soon to me too.”

“No, I mean, none of that feels real yet. I keep expecting to wake up and all of this is some elaborate prank.”

“An elaborate murder prank? That might be the worst kind of prank.”

I roll my eyes at my mother from thousands of miles away. “Your comedic timing is flawless, as always. Maybe you could joke about my potential murder a little less?”

“If I don’t joke, I’ll start screaming, and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop. You might be married, but you’re still my baby.”

Something wedges inside my chest that has nothing to do with murder. “I miss you, Mom.”

“Go be with your husband. This might be a sham marriage, but you’re still on your honeymoon.”

“A murder honeymoon.”

“Oh, so you can make jokes, and I can’t?”

“Yes, that’s the rule.”

I hear the smile in her voice. “Alright, newlywed, go be married, and I’ll go be a pampered grandmother, and we’ll see which one of us makes it to the end of the week.”

“Love you too, Mom.”

I hang up and press my phone face down on the vanity. The suite smells like salt and clean linen. Roman waits by the door with two white robes over his arm and the relaxed posture he uses when he wants me to relax. He doesn’t push. He offers a hand. I take it.

I don’t let myself think about the dark reality of what Mom and I talked about. According to Roman, today is for relaxation only. I’m not sure I’m capable of that, but I’m going to try, for his sake.

The path to the spa walks along a strip of sand and a fringe of palms. The lagoon is flat enough to be sky. Farther down the boardwalk, a fisherman lifts a line and lets it fall. Roman’s security is present if you know where to look.

A man who loves birds. Another who loves his phone. Fake tourists, real bodyguards.

The resort is all so normal I don’t know what to think of it. But I should stop thinking and enjoy the quiet moments we have. It’s just hard to do that when I know someone out there wants me dead, and he’s good at getting what he wants.

Inside the spa, air cools my skin and the light goes soft. A woman at the desk greets us by name and asks if we prefer silence or music. We pick music. We choose coconut oil—it smells like my favorite kind of cake. He signs the intake forms, and we follow two therapists down a peaceful hall.

The couple’s room is intimate, with candles and lowered lights. Two tables. Two baskets for clothes. Two glasses of water that sweat into round coasters. They tell us to undress and lie face down under the sheet. They step out. The door closes with a hush.

My robe falls away. My body remembers the weight of the last year and wants to keep holding it. I tell it to let go for one hour. I slide onto the table and fit my face into the cradle. The sheet is heavy in a way that makes me trust it.

Roman lies on the table beside me. His fingers reach under the sheet and find mine for a second, just a press that says he’s here with me. “It is no crime to relax, Mina.”

“I know. It just feels like one.”

“Take deep breaths and let your mind wander like you did with the sharks.”

He’s right. I know he is. So, I heed his advice, and my chest loosens. I breathe. The music keeps time with the fan. The therapists re-enter and the first long stroke down my back unhooks my shoulders from my ears.

I am as relaxed as I can imagine right now. I think that, and then I realize what sits under the thought, steady and bright. I am falling for my husband. It feels dangerous in a new way. It also feels like a choice I have been walking toward since the night I met him at Rope.

The therapist asks if the pressure is good. It is. Roman’s therapist works in silence except for a quiet instruction about breath. His inhale matches mine for a while. I am aware of his presence the way you feel the sun through a window. Not touching. Warming everything anyway.

Somewhere in the building a door bangs, and my body jolts. Then another. Voices move fast and low. The therapists pause. They look at each other. The one at my table says, “One minute,” and steps out. The other follows. The door hushes closed.

Roman is off the table before I lift my head. “Dress now. Robe over your clothes.” No panic. No noise. He is already moving into his pants.

“What is it?” I whisper, and I’m already on my feet. My hands shake, but they do what they have to do. Underwear. Bra. Dress. My fingers find the zipper the second time. Robe. He puts his on too.

He crosses to the wall that shares a corner with the adjoining room. It’s painted the same pale blue as the rest and holds a framed print of a leaf. He pulls the print down and thumps the plaster with his knuckles. He thumps again lower, listening. “Hollow.”

Male voices grind far away. My stomach goes ice-cold. “It’s him.”

“Yes,” Roman says. He does not look at me. He takes one step back and kicks. The plaster bursts, and white dust blooms and flakes down on the table. He kicks again, lower and to the side, opening a square big enough for a shoulder. He reaches in and grabs the crosspiece, then yanks until it snaps. He’s made a hole.

“We’re going through that, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“One second.” I stuff two pillows under the sheet on my table where my hips were and roll a towel into a head. I pull the sheet smooth so the shape reads as a sleeping body at a glance. I throw his sheet over the second set of pillows on his massage table. From the door, with adrenaline in your eyes, it will look like us.

The hallway explodes with a shout. A chair skids. I hear a voice I know down to the last vowel. Vitaly curses in Russian, fast and vicious, then switches to English for an insult that feels like a slap even through a wall. Roman’s jaw tightens. He tips his head toward the hole. I go first.

The plaster scrapes my shoulders. I get a mouthful of dust and try not to cough. My foot finds the baseboard on the other side. Another couple’s room, but with no one in it.

Roman follows. He is bigger, but he moves like a man who has broken through walls before. He pulls the sheet off one table and stuffs it into the hole on this side, then adds a second sheet until the break looks like a careless laundry pile against the baseboard.

We hold our breath and hear the outer door to our original room slam. Two shots crack. They are close enough to make my ears ring. I flinch. Roman’s hand finds the back of my neck and holds there. One second. Two.

Vitaly curses when he realizes his mistake. He shot our pillows, not us. How disappointing for him. There’s a thunk like his fist meeting the wall.

We do not move. Roman tilts his head, counting the distance between footsteps. Vitaly stomps further into the room, then back to the hall. Shouts rise near the front desk. A cart hits a doorframe. Someone runs. Two more voices argue about direction. One says “kitchen” and the other says “villa” and both are wrong. Roman waits for the one word he wants. He gets it when someone says “front” with certainty.

He touches my elbow and points to the service door at the back of this room. It is painted to disappear. It has the little square of plastic you push with a thumb. He doesn’t touch it yet. He watches the light and shadows at the bottom.

My heart tries to climb into my mouth.

Roman pushes the square. The door opens into a narrow service corridor that smells like bleach and citrus. A stack of folded robes sits on a rolling cart. A hamper waits under a chute. A green exit sign throws a weak glow at the far end. Somewhere beyond, a generator hums.

“Go,” he whispers.

We walk at first because running sounds like an announcement. The floor is tile and not kind to sandals. My steps click. I yank them off for silent steps. Roman moves like air. Halfway down, we hear a woman trying to be brave, the front desk hero who did not sign up for any of this. The woman says sir and please and then nothing. Roman’s jaw tightens. He does not break the plan to save a stranger he cannot reach without getting us killed too.

Roman moves. I move. We take the last ten steps fast. The back exit is for deliveries, one no one uses. He checks the latch and opens it with his body turned so I can slip through first.

Heat and daylight hit my face like a hand. The service yard is a rectangle of concrete and stacked crates. The generator sits behind a slotted screen letting out a steady growl that makes it hard to hear anyone coming.

We move to the side of the building, and the side gate sticks. Swollen wood and salt. He sets his shoulder to it, and the wood squeaks against wood, and opens to a narrow path that threads between a hedge and a row of storage sheds.

We run then because there is no one here to hear us. The path drops to a service lane that meets the beach farther down. I can see the pale line of the water through the gap. Our target.

I look back once because I am human. Roman’s hand closes on mine and pulls me forward. “Come on!”

We take the lane to a gate that opens onto a stand of palms. The light changes under their fronds. The world smells like sun on bark and wet sand. In another story, in another hour, I would ask him to stop here and forget the rest of the island exists. In this one, we move.

“Left,” he says, so soft I feel it more than hear it. We angle toward a maintenance path that skirts the back of the bungalows. The planks of the boardwalk show through the leaves. I can see the path to our door, but it’s a target—of course we’d go back to our bungalow where our things are. Vitaly would know that.

Roman squeezes my fingers once and lifts two of his own, a signal to someone I cannot see. The hedge rustles. A shape moves.

We push through into sun and salt and a strip of sand. The world looks the same as it did an hour ago. People drink from hollowed fruit. A child drags a shovel. A woman in a hat argues with a cloud.

They don’t know that a massacre just happened. Not yet.

Roman does not break stride. We cut behind a line of palms and reenter the maintenance path that heads to the bungalows. Our door waits at the end. He unlocks it with a hand that does not shake.

“Won’t he come here, looking for us?”

“Yes. That’s why we hurry. Grab anything important.” He produces a gun from beneath the mattress. I guess he followed his own advice.

The resort is on lockdown within five minutes of Vitaly’s attack. Doors close. Radios chirp. Managers make speeches. Guests stare at their phones and order drinks. Staff tape off areas and say this is for your safety. None of that secures anything.

It’s security theater, like the TSA at the airport making travelers pointlessly take off their shoes.

But if you are the reason for the lockdown, you use the confusion to leave.

My job is to get Mina off the island alive. That is the only outcome that matters now. I will not engage Vitaly with her present. I will not look for revenge. I turn off everything that is not the job.

Tanner is down on the boardwalk near the palm line. Marcus is down on the service path behind the spa. No sirens. No medics. This place is designed to make problems vanish with towels, free drinks, and apologies in the form of spa vouchers. They don’t know what they’re dealing with.

As we breeze past resort security, I hear the men on the walkies give instructions. The resort has sealed the guest pier. When we dart past, guards in polo shirts and shorts stand there and try to look like they matter.

As if Vitaly couldn’t get past them with nothing but a paper clip.

I stage the bungalow for absence. Curtains half-open. Two cups on the rail. Sandals where they can be seen. Burner phones on the table. The scene reads casual and lazy to anyone who looks from the boardwalk. It will buy us minutes of confusion when Vitaly comes here to wait for us.

Mina nibbles her bottom lip, looking around like she wants to help.

“Keep your hands free,” I tell her. “If I say drop, you drop. If I say left, you go left. No questions. Just like at the wedding. Understood?”

“Understood,” she says. Her voice is level. Her eyes are clear. Good.

“Follow me.” We leave the bungalow for options.

Best exit is water. It’s harder to track than footprints or tire tracks in the sand. No planes on the island—no place for a runway. No helicopters either. I looked when we arrived. There’s a service skiff, the dive tender, or a bright orange lifeboat. The skiff is fast and simple. The tender is loud and draws eyes. The lifeboat is obvious and locked.

The skiff it is.

We leave through the maintenance building. A housekeeper glances up and sees robes and then looks down. Robes at a resort are the best disguise—staff assume that either you know where you’re going or you’re lost, and either way, they’d rather be too busy to deal with you. At the back door I push the latch, let it creak, and hold it. We move through bleach and steam to daylight.

The skiff sits with the battery switch off and the kill cord wound tight. I pull the cowling and run eyes and fingers once. Fuel line. Primer bulb. Coil. Throttle head. No extra tape. No fresh bolts with wrong heads. No wire that runs where wire should not run.

No bombs on board.

“Step in and sit low.”

She does so without hesitation. “Can I help?”

“Just stay low.” The outboard coughs and catches when I tell it to. I coil the stern line and drop it clean. I shake the bow line loose and we slide free.

No kayaks in our lane, no paddleboards. They prefer the smoother water of the other side of the island. I stay inside the lee of the reef until we clear the ring and the white anchored boat.

That boat had my men on it. There should be two standing there.

No one stands there now. Only a red smear against the white edge, as if someone’s bloody hand grabbed it and failed.

I do not stop to count ghosts.

Mina keeps one hand flat on the gunwale and her eyes on the horizon. She’s low in the boat, just like I told her. He’d never get a shot off at her like this. Only me, standing at the helm. But there’s no one out around this side of the island, and the main island is ahead.

It looks like a clear shot to our destination, and that makes me wary.

“Why can’t he leave us alone?” she shouts to be heard over the wind.

“Pride.”

I watch her shoulders lift and drop, like she’s sighing. She knows why he’ll never leave us alone. She’s frustrated, so she’s asking questions she knows the answers to. I understand the feeling all too well.

Shockingly, we reach the main island marina without incident. This means he truly is doing this alone. I’m insulted that he thinks he can kill me on his own, but considering the havoc he has wreaked so far, he’s not wrong.

I slide past the big boats and into the staff channel, where it’s easier to maneuver. Diesel drums sit on the dock. A barge needs paint. Two men in vests look at us, then at the water, then at a clipboard. We climb onto the dock and run to where I told the driver to be.

He’s there, leaning on the hood like he has been checking the time. He throws me a towel. I wipe once and drop it on the engine cover. “Tail.”

He nods once and opens the rear door. Mina gets in and slides across. I sit behind the driver. We peel out.

I call the plane at the last bend around the south end of the main island. “Bomb sweep in progress,” the captain says. He knows I will do my own sweep.

I pay my people well to keep them honest, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t pay them off. It was the captain’s job to stay with the plane the whole time we were away. If he stepped away for so much as taking a piss, something could have happened.

I send Mina up first with the captain. I watch how the floor flexes under her feet. A device on a rail sings wrong. Nothing to worry about here. I check and recheck anything that seems too good to be true. I find nothing.

There comes a moment in every escape where you have to trust that things will go right. It comes after you’ve done everything you reasonably can to ensure that fact. I could spend an hour checking out the plane, but instead, I check the easiest spots to sabotage. We don’t have the time for a thorough check, which means I have to trust that my check is enough.

When it comes to protecting Mina, nothing feels like enough.

If there is a bomb on this plane, I did not earn survival today. I climb the stairs and nod. The captain hits the switch. The door thumps. The seal sets. The cabin goes quiet.

Mina buckles in across from me. She watches my face and not the runway. She looks for tremors. I give her none. She gives me none back. I know my calmness helps her stay that way. “Everything looked okay?”

I nod firmly. “We’re as safe as we’re going to be.” It’s a low bar to cross, but we crossed it.

Her head bobs, and she finally looks out the window. The tension in her neck fades by a degree, and that’s all I can ask for.

The crew runs the checklist in a tone I can believe. No stumbles. No repeats. The engines spool. The floor carries a low vibration. The air tastes like hot metal and then like nothing when the engine powers back down.

Captain gets on the speaker. “The tower wants to hold us for traffic. Going to plan D.”

“Understood.” I reach beneath my seat and pull out a neck brace in case we’re boarded.

“Plan D?” Mina asks. “What happened to A through C?”

“A was nothing happening. B was a Vitaly sighting with no action taken, meaning watchful waiting, with a chance of activity. C…you don’t want to know what C was.” I wrap the neck brace around my neck and wait to hear the conversation.

The captain turns on the speakers, so he knows I’m listening. He tells the tower the right words about a medical need and a deteriorating situation. A minute later, we get expedited clearance.

No need for the neck brace, so I tug the Velcro apart and tuck it away. “Thankfully, plan D went without a hitch.”

Mina shakes her head in disbelief and chuckles. “You really do think of everything, don’t you? How many plans were there?”

“A through double F.”

She almost smiles at that, but after everything that happened today, smiles are a rare commodity.

At three thousand feet the islands become a smear of green and sand against a blue background. Guests will post stories that do not match. Security will write a report that avoids names. The manager will issue credits and lose sleep. My men will stay dead.

I do not look at Mina when that thought lands. If I look, heat will flood the places I need cold. She is in danger, and the thought chokes me if I let it. Falling for her is fast and hard. That is almost as dangerous as a bullet.

I turn that off. Staying focused is the only option.

I unbuckle and walk nose to tail one more time. The ritual keeps me sane. I listen for new buzzes in the cabinets. I look at crew faces. No darting eyes. No sweat that does not fit.

I stop at Mina’s seat. “Drink some water.”

“I’m fine.”

“For me.”

Rolling her eyes, she breaks the seal on a bottle and drinks. “Happy?”

“I won’t be until this is over, but I’m glad you’re drinking water.”

“You should too, you know.”

She’s right about that, so I force some down. “This will be a short hop to another island for fuel, then we continue on.”

“Understood,” she says. She closes her eyes for two breaths and then watches the window again. “It all looks so peaceful from a distance.”

“Most things do.” I didn’t let myself think their names when I saw the boat empty and bloodied. I swallow down more water first. “Marcus and Tanner are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Vitaly got them.”

She takes a breath, and her face goes pale. “Did you see them?”

“I saw enough to know.”

Mina’s eyes fall onto my hands. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Believe it or don’t, the next steps are the same. Get some sleep on this flight, because you’re unlikely to get much in the near future.”

“Sleep?” She laughs once. “You’re out of your mind.”

“Probably. All the same, sleep.” I close my eyes and let the dead sit across from me for a beat. Tanner with the loud shirts. Marcus who turned himself into a door when rooms needed one. The knot around their names tightens.

Vitaly killed two men he’s known his whole life. Three, if I count Fyodor.

That takes a special kind of brokenness. The kind that cannot be fixed. I’ve always known Vitaly wasn’t right in the head. Even as a baby, he didn’t cry like normal. Mostly, he stared, like he was trying to see into your soul. Always observing, always thinking. Calculating.

With Bridgette taking him under her wing, the kid stood no chance of being a normal person. Maybe none of us did, considering my own upbringing. But it’s hard not to wonder what went wrong with him. How I could have done better by him. Why he came out the way he did.

Those questions don’t matter right now. The only thing that matters now is solutions. I will not allow Yuri and Alexander to end up like Vitaly. I will protect them from him and the rest of the world. I will keep their mother safe. And I will love all of them with everything I have to give.

But love doesn’t matter now either. If I let myself think of things in terms of love and family, I’ll lose my nerve to do what needs to be done.

The cabin hums like a held breath. I stare at the oval window until the sky blurs and comes back. My phone lies face down on the little table, screen still, a quiet threat. I tell myself not to touch it. I touch it anyway.

I need confirmation of what I know has happened, and I google the island. Headlines pop up. All some iteration of “Fourteen dead in paradise massacre.”

My throat tightens. The words swim and then sharpen. There are three paragraphs of nothing. There are a hundred comments from people who will never smell salt and plaster dust in the same breath. It does not matter. Fourteen dead.

My lungs forget how to work. Air goes in wrong and comes out worse. Roman looks up from whatever gauge he was pretending to read. He reads me instead.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Fourteen…” The word scrapes my mouth. I show him the screen and keep my thumb over the comments.

He scans once and nods once. He does not tell me the number will change. He does not tell me the post is wrong. His breath is steadier than mine.

I blurt, “We keep them there. At the retreat. My mother. The women. I do not care how long. We keep the boys there.”

“Yes,” he says. He does not ask how long is long. He does not tell me I’m being dramatic. “For now they stay. You call when you need to. Not when you think you should.” His eyes hold mine. “We have a chance to pull him again. We take it. That is how this ends.”

My chest goes hot. “No.”

“Mina, it’s the only way⁠—”

“I don’t want another chance. I don’t want to be bait. I want our sons behind a fence. I want to close my eyes and wake up to a normal that never existed. I want⁠—”

“You cannot pretend it away,” he says softly.

“I know,” I say, and my voice breaks. My phone slips from my hand and smacks the carpet. “I know, but I want to. I want one hour where I am not a target. I want to be boring. I want you to lie to me and say everything is fine.”

He reaches for my hands. I pull back and my hands shake. Heat crawls up my throat. Shame follows it. He laces his fingers with mine and squeezes once. “Look at me. Only me.”

I look.

His gaze does not flick. “Breathe with me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“You already are.”

I try. The first inhale hurts like a bruise. The second catches on the way out. The third slides. On the fourth my hands start to remember stillness. I want to be angry at myself for needing help to breathe. He squeezes again and kills the anger before it grows.

“Tell me what is happening right now.”

“I am on a plane. I am breathing. I hate that I’m breathing without my boys. I hate that your men are dead. I hate that my mother’s kettle is the thing my brain keeps circling like it’s a lighthouse.”

He nods. “All true.”

“And I hate that I’m falling in love with you, because I’m scared I’m going to lose you,” I say, because panic makes me honest.

His mouth moves. Not a smile. Not not a smile. “I know how you feel. I feel it too.”

He said he would never lie to me, so I should take that at face value. But maybe when he said he’d never lie to me, he was lying. It’s easier to believe that than to believe he’s falling in love with me. No one falls in love with me. Not ever. Love like that has never been in the cards for me.

And yet…

We sit in silence for a breath. The engine hum shifts. The seat belt digs into my hip. The number sits between us like a guest who refuses to leave. Fourteen. I hear it in the cough of the air system when it changes speed. I hear it in the thin voices that float through the closed door from the cockpit.

“I can’t do this,” I say. I hate the way the words sound. “I cannot be bait. I cannot be brave. I cannot pretend this is somebody else’s life. I cannot.”

“You can.” He does not make it a speech. “But you do not have to like it.”

“I will claw my own skin off if I sit here,” I whisper. I close my eyes and see plaster dust in his hair, the hole in the wall, the sheet I smoothed over pillows, the way the air went still after the shots. “Make it stop.”

He studies my face. Then he unbuckles with a clean click and stands. He does not walk away. He closes the cabin door. The latch falls soft. He drops the second shade with a small pull. The cabin lowers into private quiet. He looks at the phone on the floor.

“I’ll make it stop.” He presses the button until the screen goes black. He sets it with his own on the credenza. He waits by my knees. His jaw flexes, a tight line. He kneels in front of me and sets his palms on the armrests. He looks up like a man asking permission to step through a door. “I am going to touch you. Tell me if you want me to stop.”

“I will.”

He frees my seat belt and slides his hands over my thighs. His palms are warm through the fabric. He waits. I nod and the nod breaks into a shiver. He kisses my knee. Then higher. Slow. Careful. Patient. I pull him up by the back of his neck and meet his mouth. Heat rolls through my chest like a switch flipped the right way.

“Here,” he murmurs, voice low and sure, and shifts us to the small couch by the window. I climb into his lap and anchor myself with my knees at his hips. The plane hums under us. He is strong under my hands and steady in every way that matters. “Take what you need.”

I hike up my dress as he lowers his trousers for me. This is what I need. No thinking. Just doing. We move together until my head empties of everything but breath and his name.

I ride him hard, mindlessly, carelessly. My first orgasm shatters me, but it’s not enough. I need obliteration, so I keep going. The next tightens every muscle in my back, and he catches me before I fall off of him. His arms lock tight around me, keeping me close. He gives me nowhere to fall but into him. When I crest and break, I breathe like a person again.

I taste the sweat on his lip, and crave more. He turns us over, laying me on my back on the sofa cushions so he’s on top of me. His strokes turn slow. Almost lazy. He peppers my lips, my jaw, my throat with stubbled kisses. One hand on my low back pulls me to him, getting him deeper and deeper. His stare is intense, and in this moment, I can’t tell where he begins and I end.

I have never felt more loved than I do right now.

When that thought hits, my climax does too, cresting higher and higher until there’s nothing left of me. He buries himself deep and comes, and I wrap myself around him, clinging to him for every pulse.

After, the cabin smells like lemon and sweat and altitude. I press my forehead to his shoulder. His hand finds the back of my neck and holds. It is the pressure I need. He never holds too tight. He never lets go too soon.

“Better?” he asks against my hair.

“Yes.” The word is breath and gratitude and something like grief.

We clean up and dress, and settle into our seats again. I drink water, not because I want to, but because I need to. He’s right—the only way we get through this is by taking care of our bodies.

“I hate that I feel better,” I admit. “It feels like I cheated. Like I should sit here and punish myself until breathing is something I earn.”

“Enjoying what you can is not cheating. It is how you honor the fallen.”

“Tell me something about the retreat. I need to think about anything else right now.”

“They planted tomatoes,” he says. “The soil is bad and they are trying anyway. There are security cameras in all directions. The people on the ground are well trained and smart. My team takes care of the people I send there. Our boys and your mother are safe.”

I breathe that in without choking on it. The captain says something about time and weather. I tuck my feet up and breathe the way Roman taught me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.

My mind tries to crawl back to the spa. I let it. I feel the cold tile and the hallway and the sheet. Then I force it toward tomatoes. Ugly and red and perfect in bad soil.

I close my eyes. The hallway is gone. The garden remains. The boys sleep in a room that smells like soap and wood. My mother argues with a kettle and wins. A door closes. A bolt slides. Tomorrow exists.

When I open my eyes, Roman is watching the wing. His hand rests on the armrest, so I curl my fingers over his.

“Better.”

It makes me smile to hear him say that.

I pick up the black phone and put it face down again. I could read about the fourteen dead bodies found at the resort. I could wallow in despair and guilt for their deaths. I could do a lot of things, but almost none of them are useful to the dead. Or to me.

As much as I blame myself for what happened, I know it’s not true. Vitaly did this. Not me. Not Roman. Vitaly is an angry, jealous man who thinks he is entitled to everything he wants.

He wants to be pakhan. He wants revenge against me.

He will have neither.

The plane rides a smooth pocket of air. The sky on the other side of the glass is the kind of blue that paint tries to copy. Roman’s hand is warm under mine. Fourteen is still a number in the world. It is not the only one. Two babies, sleeping. One woman, breathing. One man, watching the wing.

Right now, that’s the only math that matters.

When we land, the math changes. But I’ll be damned before I let that monster hurt my babies, and if that means I have to be bait, so be it.

The house is too quiet. The silence is wrong, but the choice is right.

I don’t like being home without my sons. It feels empty. Funny that. I’d thought the noise and chaos of them would be too much, that I was too set in my ways to be the father of twin infants.

Now, I yearn to hear their fussy cries and wear their spit-up like a badge of honor. They’d been here for only a few weeks before we sent them away, and now that they’re gone, I feel as though I’m missing a limb.

What I’m missing is worse than that. Bigger. More painful.

Children are like that, though. You can’t prepare for them, not in any real way. For the past year, I’d been living my life as I always have, unaware two miracles were born with my blood in them. But the moment I met them, the world narrowed to their two tiny bodies.

Two enormous possible futures for the Bratva.

I make predictions I know will be wrong in the details and right in the shape. Alexander is heavier in the arm and louder. He laughs first and calms. He looks at the world as if it belongs to him. He will be the bigger one. He will take the first step into any space and make strangers feel like friends. That is how doors open in this world.

Yuri is smaller and fine edged. He watches before he moves. He listens to the air. He notices a change in a voice and turns his head toward it. He settles slower and deeper. When he smiles it is earned. He will be the one who reads the table and names the danger before it stands up. That is how houses stay standing.

I hope those lines hold as they grow. The loud one and the quiet one. The hand that reaches and the hand that steadies. Together they could balance the weight I carry better than I do. Together they could keep each other honest.

Maybe that is what our people need. Not one crown on one brow. Two brothers who split the work. One to greet. One to measure. One to lead the parade and one to watch the crowd.

The need for them to grow up and have lives of their own…it’s all-consuming. Primal. I will protect them no matter what. Even if Mina would never approve of my methods.

I don’t need her approval. At the moment, I need her out of the picture, so I can handle the business of keeping my family alive. Her exhaustion is evident in the slope of her slender shoulders, the flat gaze. She’s been worn down by Vitaly, and not for the first time.

I haven’t asked about their relationship, because it’s none of my business, but also because anytime the subject is brought up, she shrinks in on herself. I will not pull at that thread until I know I can sew her back together when she comes apart.

Mina pauses in the foyer and turns toward the nursery without thinking. Her hand finds my sleeve. She does not speak. She needs a bed, not words.

“They are where they should be. This house will feel empty tonight. That is the price we pay so they live to fill it again.”

She nods, and we go upstairs. The staff withdraw without being told, though Sergei watches silently from a distance. He has always worn his heart on his sleeve, and at the moment, his old eyes fill with concern for Mina. Maybe for me too.

In the bedroom, a lamp burns low. The sheets are turned down. There is a tray with food she can eat without thinking. Sergei’s handiwork, no doubt.

“Rest for now. Tonight, there will be no rest.”

She leans on the doorframe and studies my face. “What’s tonight?”

“We go out.”

“Where to?”

“Rope.”

She chirps an incredulous laugh. “We are being hunted, and you want to take me to your kink club?”

“It is the second most secure place I own. He will come out of hiding there. I know it.”

“Why wouldn’t he attack us here?”

“Without Fyodor to help him, he will not get in here. At Rope, there are plenty of people to bribe or blackmail for access. Also, he’s already tried here⁠—”

“And he doesn’t like to use the same tactic twice. Right.” Her smile dies, and she looks past me at the window. “I do not want the boys near any of this.”

“They will not be. They stay where they are.”

Her jaw works, but she says nothing.

“I will be here when you wake. Sleep now.”

She lies down in her clothes and pulls the blanket up. Her jaw scar is a pale thread in this light. She kisses my wrist and lets go. Her eyes close before I stand.

I hate leaving her here. I do it anyway. I also leave a code card on the nightstand. If she dials it, the inner doors lock, the cameras turn, and the gate freezes. That will keep him out.

I set in motion Marcus and Tanner’s replacements via text, and so far, so good. The new head of security, Aldo, waits by the landing with a clipboard. I miss the men who are gone and give no space to the ache. There’s no time now. Aldo has been with me for years, but under Tanner. He knows why he was promoted, and he doesn’t look scared.

“No gate for anyone but me. If I say winter, you evacuate the rooms to the sublevel and you burn the driveway where it crosses the stream.”

He repeats it back without a single note wrong.

I change and leave by the side stairs. The car waits. My new driver, Peter, watches the clock and my face. He trained with Marcus, worked as his third shift relief. He knows better than to offer comfort.

“Route Five. The old Valivov place.”

The city is half-awake. We cross the river. Smoke from last week’s fire still stains the sky. Downtown is a vague blur on the way to the other side of the city. I used to love this drive.

Thirty-five years ago, there was less city to pass on my way to my meetup point with Olga. It was near her family property, but just far away enough that their guards never saw us meet up. She’d sneak out in the middle of the night, and I’d pick her up, and we’d steal away to some remote location. The woods. A park. Another town where we’d see a late-night movie and feel like a real couple for a few hours.

Sneaking her back in was always perilous. We never knew if her family knew she had been missing, so when she snuck back inside, she might have been caught. It never happened, though.

Well, there was one time.

The morning after a midnight escapade, her brother told her to be quieter when she snuck out, because he had to cover for her and say he’d fallen out of bed, because she had closed the window too loudly. She was terrified Leon would rat her out, but he swore he wouldn’t, and he never did. He told her that out of all their family’s enemies, I was the one he liked the most for her, because he knew I’d never hurt her.

If only that had been true…

The past clears away with the sighting of their grand driveway. Trees loom like sentries, and the ornate iron gate stands in front of the car. The buzzer sounds like a throat clearing.

I press it. “Roman Ekimov to see Leon Valivov.”

The lock whines before the massive gate opens. It is always a risk to visit another pakhan, particularly when unannounced. But this is a face-to-face discussion and not one I want Vitaly to catch wind of.

Leon stands at the doorway to his mansion looking somber. He has gone gray the right way. His hands are steady, and his clothes are perfectly pressed and tailored. I have never seen him look anything other than sharp.

On my approach, he calls out, “Roman, what are you doing here?” He does not offer his hand.

“I have come to ask a favor. Might we speak?”

He nods once, and I follow him inside. His men are wary, and I don’t blame them. But Peter waits in the car, and that seems to put them at ease a fraction.

We sit in his den. The room is small and a fireplace warms the space well. Books line the shelves, and we take to two overstuffed leather chairs.

“It’s been a long time,” he notes.

“Indeed.” Two years? Four, since our last conversation? I’m not sure.

His brow lines with what some might interpret as concern. For Leon, it’s calculation. He’s questioning whether I can still be trusted. “I am sorry about your men in the islands.”

I should not be surprised he knows about Tanner and Marcus, and yet, I am. “Thank you. Unfortunately, it has been an eventful few days.”

“I am sorry to have missed it, but I did not receive an invitation to your wedding.”

I had wondered whether to invited him. “Considering our past, I worried it might bring up old wounds.”

He nods and sighs. “Ah. Fair enough. And where is your new wife? I’d like to meet her.”

“Apologies. She is resting after our travels.” I lay an envelope on the table and turn it so the name faces him. It has his on the outside. “You know Vitaly is coming for me.”

He acts surprised, but it is only an act. “Is he?”

“You have your ear to the wind as much as I do. You knew about my men. Don’t act surprised.”

A slight lift in his shoulders. “You have your corner of our world, and I have mine. I don’t interfere with your family squabbles anymore. It cost me too much the first time.”

“Can’t say I blame you.” I swallow my pride to speak the words that will protect my family. “If Vitaly kills me, you protect my wife and sons. Half of what I own becomes yours if the condition is met.”

He lifts the flap and reads the first page. He does not touch the second. He looks up. “The condition?”

“Vitaly. You kill him. Fast. Clean. You end this, and you keep them alive.”

“And if you live?”

“That is the outcome I am planning around. You’re my plan B.”

He sits back and pauses to stare into the fire. The light deepens the shadowed lines of his face. “Why me?”

“Of all the pakhans in this city, you’re the only one I trust to do right by them. None of us are good men⁠—”

He laughs once. Sharp. Not a denial. An acknowledgment.

“But you’re the closest thing to a good man that I know.”

“This could have been avoided. If you had married Olga in secret. The way she wanted you to.”

I wish that were true. “She would not have survived our world, Leon. She did not have teeth for that fight. You know it as well as I do. This life was never meant for the kindhearted. The good things she loved about me…they’re as dead as anyone we’ve lost. She would have hated me, hated this life. That hate would have been a slow death for her.”

Leon closes his eyes. For a second his face is hers. Then it is his again as he blows out a large breath. “We are old men now. It is easy to tell ourselves lies about the past for comfort. The thing is, I’m not sure which of us is doing that now. Is it me, thinking she’d still be alive if you’d married her in secret? Or is it you, insisting she wouldn’t have survived that marriage?”

“We will never know. Rewriting the past is an old man’s favorite comforting pastime. But I am not interested in comfort. I am interested in making sure my wife does not face my son alone.”

He breathes out through his nose. “Then don’t let him kill you.”

“That is the plan. I take her to Rope. Let us be vulnerable. And when he attacks, I finish this. If I fail, that’s where you come in.”

“I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say this, Roman. If you go to the club, you will be a target. Vitaly might not have a membership, but there’s nowhere he can’t break into. He will come for you.”

“That’s what I said.”

He shakes his head. “You play a dangerous game.”

“I play to win.”

“And your bride? Are you playing another dangerous game with a woman you profess to care for?”

I sit back, letting the cutting words slice into me. “I never played games with Olga, Leon. You know better than that. I loved her.”

“And you married Bridgette.”

“To keep Olga safe.”

“From your father, from Bridgette, or from yourself?”

I want to tell him he’s being unfair. That I was protecting her from a life in the Bratva, from my father, from Bridgette. From anyone or anything that doesn’t point the finger where I know it belongs.

The words still don’t come easily, even when I know they’re the truth. “I protected her from me.”

“What would you have done to her that she needed protection from, Roman? What were you afraid of?”

Those old fears creep out of my mouth. “That we would end up like my parents. My father had groomed me to be his successor, and as much as I hated the man, I feared becoming him. My mother was a good woman, and he turned her into a shell of a person until her death.” I can’t look him in the eyes when I say this, so I stare into the fire instead. “If I became him, and she became her, I could have never lived with myself. If I had been the one to destroy the goodness in her…”

A knot forms in my throat, and I try to shake off that guilt. It doesn’t work. Maybe it shouldn’t be that easy to shake off guilt. This is the first time we’ve truly spoken on the matter, and I refuse to give rote answers about any of it. Not when I may be dead by morning.

I clear my throat again, or at least I try. I want my words to be clear. “The world became a far grimmer place when Olga died. It would have been worse if she had been hollowed out by years of cruel indifference and undeniable pressure. Maybe I didn’t handle things the way I should have back then. I have a great many regrets in this life, but that is not one of them. It’s ugly, but I made the right call on that score, Leon.”

“You feared mistreating her by becoming your father?”

“Until that point in my life, my greatest fear was becoming him. Then, I met Olga, and that fear was overtaken by becoming him and hurting her because of it. Yes.”

He sits back, and the leather chair beneath him muffles a squeak. “That is how I know it would have never happened.”

I blink at him. “I don’t understand.”

“That was your fear, Roman. You would have done everything in your power to stop yourself from hurting her, from becoming him. But you never trusted yourself enough to know that.” His shoulders slide down. “You would have never hurt her. You aren’t cruel like your father. You’re a better man than he ever was. Trust yourself.”

Conflict rises in my shoulders. “It means a great deal that you think so highly of me. I’m not sure I agree.”

He chuckles. “Being better than your father isn’t a particularly high level of humanity, Roman. But you stuck the landing.”

His teasing almost makes me smile. “Does any of what I told you make you feel better or worse about Olga?”

“Both, I suppose. Better, for finally knowing your reasoning behind it. Worse, for how I think it could have been for her. And worse for you, because I think you might have been happy with her.” He stretches. “But in the long run, what’s done is done. And your new bride has a bright future ahead of her, when tonight goes the way you plan.”

“You’re that sure of me?”

“I am sure of little in this life, but I am sure of you.”

I have to ask. “Why? Why have you always been in my corner?”

“To paraphrase—because you’re the closest thing to a good man that I know.”

I whiff a laugh at that, and he stands, so I follow suit. He walks me to the door. We shake hands and hold for a beat longer than we used to. He says the thing that must be said. “If he kills you, I will not let your new bride walk alone. I will do everything in my power to watch after them. I swear it, Roman.”

Relief washes over me like heat. “Thank you, old friend.”

The walk to my car is brief and cold. Night has fallen in the past hour. The drive back holds less dread, because I know Mina and our boys will be cared for. What happens to me is inconsequential. I will face Vitaly and do what I must.

No matter how much I hate it.

The house is dim when I walk in. Rugs mute the steps of men who know how to walk without being noticed. The air still carries her shampoo and a ghost of mint from tea. Everything is in its place.

Nothing feels right in it.

Mina lies on the bed with her eyes open. She’s on top of the bedspread in her black dress. It reveals too much leg and cleavage, but that’s perfect for Rope. She tries to smile. It does not reach the part of her face that tells the truth. She looks past me for a second and then back like she cannot help it.

“They are safe. The same report as an hour ago.”

She nods. “Okay.”

“Sleep a little more,” I tell her. “We go out later.”

“Can’t sleep. Just staring at the ceiling, hoping this all goes right.”

“Then stare more. I need time to get ready.”

“Don’t worry about entertaining me, Roman. I’m fine on my own.”

In my bath the mirror tells one story. A man who slept when he could, and that wasn’t often enough. Lines sit deeper at the eyes and mouth. The gray in the stubble shows more than it should. I do not shave it away.

I take a hot shower long enough to loosen the muscles that stayed tight on the flight. Old memories haunt beneath my skin. A shoulder that took a fall on a bad road. A rib that remembers a fighter from Boston. That bullet in Sochi. The heat makes them quiet. I turn the dial to cold at the end. The shock is a good one.

Leon’s words rattle in my head, refusing to settle. He called me a good man. Or near enough. But do good men make their wives into bait? I don’t think so.

If, somehow, I had married Olga and we were in this situation, she would not have handled it with Mina’s grace. She would have gone catatonic, despite being raised in this world. I would have sent her away with the babies and hunted Vitaly down.

Even now, with this plan in motion, I wonder whether that would have been the better strategy. Mina is handling this better than I expected her to, but taking her with me into the lion’s den is a tall ask.

But she does not shrink from it. She hates this, and she is still here. I do not deserve a woman like her.

If we survive tonight, I will live every day trying to change that.

The closet waits with its dark hung order. Tonight the suit is black. Shirt black. Tie black. No shine. I button each button with hands that refuse to hurry and refuse to shake. My holster fits skim to my body. The jacket settles right across the back. The bigger gun sits in the case at my feet and will ride in the car. I pocket a second magazine and a thin phone no one knows about.

On my way down I stop at the nursery and stand in the door. Two small shirts wait on a chair for a morning that belongs to us again. A toy truck sits under the dresser like it rolled there on purpose. I pick it up and place it on the shelf.

Soon they will play with that truck. Mina will pretend to rev it up, and they will laugh, and all will be right with the world. That’s all that matters.

Whether I’m alive to see that is inconsequential.

I go back upstairs and knock softly before I open our door. Mina is sitting now. Her mouth has color. Her hair is down. She looks like she’s ready for a battle no one else will know about until it’s too late.

“Ready?”

“Yeah, ready.” Her voice is steady. Her eyes are somewhere two steps behind it.

She takes my arm when I offer it. She fits at my side as if we have been doing this for years. I hope to. But I don’t count on it.

My son has a knack for getting what he wants.

Vitaly was always his mother’s creature, and his mother was trained by the best assassin I’ve ever known. He’s lethal, with a body count higher than most in that line of work.

But he’s sloppy. Prideful. When the moment comes, I will play to his flaws. I will let him think he has the upper hand, then take it from him.

That’s the only play I’ve got.

In the car she looks out the window as the gate opens. The trees make a tunnel. The city takes us back like it did not notice we left. There are small pieces of life in every frame. A man smokes at a bus stop and cups the ember when the wind pushes it. A girl runs with a bag held against her chest so it does not bump her ribs. A dog pulls a woman toward the thing it wants to smell.

This is why I fight the way I fight. None of these people know they are under a roof I built. I do not need them to know.

I look at my own hands. They are steady and used. The lines were made by work I inherited. They will do more tonight. I think about the boy who has his mother’s eyes and my build, and what he’d do if he were ever to inherit the work I did.

Vitaly would burn this city down if it meant he could wear a crown. It’s all he’s ever wanted, the only future his ego would accept. He has a quick temper and a quicker trigger finger. Our family’s name would end in the ashes of this city.

“I thought being pakhan meant I could do whatever I wanted,” I mutter to myself. The words arrive without me thinking about it.

Mina turns fully now. “Doesn’t it?”

“On the contrary, it means doing what everyone else needs. Pakhans—the good ones—do not live for themselves. They live for their people. It means fathering those who need fathered. It means helping the helpless. It means marrying the wrong woman to protect the right one, and still failing.” Old scars. “It means trying to do the best for your people at all times, even when it feels like the wrong thing. And sometimes, it means killing your own blood because they live only for themselves. That is my son’s failing.”

Mina sits silently for a beat. “I would have thought all the killing was his failing.”

“That’s the result of his shortcomings. A symptom of his sickness. He’d rather kill than negotiate. He’d burn a building down to collect the insurance instead of refurbishing it. If he can eliminate an obstacle, he will do so, because it’s easier than not getting exactly what he wants.”

“That’s why you think he’d be a bad pakhan.”

“Even if my son were to take the title, he would rule briefly. The others would not tolerate the chaos he would bring. It would be a year at most before he was taken out. Or the law caught up to him. He is too rambunctious and hateful to rule quietly.”

She studies my face. “You mean to kill him tonight, don’t you?”

I nod once. It is a small movement. It feels like more than I want to carry. “I wish it could be different. I do not want to kill him. But he has not given me a choice.”

The truth sits heavy when it is said aloud. I watch her breathe and see the small catch in it.

“You were young,” she says after a while. “When you thought the title meant freedom. Did age change your perspective?”

“Yes. I was young and angry about Olga. I thought the chair would make me taller. It made me a wall. I did not like it until I learned what it held up. A legacy of men through the years, working to keep their families and this city safe. I run guns, and I don’t pretend to be innocent about any of that. But I keep the guns out of the wrong hands. It’s not easy⁠—”

“I never thought it was.”

I lace my fingers with hers. “I do my best to protect innocent people. I don’t always succeed, but I try.”

“You sound tired.”

“I am. Not the kind a bed fixes.”

She nods. She knows that kind.

I watch our reflection slide along dark windows and vanish. The city lifts and dips. The bridge climbs. The river passes under us, black and simple. For a second I imagine stepping over the rail and letting the cold water take everything it can take from me. The thought arrives and leaves. It is not the first time I have thought about that.

But I have work to do. The river can have me when the world does not need me.

Mina shifts. “Do you ever wish you had chosen something else?”

“Every man wishes that at three in the morning. Then he wakes up and does the thing he said he would do. Or he is not a man I would ever trust.”

She looks back out the window. “I do not like that your answer makes sense.”

“I do not like it either.”

I flex my hand and feel the small ache in the knuckles where winter lives now. I roll my shoulders once under the jacket to set the weight the way I want it. The mask I use for this place is an old one. It fits. It takes work to put it on and more work to take it off.

“You should not worry about the boys tonight. Worry is wasted energy, and you’ll need all the energy you can muster in this place.” It is the advice I give and can never heed.

She breathes out through her nose. “I am their mother. Worry is my job.”

“You are more than that.”

She seems to consider it as she stares out the window.

“Once we are inside, you stay with me. If a hand you do not know reaches for you, you do not pull away. You step into it and put your heel on their foot, and then I will break their face, and security will handle the rest.”

She nods. “Understood.”

“No, I’m not sure you do. In Rope, I am the dominant everyone else takes their lead from. I set the tone. Those there will see you as my submissive⁠—”

“But I’m not.”

“Perception is reality at Rope. My point is, they will see you that way, and some dominants like to believe they can cow any submissive, even one that belongs to someone else. If they touch you or approach you, it is to challenge my claim on you.”

She blinks. “I am your wife, the wife of a pakhan.”

“And yet, there are those with too much ego and not enough sense. My illegal activities are a well-founded rumor here. One I never confirm, nor deny. It gives them plausible deniability. They do not know for certain who I am outside of here. They only know the rumors of it.”

“Why would they come here, if they’re normies who think you’re tied to the Bratva?”

“People like a taste of danger now and then, and attending the BDSM club of a suspected pakhan is its own kink.”

She settles in her seat, taking it all in. “So, they might come at me because they want to challenge you?”

“Weak dominants love to throw their weight around. It’s the behavior of a novice, and a good way to know who is on their game and who is merely a pretender.”

“Then, we’re being bait in two ways tonight.”

I huff a laugh at that. “That’s one way to look at it.” I see the distraction still walking in her face. It is small and precise. It creeps behind her eyes and hides when I try to catch it.

I do not press. I do not need to. She will tell me what she can when she can. Until then I carry what I must and let her carry the rest. She is a worried mother. Tonight would be stressful on its own without that factor adding pressure to the festivities. Dragging it out of her would only rile her up more.

Vitaly will come. There is no cleaner chance for him than this room and this night. He will bring too much heat and not enough sense.

I will use that and any other tools at my disposal to eliminate the threat. If I die tonight, she will live. If he dies tonight, she will live.

Either way, my family survives. That’s all anyone can ask for in this life.

Rope looks the same from the street. Tall doors. Black glass. Music you feel before you hear it. Last time I stood here, I was a woman who had never seen a room like this. I was brave because I had decided to be.

Tonight, I have to be brave enough to be Vitaly’s assassin.

Roman steps out of the car, and the doors part without being touched. Faces turn. Necks tilt. The darkness opens because the room knows how to make space when a man like him arrives. He holds my hand, and I let his touch steady me. We walk through body heat and staggered breathing, all eyes on us.

The air inside is cool. It smells like clean leather, candle wax, sex, and money. Bass pulses under the floorboards in a steady line. The light is low but not hazy. Everything important can still be seen in blue and purple lights.

A woman in a black lace mask walks by with a leash in her hand and a man at the other end. A bartender flips a bottle and does not spill. A couple takes a slow kiss against a pillar. A rope rig hangs in the far room like a threat. Or maybe a promise.

Different scenarios play out in this space for public play. There are private playrooms too, but voyeurs and exhibitionists have their fun in the main space. A few bound submissives are spanked or fingered in a dark corner. On the right wall, a man has his hands tied over his head, and people take turns tickling him. He is completely naked. And very erect.

Last time all of this looked like a storm I had to walk into without a coat. Now it looks like a set. I know the marks. I know the exits. I am not afraid of the rope or the mask or the crowd or their versions of fun.

I am afraid of one man and what he told me to do.

I scan the room without turning my head. Vitaly loves to be seen. He also loves to make you think you cannot see him until he wants it. He will not miss this. He will not miss the chance to watch his father die.

He’s waited his whole life for this.

We walk toward the throne. It sits on the same small black stage where I met Roman. The steps up are shallow and wide. The seat is high-backed and plain from a distance. Up close, there is filigree you only notice when you are inside the circle. The button that lifts the walls is a pressure plate hidden in the arm. Smooth black walls live under the floor and rise smooth when he requires privacy.

I remember the first time he pressed it and the sound the whole room made when we disappeared. A hush. A lean-in. A feeling like a lid closing on a jar. Luxurious, isolated, and private.

A royal room fit for a king to die in.

He squeezes my fingers once and lets go. He has a face he wears here. Command with a hint of indulgence and more dignity than needed. He sits and becomes the center of attention. I sit on his lap.

His plaything.

His doom.

Lighting warms by a degree. The DJ lowers the bass a little so he can hear the room. Security lines shift. The new head of security—Aldo—moves like a quiet dog that likes only one owner. The old ghosts do not stand in his line.

I feel their absence like a bruise. I know I am alive because men and women died for me. What brought them to that line of work? Money? A sense of honor? I’ll never know.

Whatever their reason, it’s not enough. No one should be in a position to die for someone else.

Yet, that’s exactly what will happen tonight. And I hate myself for it.

He touches my waist with warm hands. He kisses my temple and smiles at the room. I smile back like the smile is for him. It is for the man I told myself I would betray if I had to. It is for the man I am praying I will not need to hurt. If he kills Vitaly first, I will throw the knife into the floor and go to my knees and thank every bad god who came to watch the carnage unfold.

I keep my eyes up without flicking. The mezzanine is a narrow ring with small tables. The stairs to it sit in deep shadow. If Vitaly came with a mask and a membership card, he could sit at the rail and no one would ask his name.

I look for a head that does not move when the music moves. I look for the absence of rhythm. That’s something he’s bad at—dancing, rhythm, blending in with other people. Vitaly Ekimov is many things, but normal is not one of them.

Roman’s mouth finds my jaw. He is careful with the line of my scar even now. He knows I do not need that anymore. He gives it anyway. The crowd watches without staring. This is theater. Everyone is an extra until a spotlight hits. He kisses me like a man who does not think he could die tonight. He does it to sell a picture. He also does it because he wants to.

I let him. I sell it back.

If the knife is in the chair, I will feel it when I reach down. If it is not, Vitaly lied for sport. If it is not, he planned to kill everyone all along.

That thought eliminates all the others. I have to find the knife. I have to know he put it there. If he didn’t…if he planned to kill my family regardless of what I agreed to…

No. I can’t think like that. Not now. Not when this is so close to being over. I have one job. I am supposed to make Roman feel private in public. I am supposed to smile until the walls rise. I am supposed to reach under and close my hand on a handle and make the world ripple. I am supposed to do all of this without giving away that I am counting my own breaths so I do not pass out.

I put my lips to Roman’s ear and say the only thing I can say without lying. “You look good.”

“You look like the reason this place exists.” It would be a line if it came from any other man’s lips. But he means it, and that is worse.

Every compliment, every kiss—it’s all poison to my conscience.

He lifts his hand, and the room changes posture. People turn their bodies toward us by a degree. That is all it takes. They want to be seen being seen. He makes a small motion. Two men move a velvet rope and slide a low table away from the steps. No one approaches the stage unless invited. People like to think it is fear. It is design. He built this room to teach people how to behave in it.

My eyes catch a flash of white near the upper rail. Not a shirt. A bandage. The head above it has hair cut close. The posture is a story I know too well. I do not let my face change. I do not move my head. I keep my mouth on Roman’s and my hand on his tie and I let the corner of my vision do the rest. The man turns and the bandage vanishes. It could be a trick of light. It could be nothing.

It could be everything.

Vitaly would have a reason to wear a dressing. He would have earned it this week—too many fights, too many chances for someone to get a leg up on him. He’s never been afraid to get hurt. According to him, scars make a pakhan look more fearsome, so he welcomes them. It’s why he lets anyone get close enough to hurt him.

Underworld marketing.

My chest tightens. I loosen it by force. Roman’s hand slides under my hair and cups the back of my neck. He is still selling the picture. He is also checking my pulse. He can feel when I stiffen. I relax against him before he can read it as panic. I mouth his throat and think about nothing for two counts. Then reality rushes in again.

I try to put myself in Roman’s mind. He says he will kill his son. He says he has no choice. I believe him because I have seen his beliefs turn into action without a pause. I also know he is a father.

I try to imagine lifting my hand against my own child. My brain stops. It is like trying to breathe under ice. The body pauses and then thrashes. I cannot do it. I know I cannot. I would die for them. I could never harm them. The thought makes my stomach turn.

The thought of Roman not doing it makes my stomach turn worse.

“Slow,” I whisper into his skin. “Take your time.”

He hears the words I say and the ones I do not. He slows. His hand firms on my hip. He knows exactly how to make four minutes feel like twenty. He knows how to make a son who thinks he is smarter get impatient.

The slower we move, the longer this takes. The longer this takes, the more likely Vitaly will act out.

We fool around. I keep it within the bounds of what I can live with in front of all these eyes. Each kiss is guilt and love and sex in one bite. I put my mouth near his ear and talk without words. I move my fingers down his tie and stop where it is decent and then move back up. He slides his hand under the hem of my dress and rests it high on my thigh and leaves it there. The room reads the rest.

I am grateful for the light. The light protects me from my own fear. Darkness would swallow me whole right now. And privacy would be the death of Roman.

I think about the hidden knife. Tucked and waiting. It has to be there. There is no alternative. Something simple that would not be spotted in a sweep if the sweep was for what men expect. Vitaly likes to think he is a magician. He’s a boy with a trick he learned from watching other men.

I slide my palm down the outside of the arm as if I need to steady myself. My fingers drift under by a hair. Wood. Metal. Nothing else. Not yet.

Where the fuck is the knife?

A waiter glides up the left side of the stage with two glasses. He keeps his eyes down. He does not look at me. He sets the glasses on the small table by the step and vanishes. The drinks will not be touched. We are not here to drink.

I force myself to look away from the rail where I think I saw white. I scan the floor again. Two men by a St. Andrew’s cross. One looks up too often. One never looks up. That pair is nothing.

A trio by the bar leaning in. The woman in the lace mask returns with her man and ties him to a low piece of furniture I cannot see from here. They are here to forget the outside world. They are not my problem.

A couple waves at the throne and waits for their wave to be returned. Roman does not oblige. He nods once. They look relieved. They will talk about that nod for a week.

I breathe and slow my own pulse. I try to thread a needle. If I draw this out too long, Roman will decide to raise the walls because that is how this play goes. He will do it for theater and to bait a killer.

If I rush, we will lose the only chance to take Vitaly while he watches. I need him to reveal himself. I need Roman to keep the walls down until then. I also need him to press the button at the exact right second if he is not going to kill his son in front of everyone.

I reach under the left arm as I shift my weight once more. This time, I find a knobby handle. I resent the relief I feel as I grind on my husband’s hard-on.

I hate this plan. And I hate that it’s the only one I’ve got.

I hate this.

Mina lowers into my lap like she was born to that place. The first time she came to me, she was all bright edges and stubborn courage, a woman daring herself to walk into the dark. Tonight, she is not naive.

She sees what I see. Corners that can hide a hand. Shadows that can hide a boy. She sells a smile to the room that looks like sin. She gives me a kiss that tastes like a vow. I feel the weight of both.

We make a spectacle because that is the job. This crowd lives for the show. It fills the blanks with its own hunger. I have used that hunger a thousand times.

I do not want to use my wife. Not now, not ever.

I have taken my pleasure in this chair with women who asked for nothing but to be chosen for an hour. Mina is not that. I want her like a man wants the reason he still gets up in the morning.

All the world is a stage, and the men nothing more than actors, or however the quote goes. But we are not actors, and while we may be on a stage, I am tired of giving people a show. More than that, I don’t want to show them my wife.

I slide my palm up her thigh and stop where it is decent. The room imagines the rest, and I let them. They don’t get the full sight of her. Not this time.

I bend to her ear. “Let me put up the walls.”

The switch sits under my left hand. One press and the panels would rise smooth and silent. The stage becomes a room, and the noise outside turns into a muffled hush of pulsing bass and moans. It also sets the trap for Vitaly.

I am tired of waiting for this.

She stiffens for half a breath. Then she shakes her head, small enough for only me to feel it. “Keep them down,” she whispers. Her voice is velvet and wrong. The request lands like a pebble in a still pond.

Odd. My instincts list possibilities. She wants to draw this out. She’s searching for Vitaly in the crowd, paranoid that he’ll get the drop on me or my security. Perhaps she’s in a mood.

Whatever the case, it is not my preference. I kiss the corner of her mouth. “I do not want to share you with them.”

“Share me,” she says, low and steady, as if the words do not cost her. “Use me. I like it.”

Since when?

Is this a mirror of her behavior on the island? That blow job that was damn near public? The sex against a tree that was public? Is she an exhibitionist, or is it something else?

I turn her chin with two fingers until she looks at me. The eyes I give her are not for the room. “I do not use you, love. You are mine. I am yours. We do not belong to them. We belong to each other.”

A shine lifts in her eyes. Not submission. Fear. She hides it fast, but I am built to read tremor the way other men read maps. Her voice catches on the next breath. “You told me pakhans don’t live for themselves. They live for their people. We do belong to them, so we should put on a show.”

Every word is right and still wrong. The logic fits. The reasoning under it does not. I search her face. Her lashes flutter once. She looks over my shoulder for the briefest slice of a second. That is the look of a woman counting down.

“What is wrong?”

She opens her mouth. Nothing comes. She swallows. Her throat works. She tries again. The effort hurts me more than anything she could have said.

Mina is unwilling to speak on this here. Very well. “Come with me.” I stand with her in my arms. “We’re taking this to another room.”

“What?”

The floor manager reads the shift and opens the path. The rope drops from a hook. A low table slides out of our way. Two guards take positions a beat closer than usual. I descend from the stage with her held against me, slow enough to sell possession, fast enough to keep the moment intact.

I take her to a room I do not enter often. The door lives behind a panel disguised as a wall mirror. The key is not a key. The lock reads body heat and fingerprints coded to it. Mine are coded to every lock in Rope.

Inside, the air is cooler. The light is clean, but low. The equipment is not for amateurs. This is a place for negotiated play. The walls are lined with specialty equipment I commissioned for a few high-roller members, and they visit Rope rarely, so I knew the room would be open tonight. It’s a good thing too, because we didn’t negotiate anything. Not yet.

My wife and I need to have chat.

She looks around like she has been starving and just found a buffet table. The door clicks behind us. I slide the bolt and throw a look to the ceiling plate. The two men I trust most in this building will guard the outside. No one will open this door for anything short of a fire. No one will see her cry if she needs to.

I turn to ask again what is wrong. She comes at me before I get the words out. She is heat and urgency and a hunger that feels like a deadline.

She pushes me back until the backs of my legs meet a padded bench and then onto it, straddling my lap with the single-mindedness of a person who wants to tear a clock off the wall. It is reckless for her. It is reckless for me. It is also us.

My hands find her hips because they always do. My mouth finds hers because it must. But something is wrong. “Wait.”

“No,” she says into my mouth, and she makes the word an oath.

She moves like she has to keep something from catching up to her. I have known impatience and exhibition and the kind of show a woman puts on for an audience and for herself. This is not that. This is need, sharp and strong, wrapped in control that could fray if I tug too hard.

I do not tug. I go with it. I am a man with limited tools to soothe a terror when a woman will not name it. I will use the tools I have.

Her kiss shreds my will to persist with questions. Fiery, ardent. She kisses a line down my throat as she unbuttons my shirt to expose more skin. A naughty hand dips lower than her mouth, cupping me over my trousers, where she finds me hard and ready.

But something troubles my queen, and I cannot let her distract me from that. I take her hands from me, kissing the inside of her wrists before I speak. “Tell me what troubles you, my love.”

The fear in her eyes is back for only a flash. “What’s wrong is my husband won’t let me work off some of my nervous energy on his cock.”

I don’t buy it for a second. Her pupils flare when she lies, or when she pretends she’s okay when she’s not, and they’re flaring now. But she doesn’t want to talk about it at the moment, and I’m too far gone to deny her anything.

“Promise we talk about it after.”

She swallows. “Promise.”

With that, I unleash her, and I am delighted by the results. She yanks open my trousers, tumbles to her knees, and takes me deeply into her throat. The sight of this exquisite woman on her knees would make a lesser man come in two strokes.

I cup the back of her head in my hand and take her throat. Now that we’ve grown accustomed to one another, I’m less worried about hurting her. My wife is strong enough to take whatever I dish out.

She groans around my cock, and that’s all it takes for me to pull out and lift her to her feet. Her brows furrow in confusion. “What⁠—”

I turn, bending her over the padded table behind me. That dress is in the way, so I lift the back of it. Black lace panties. Such a good girl. I pull them down and press on the small of her back so her ass sticks out for me as she bends forward.

Fuck, the sight of her like this is killing me. Her sex is wet and shining between her thighs, and it’s all I can do not to slam myself into her right the fuck now. But I will take my time.

I notch there, enjoying the slick, tight feel of her entrance and the way she whines for more, arching herself back to meet me. “Tell me what you want, wife.”

“Now! Fuck me n—oh, yes!”

I give her half my length to work on for a moment. She is primed and ready for more, but why not take my time with this? Why not enjoy it? This may be our last time together.

Perhaps I should make it sweet for her. Slow and romantic and meaningful. That’s where my heart is right now. I long for more time with this woman, and I may not have it. Such is the life of a pakhan.

The truth is, my end is nigh. So, I will not waste a single moment on what should be.

I slam deep, fitting into her soul where I belong. There, I pause, letting her body adjust to my presence. I feel it all—the way her pussy quivers around my cock. That deep sigh that relaxes her bones. The way she shakes with anticipation for my next move.

“That right there? That’s where you truly live, isn’t it?”

Her voice is a ghost. “Yes.”

I drag my thumbs up the sides of her spine before hooking my hands over her shoulders. Once I am anchored inside of her, I begin. I don’t retract completely—wouldn’t want to give her too much length to work herself on yet. No, I give her only a few inches. Not enough to work her G-spot into a frenzy just yet.

I am unsheathed inside of her, only now realizing the risk of condom-free sex. Doesn’t matter, I suppose. We’ve risked it before. What’s one more time? And a bit of risk adds to it. Heightens each sensation.

I’ve never been much for gambling, but tonight is the night for such things.

I wind my fist into her hair for more direct control and hammer myself into her body. The sounds she makes set me alight. I’m almost there. But not before her. Never before her.

I pull out abruptly, and she whimpers with loss. But I turn her over to face me and hoist her legs up over my shoulders as I bend over her body. She’s folded in half, our eyes line up, and now I see her. Truly see her.

The fear. The love. The danger.

I don’t know what’s on her mind, but right now, I bet it’s me.

I thrust all the way in, giving her those inches she needs to come. “I want to see your face when I make you come on me.”

“Yes!” she gasps.

A stroke later, and her eyes roll back as she lets out a keening wail beneath me. I feel it when she comes, milking my length. It’s enough to bring me over the edge with her.

I have fallen with this woman, for this woman. Whatever lies on the other side of tonight, at least I had that.

I never want to leave this room.

The private room swallows the noise. The walls are padded in a black leather that drinks the light. The door is heavy enough to deflect bullets. It has a bolt I watched Roman slide with his palm. No one is getting in here without his permission.

There is a sink with a steel bowl. Hooks and rings dangle in a way that appears careless, but every inch has been meticulously curated that way. It smells like clean leather and eucalyptus from a bottle someone forgot to cap tight.

This is the room people enter once they’ve made a dark choice.

I certainly have. “I want to stay in here.”

Roman studies me. His face is open and shut at the same time. “We can.” He does not ask why.

I love him for that. I hate the reason I need it.

If we stay here, Vitaly cannot get him. He cannot stand at the rail and watch me cross a line. He cannot see the switch flip and the walls rise and my hand go under the left arm of the throne for the knife I felt but did not take. Vitaly lives for the show.

This room denies him that. I want to deny him everything.

“What is all this?” I ask, because a neutral question is a rope I can hold without my hands shaking. I nod at the strange equipment on the walls. A low cross with buckles. A line of padded cuffs. A matte black bar with silver rings at the ends. A single hanging ring that I can’t fathom the purpose of in the realm of kink.

“Hard points,” he explains. “Safe load. The anchors are rated for various weights. The cuffs lock and release by touch. The buckles are for theater. This”—he touches the hanging ring—“is not for beginners if the mind is noisy. The wall binder is kinder.”

He moves like a chef in a professional kitchen. Everything in reach. Everything where it belongs. He takes two wide cuffs from a drawer and shows me the padded lining. He opens them and closes them so I hear the click. He shows me the quick release hidden by the leather tongue.

“Do you like it?” I mean the toys, and in some ways, me.

“I like what happens when people explore their tastes in a safe way. This room allows for that.” He brushes his knuckles along my jaw where the thin scar shines. His eyes go soft the way they always go soft when he touches it. “Talk to me. You promised.”

The promise was a lie. “Show me what you do in here first.” Delay, delay, delay the inevitable. It’s all I’ve got to keep me sane.

Otherwise, the chyron in my head is too loud, too cruel.

Him, or my mother. Him, or my babies. An endless loop of doom.

I shut it out to smile coquettishly at him. Thank God, he buys it.

He chooses the wall binder. He touches the padded panel where he wants me, then looks at me for the consent that tells him I am with him.

I nod. I am with him. I am also somewhere else, at a window with a shade lifted, with my palm to cold glass and a phone at my ear, listening to a voice that will not let me unhear it.

“Hands here,” Roman says, and I lift them to the level he indicates. He kisses each palm before he fits the leather and closes the buckles. He does not pick up speed when he could. He looks at my fingers as if they are a fragile thing he intends to return whole. The cuffs hold without biting. The pressure is clean and exact.

My breath seesaws. He hears it. He pauses and waits until it is mine again.

“Feet,” he says. He kneels and fastens me at the ankles with the same care. I can’t budge more than two or three inches from the wall. He taps the release on the left ankle and shows me how it gives. “If this is too much, that’s how easily I can let you out. Understood?”

“Yes.”

He fastens the clasp again and stands. He leans his shoulder to the wall next to me and lets his weight rest so I can see he is not in a hurry. “This room runs on three rules. We say what we want. We say what we will not do. We stop if we need to stop. That is it. That is all.”

“Simple.”

“It has to be,” he says. “When the body is loud, the mind can only hold so much, and vice versa.”

He steps close and takes my chin the way he did upstairs. He raises my face until I have to look at him. It’s unbearable. This closeness. The love in his eyes. I want to look away. But he kisses me, slow and sure. He tastes like mint and metal and patience.

He tastes like something I do not deserve, and that I want anyway.

“What is wrong?” he asks against my mouth.

My eyes close unbidden. “Not now.”

He touches my throat with the back of his fingers. My pulse knocks against his skin. He smiles, but this smile carries an edge. “I’m not letting you go until you tell me what troubles you. I know tonight is frightening. But there’s something you’re not telling me, and I have a right to know what troubles my wife.”

He’s right. I know he is. But I can’t make myself say the words. If I say them, I’ll lose my nerve, and then I’ll lose more than that. I’ll lose everything.

“Please, Roman⁠—”

“Your safeword is latte. Understood?”

“What are you talking about?”

“We will begin.” With that, he steps to a wall of paddles, canes, and things I don’t recognize. “What are your thoughts on impact play, wife?”

“You’re going to hit me?”

“Only in ways you might enjoy.”

My mind works on that. “You mean, like when you spanked me during sex?”

He nods once. “I noted how much wetter you were after that. You enjoyed it.” A question and an answer.

I swallow as my throat dries. It’s the only dry part of me. “Yes.”

“Then we will experiment.” He takes a small leather paddle from the wall. “Something simple to start.”

“But how will you use that on my ass? I’m attached to the wall, facing you.”

His smile turns sinister. “Oh ye of little faith.” He clicks a button on the wall next to me, and suddenly the unit I’m bound to thrusts slowly out from the wall and turns from above, then pulls me back to the wall. There’s even a fucking chin rest there.

He presses another button, and the wall reforms with a padded bar at my hips and adjustments at my legs so my ass comfortably sticks out from the rest of me.

“You really thought of everything.”

“I do enjoy my toys.” His rough hand raises my dress the way he did when we were fucking. My ass is completely exposed. “Now, as I was saying. What troubles you, wife?”

“I’m just tense⁠—”

Smack.

It’s not harder than he spanked me, but it’s odd. And I think I like it.

“The next lie will cost you.”

“You’re being ridiculous. We have bigger problems⁠—”

Smack!

A moan tumbles out of me. I can’t help myself.

He breathes against my neck until the skin there lights up. He brackets my hips with his hands and holds still until the stillness becomes pressure. He trails his fingers under the edge of my dress until I melt and then withdraws.

I try to say I am fine. He skims his nose along my cheek until I want to cry from the gentleness. He puts his thumb on my lower lip and presses down until it trembles back at him.

I thought the cost would be more smacks. Not tenderness that makes my eyes water or my heart soar. “Please⁠—”

“Tell me,” he says. His voice is low and patient and relentless. “What is wrong?”

“Nothing!”

He taps the inside of my ankle with his shoe. A reminder of the release. A reminder of choice.

Even now, when he knows I’m lying to him, when the stakes are life and death, he’s still so fucking gentle with me. Even in this room of torment and sexual anguish, he can’t bring himself to cross that line. Not with me.

It breaks something inside me I can’t explain. A hot knot forms in my throat, and I can’t swallow past it. So when I speak, my voice cracks. “Everything.”

“Use your words.”

Tears stream down my face. I can’t hold the words inside anymore, and I’m terrified of what that will bring. “Vitaly texted me. Before you came home. He told me to come to the window.”

Roman stills, and then he is calmer than calm. He rests his head next to mine for one second. He does not rush me. He waits.

“He had my mother. Outside the main fence. Tied. Gagged. He had a van. He was smiling.” That last word chokes me. I gulp to continue. “He told me I would go with you to the club and be your whore and make you feel safe and convince you to put the walls up. He said there would be a knife tucked into the left arm of your throne. He told me to take it and stab you in the chest when the walls were up. Said that way, you’d know what it’s like to be stabbed in the heart by me too.”

Roman’s jaw tightens once. He does not move away. “He told you that. He spoke that filth into your ear.”

“He called me Scarface. He said if I didn’t do what he said, my mother and the boys would die screaming.”

The world goes quiet in a way that adds sound to my own breath. Roman rests his palm on my chest, over my heart. It pounds against his hand and does not settle. He kisses my forehead once. He does not curse. He does not promise me comfort.

The panic I have been holding begins to tear. It rips down my chest and opens like a mouth. The words pour out because the room makes words and because he will not let me hide. “I don’t know if the guards at the retreat are alive. He knows I love my mother. He knows I love our sons. He knows I will do anything to keep them breathing. He knows I am weak for you. He knows I will cut my own throat if he tells me to, as long as they live.”

“Love, you⁠—”

“Let me finish.” Because if I stop I will never start again. “I don’t know how to make the right choice. Every choice breaks the wrong person. I am supposed to be clever and brave and quiet and useful. But I’m a shaking woman in a pretty dress with her hands cuffed to a wall because she can’t say a sentence without wanting to scream.”

The tears come because they have to. They do not ask permission. Roman leans in and kisses them where they fall. He does not hush me. He does not tell me I am brave. He lets me be exactly as scared as I am.

“Look at me,” he says. His mouth is gentle. His eyes are not.

I lift my head. He smiles. It is small and sad and true. He kisses me hard enough to stop the thought that is eating me. He pulls back a fraction so he can say the next thing with his mouth against mine. “We all do what we must for the people we love,” he says. “If this is what you must do to protect our children—if you have to kill me to save them—fucking do it.”

My whole body jerks against the cuffs. The leather creaks. I stare at him. I cannot pull air. He said the thing I have been running from. He said it without flinching.

“No!” It tears out on a breath. “Do not ask me that.”

“I am not asking. I am telling you that if he puts you in that box and there is no other way, you take the way that keeps our sons alive. You trust that I will do everything to make sure it never comes to that. You also trust that if I fail and you have a knife in your hand, you do not fail.”

I try to shake my head. The cuffs hold. “I can’t do it.”

“You can. You will. Our sons are counting on you.” He reaches up and presses the release on my left wrist. The cuff opens with the soft click he showed me. He does the right and then the ankles, slow and kind so my blood can come back without sparking. He rubs my wrists with his thumbs to bring the feeling down.

He cups my cheek. The sadness is not gone from his eyes. It sits there like an old friend who cannot be convinced to leave. “You should have told me at once.”

“I know.” It is all I can give him. “I couldn’t…I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, in case he bugged something or was listening some other way.” I glance around the room. “I’m still scared he heard me.”

“Scared is fine,” he says. “We use it. We do not let it use us.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“You will. When the time comes.”

I wrap my arms around his neck and let him hold my weight. He takes it without stepping back. He breathes into my hair. I count his breaths until mine match and the panicked edge goes from razor to dull.

“When you’re ready, we go out there and finish this. One way or the other.”

I gulp down air, and there’s just not enough of it. “I can’t kill you.”

“You’re not going to kill me. You’re going to save our sons.”

“That’s the same thing!”

He takes both of my hands in his and kisses my knuckles. “If you save them, you’ve saved the best part of me. Nothing else matters.”

My heart shatters hearing that. “You matter to me! I love you!”

His eyes shine in the low light. “Hearing that from you is all I’ve ever wanted in this life. I didn’t know it until now.”

He opens the door, and we plunge back into the dark.

We return to the throne the way a tide returns to shore. The floor opens. I sit and the chair takes my weight like it always has. Mina folds across my lap. Faces tilt. Bodies angle. Everyone finds a reason to be looking without getting caught doing it.

We give them a show. I set a hand to her hip and let the grip read as possession because she is mine. It is theater and it is not. I want her again. I also watch the mezzanine, the stairs, the dark cut of the private hall behind the riser that runs to the staff restroom.

Vitaly likes the element of surprise. He will not get it here.

Her fingers find my collar. She draws my head down and kisses me as if there is no one else in the room. The man at the far pillar stops pretending to talk. The woman in a red lace mask leans against the rail and angles for a better view. We have the crowd’s attention.

Mina moves on me in a rhythm that tells the room we are lost in it. She is not lost. She is calculating every possible equation. I feel the insistence gather. She is pulling me toward a line she said she does not want to cross.

I completely understand that. I don’t want to cross it either. But what I want stopped mattering a long time ago when it came to Vitaly.

I wanted a son I could bring up to be better than me. One that grew into a man I respected. I wanted to rest on my deathbed knowing the world was a better place for the man I brought into it.

If this goes right, I’ll rest on my deathbed knowing the world is a better place for the two boys I saved.

I let my palm settle on the arm where the switch hides. I do not look down. I do not look at her hand when it closes over mine and squeezes once. Earlier she asked me to keep the walls down. Now she presses my wrist and does not pull me away from the panel. I read the change and accept it.

She is ready for the walls to go up. If I raise the walls, I tell a boy who wants a crown that I feel safe. He will make himself known, and all of this will be over.

I press. The motors hum below the sound of the music. The panels rise clean and slow. A hush follows the lift. New quiet. The walls climb until the room is sealed. The light inside the box is softer by a shade.

Mina’s breath catches. She straddles me, knees tight, weight low, stare bright. It reads as hunger from the outside. I know the difference. It is decision. It is fear turned into action. She strokes my jaw with one hand. Her voice is a thread against my mouth. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Mina.”

She leans back, slow and sin, before unzipping me and stroking my cock. Her warm hand would be enough to wake the dead, and I was already hard as a rock. She slides down my length just enough that her eyes roll back.

Then, her hand disappears under the arm where the joint meets the seat. She does not draw the blade. Not yet. She keeps her shoulders loose and her eyes on me. Her mouth skims mine and then my cheek and then the shell of my ear. She whispers nothing and makes it sound like a vow. He told her to make me feel comfortable. To do the things I like. She is certainly doing them now, which means he’s watching.

He must be. He’d never miss my execution. But where the fuck is he?

She arches her back as she rides me. The perfect distraction, had I not already known the plan. The blade comes free with a slow whisper I can feel through the chair, but I ignore the threat. The metal vanishes behind her back. To anyone watching it looks like she successfully distracted me with her body. Any other night, she would have.

She strokes my face with her other hand. Tears stand at the edge of her lashes and hold. The moment is real and a play. I do not know which I hate more.

Her eyes flick past my shoulder. Not far. Just enough. That is all the warning I get.

I do not turn. I look at her raised blade. The flat catches the light. Within that light is a sliver of the restroom door behind me. Reflected in that sliver is the person I tried to raise right.

My son steps out with a gun in his hand and a grin like a slash.

I draw the pistol from the holster that sits under the line of my jacket. I set the muzzle onto my left shoulder. The shot is a hard crack inside the small room.

I tumble Mina from me and keep her behind my body as I stand and aim once more. Vitaly curses and staggers, his shoulder hit high. He snarls and lifts his gun through the pain.

I shoot again, lower. His leg goes out from under him. He hits the floor in a twist of anger and shock. His pistol skitters and kisses the baseboard and stops. He grabs for it with his wrong hand and fails. It’s too far anyway.

He swears. It is not a word. It’s a sound a boy makes when the picture in his head breaks. I know the sound. I once made it in a different room.

Vitaly pushes to his knee and finds a second weapon under his jacket. He fires wild. The round catches my forearm and grooves it. Heat and pain flare, and I ignore it on my way to him.

Everything else is background noise. Vaguely, I hear Mina tell someone, “He’s gotta do this himself.”

Vitaly spits blood and pushes up on a bad leg like a wounded gazelle. He yanks his shoulder straight with a hiss and throws a punch. It lands on my jaw and lights a little fire. I take it and give him back one that shuts his mouth and resets the room.

I strip the second gun from his hand and kick it behind me. He grabs for my wounded arm. He wants the pain to make me stupid. I give him the forearm and take his ear and the base of his neck and drive him into the doorjamb. The air goes out of him. He claws for skin and misses, his eyes wide and furious.

My next strike lands where the jaw hinges. I need him down. The one after lands in his kidneys. I hear his breath go thin and ragged. He tumbles down, and I pin his leg and dump him on his belly and take the back of his head in my hand. “Vitaly. You will never be pakhan. You are not my son anymore. You are nothing.”

He laughs. It’s not a stranger’s laugh, nor is it a son’s laugh. It’s madness and hatred all at once. “Stop talking and just fucking kill me. I have heard enough of your bullshit for one life.”

“Kill you?” The words land flat. “I told you you’re nothing, boy. You’re not worth the cleaner it will take to get your blood off this floor. I’m not going to kill you.” I roll him over to look him in his swollen eyes. “I’m going to do worse. You are going to prison for the rest of your life.”

“I will get out.” He spits pink and grins like a boy who still thinks he has a trick left. He’s missing a tooth in the front. His voice is nasal from the swelling. “You know I’ll get out. When I do, I will torture and murder that bitch and your bastards, and I will make you watch before I kill you too.”

Every thought vanishes as if it were never there. Vitaly’s cleared them all away with that declaration. He believes every word he’s saying right now, and he’s crazy and capable enough to make it happen. I can picture it vividly. He will make them suffer for the mercy I showed him tonight. He will make good on his word, and they will die in agony.

Not in this lifetime. “You will never touch her again.”

“Yes, I will! I will⁠—”

I shoot him in the forehead.

He goes slack. His breath stops. I stand with the pistol in my hand and the world in a small quiet.

I look down at my son for the last time. He is smaller. Death always does that. Makes us all smaller than we were. Humbles us. He was a man who refused to be humbled. The choice isn’t his anymore.

He was a danger to every person I love. Even himself.

Especially himself.

My men step in now. They do not rush. The first two check the corners. The third confirms what I already know. Dead. The floor manager appears in the crack with a face like a curtain drawn to the side. The DJ lifts the bass because people do not need to know they heard a murder.

I look at Mina. She meets me without blinking and zips my trousers. I’d forgotten they were open. Her dress is smoothed back into place as if it had never been moved.

She presses her palm to my forearm above the graze. Her touch is steady. Her eyes are the only place in the room where the dead cannot get in. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

She gives me a look that says she does not like that answer and will accept it for now. She steps in and sets her forehead to mine for a breath.

I turn to my men, already occupied by what I’m about to say. “Clean this up.”

I walk to the door and push the panel. Outside my throne room, people return to their drinks and their rituals. Staff do the dance that turns catastrophe into a story told differently tomorrow. I signal the team and they move with the quiet speed I pay for.

This is not the first death Rope has seen, and it probably won’t be the last. But it’s the first that meant something to me.

It means my family is safe.

Someone hands Mina a first aid kit, and she wraps my forearm with clean gauze and tape that does not pull hair. She cleans the groove the bullet dug, and I don’t feel it. I only feel her touch. Her warmth.

“Call Leon Valivov,” I tell one of the men at the door. “Tell him the storm has passed and left a fallen tree.”

“Understood,” the man says. He steps into the hall with a phone for the call.

I’d make the call myself, but my head is too empty to talk to someone who might want a conversation.

Can’t focus on that. Next steps are all that matters. Reflection, emotions, all of that bullshit will wait. There are more important matters than the gnawing pain in my chest.

My first boy is dead. Flashes of his life spring to mind unbidden, no matter how I try to shut them down. Bridgette’s round stomach. The day he was born. The baby he was—cool and calm, no matter the chaos around him. I had naively thought that meant he would weather the storm of the life he was due to inherit.

But then he became a boy. A cruel, sinister boy who hurt the helpless. And then, he grew into a man who was worse.

That gnawing pain eats away at my heart, despite knowing all of this. He was my first boy, but my son died years ago.

Tonight, I laid him to rest.

Mina leans in. “What now?”

“Now we find the people he tried to take from us.”

Outside blurs into streetlights. Roman sits beside me with his bandaged forearm on his thigh and his other hand open, palm up. I stare at the white edge of the gauze I placed. He is calm. The calm disturbs me because a part of me wanted him to shake the way I am shaking inside.

We leave the alley behind the club and join the river of traffic. One SUV takes the lead. Another hangs back. A voice murmurs in the radio and then goes quiet. The city moves around us, full of people who are unaware of how a life can change in one breath.

He killed his son. When the moment came there was no tremor in his face. Something in me wants to be relieved by that. Something in me wants to run from it. But that part of me gets smaller by the moment.

He shifts and that small motion steadies the air in the car. He does not speak until I do.

“I can hardly believe you did it.” I sound like I am standing far from my mouth. “You look so calm.”

“It felt right. It felt like justice.”

He’s right about that. There are fourteen bodies on that island that will never be tucked in. The number is a weight that keeps changing because it’s incomplete until we have his total body count. That won’t happen until we find out about the retreat.

I breathe until the breath is mine again.

He turns his palm, and I slide my hand into it. Heat blooms where our fingers meet. His thumb strokes once across my knuckles and stops. If I were the kind of woman who could sleep in a storm, I would do it now. But there are words turning over inside me, sharp side up.

“Do you hate me?” I whisper.

The question rips something in my chest. I am scared of the answer because I know what I was ready to do. I was willing to put a blade where his heart beats. I was willing to trade one life for three and carry that act like a stone in my pocket. He murdered his son for me and mine. He has plenty of reasons to hate me.

Roman does not make me wait. He pulls me across the space between us. His arm wraps around my shoulders without touching his wound. He presses his mouth to my hair and holds me there. “I could never hate you,” he says. “Not in this life. Not in the next. I love you more than I thought possible.”

The idea of a next life with him cracks me open. I place my hand over his bandage and feel the heat there, the pulse under it, his body’s stubborn refusal to quit. He killed for me. He killed for our sons. I was willing to kill for them too, and the only reason I did not is because he did it for me.

My voice shatters to a whisper. “I hesitated. When the moment came, and I knew what I had to do to save our sons, I hesitated.”

“You hesitated long enough for me to see him in the knife’s reflection. That hesitation saved us.”

“I hesitated because I wanted the last thing you saw to be me in love with you. I wanted that to be the memory if I took you away from the world.”

He tightens his hold and then loosens it so I can breathe. A red light washes the windshield and blinks to green. The driver keeps us smooth and unremarkable. Roman tilts my chin so he can see my eyes.

“Are you angry with me,” he asks, “for hesitating before the kill shot? For offering prison instead of death? Can you forgive me?”

There is tenderness in the way he asks for forgiveness, as if mercy is the flaw. “There is nothing to forgive. If it were my son, I could not do what you did. No matter what he had done. The instinct to protect your child is primal. It crushes thought. I am shocked you were able to do it at all. I was bracing to step in. I thought I might have to finish it if you could not.”

He closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, they are darker. “I know you would have. But I never wanted that for you. Killing someone, even someone as wretched as Vitaly, it stains your soul.”

I know that. Not from experience, but I’ve known enough people in his shoes to know that. “I would have done it for our family.”

He presses a kiss to my forehead. “My hope is that you never have to.”

We ride in a pocket of quiet. The city slides by in lit windows and empty benches and a woman walking a tiny dog as if the night minds its own business. I lean into him and listen to the steady music of his breath. My mind tries to make a list of everything that needs to happen next. Find my mother and the boys. Find out what happened at the retreat. Wash the blood from his cuff. Throw away the dress that now belongs to a ghost of me.

Random thoughts come out of my mouth. “I keep thinking of your face. When you aimed without turning. You looked at me as if I were the only sight that mattered.”

“You were. You are.” He lifts my hand and kisses each knuckle. His mouth is warm. The gesture makes my throat ache. I stare at our hands and see a ring that is too new for us to have this much history attached to it. I drag the pad of my thumb over the metal and think of vows that did not predict this night and still cover it.

“I was afraid you would hate me.” I can’t seem to shut up. “For asking the walls to rise. For wanting to hide with you in that box. For wanting to deny him his show.”

“He never deserved a show,” Roman says. “He never deserved anything at all.”

The driver takes a turn that leads to a bridge. Water below is black and sparkles under the city lights. The reflection makes me think of that blade again, that narrow piece of truth. I squeeze his hand.

He threads our fingers together again. His pulse beats against mine. The radio clicks once. The voice in it says all clear. He nods toward the windshield as if the night needed permission to continue. “I keep thinking of your mother.”

“So do I. Where do you think she is?”

“Vitaly, for all his finesse, was a creature of habit in certain respects. This is not the first time he took a hostage, and I suspect we will find her in his warehouse. Which is why we’re heading there now.”

A hint of relief crashes into me. Not enough to make me feel better—that won’t happen until my babies are in my arms and I see she’s okay. But for now, it’s enough to keep me breathing.

“I thought you said we were headed home.”

“That was for the benefit of anyone who might still be loyal to Vitaly.”

“You think you have a mole?”

His lips form a flat line. “He didn’t get close enough to our home for you to see him hold your mother without having a man or two on the inside. We will have to root them out to be sure, but that comes after our family is secured.”

We pass the last exit before the bridge ends. The edge of town hosts industrial buildings where people don’t ask questions. They simply handle their business without noticing too much.

I’m not sure if I want to know the answer to this question. “After tonight, can you still be with me?”

He looks at me as if I asked whether he plans to keep breathing. “I love you more than ever. You are a fierce mother and a devoted wife. You are the perfect woman for a pakhan. More importantly, you’re the perfect woman for me.”

The sentence goes through me like warm rain. I put my face to his shoulder and breathe there. “You made me this way.”

“You already were.”

We fall into the kind of silence that is not empty. His thumb keeps time on my hand. The driver’s mirror shows the set of his jaw and the stillness that means the route is clear. The SUV behind us keeps a polite distance. The city settles into itself like a huge animal that has eaten and is ready to sleep.

“I am sorry I asked you to press the switch. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I know that.” He says it like a simple truth.

“I wanted to be the kind of woman who never hesitates.”

“Then you would be someone else, and I love the person you are.”

I look at his bandage again. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes,” he says. “But it tells me I am alive, so I’m fine with the pain.”

“That’s twisted.”

“That’s life.” There is a small smile, and I cannot bear how much I love him when he lets himself be light for one second.

We pull up to a warehouse I’ve never been to. Funny—I thought I knew all of Vitaly’s secret hiding places. The truth is, I never knew him at all.

In the time we were together, I never saw beneath his mask. He never let me in that close. But he called it love and I was desperate for that, so we misfunctioned together.

He told me so little about himself, just enough to keep me hanging on. Crumbs, really.

How much did I hate myself to settle for that? I’d be angry with my past self if I had the strength to be. But tonight, my strength goes elsewhere.

I didn’t have to be strong enough to kill Roman. I didn’t have to be strong enough to kill Vitaly if Roman couldn’t do it. But I was strong enough to do either, if I had to.

Now, I have to be strong enough to deal with the aftermath.

When we and the second SUV park, I start for the door, but Roman snatches my hand before I see him move. He grumbles, “You will wait in the car, do not argue with me.”

“She’s my mother, Roman.”

“And if there’s a dead man’s wire on the door, that won’t matter.”

I blink at that. “What?”

“Vitaly is—was—a lunatic. If he wanted to assure himself you’d be dead by the end of the night, he may have rigged the door.”

“So you’re going to go in and get blown up instead?”

He smiles. “No. I’m not.”

One of his men knocks on the door. “Ready, boss.”

“Give us a moment. I’ll signal you when it’s safe.” He gets out and follows them to the nearest wall of the warehouse. One of them carries a crate. I can’t make out what they’re doing, but I see someone shine a flashlight on the wall, and another pulls a tool from the crate. Then, there are sparks at the end of that tool. They trail the sparks in the shape of a rectangle.

They’re making a new door.

When that section of the wall falls in, flashlights disco around the inside of the warehouse. I don’t hear gunshots or see an explosion. Roman waves at me, so I race to him.

Cool night air fills my lungs, and I barrel through the hole they made. There, inside a room made of chain-link fencing, are my mother, our sons, and the guards that took them away.

They’re alive. They’re alive.

My eyes aren’t just showing me what I want to see. It’s really them.

The strength goes out of my knees when I’m close enough to see Yuri’s sleeping face and smell Xander’s head. The chain-link still separates us, but they’re breathing, and that’s all that matters. Hot liquid pours from my eyes as I fall to my knees and clutch the cold metal wire.

Mom drops to her knees on the other side, tears pouring down her cheeks. “I knew you’d come.”

One of Roman’s men cuts through the lock on the gate, and the door swings wide as the women escape their captivity. Two of them carry my babies to me, and it’s all I can do not to squeeze the life right out of them. I can’t stop kissing their heads until they fuss. Can’t stop breathing them in either. Mom’s arm is on my shoulders, and I didn’t even see her move.

Roman kneels with me and plants kisses on their heads too. His eyes glisten with tears. “Let’s go home.”

Cover-ups are often more trouble than they’re worth. Not this time, though.

The man from the crematory spoke in the tone people use for weather. He did not know my son. He did not need to. The ash would not be buried. It would not be scattered in some place with a name that meant anything to me.

Vitaly Ekimov would not receive a place of honor simply because he was my son. Instead, I scattered his ashes where his mother’s family buries their dead. He was her creature in life. She can deal with him in death.

At Rope, the story we gave was simple. A structural failure behind the throne wall. A hidden service cavity that collapsed. Dust. Concussion. A freak acoustic echo that made it sound like more. Security repeated the lines because I wrote them short and plain.

No one argued. No one wants to win an argument that would cost them their membership to my club.

All evidence of that night has been processed or destroyed. Nothing will connect us to his death. Those who know what happened are relieved. No one mourns the wicked.

My only regret is I cannot give peace of mind to his victims’ families. But I have reached out to them, financially speaking. Anonymous donations have been made to those my people were able to track down. It doesn’t make up for what he did, for the lives lost, none of it. But at least it’s something.

When I think back on the past month, it’s hard to put into words how I feel about him and what he did to my family and anyone fool enough to get in his way. To this day, I don’t know why he didn’t kill Jennifer, Yuri, Xander, or the guards I’d given them. Such things go against what I know of him. Or rather, what I thought I knew.

Was it mercy? Leverage? What drove him to keep them alive? Perhaps he saw a little of himself in his half brothers. But that would have required him to still hold a shred of humanity in his bones, and the night I executed him, I saw no humanity in his eyes. I’m not sure if I ever did, even when he was a child.

Some questions never get answered.

Regardless, Mina has begun to sleep again, and I am grateful for it. She has had too many sleepless nights in her young life. My wife—it still boggles me that I can call her that—doesn’t twist and turn in her sleep anymore either. A miracle. These days, she curls up on her side, usually with me behind her, and sleeps through the night.

I know this, because I do not sleep much. When the hour will not be argued with, I let it do what it came to do. I get up. I walk the hall. I stand in the nursery door. The need to watch them is like the need to watch Mina. Unending and undeniable.

Every conscious moment, I need to know they’re safe.

The twins sleep like boys who already decided the world is theirs. Xander sprawls. Yuri tucks. They trade positions without waking. It is a language they speak to each other without words.

I hope whatever kept Mina alive is in them. Not just her stubbornness. Her mercy. Her ability to be afraid without being stolen by fear. She doesn’t freeze. I want that for my sons. I want them to have her steadiness.

I used to worry that what was wrong in Vitaly came from both sides. Bridgette’s rage knew no bounds. My father’s callousness was wielded against friend and foe alike. Blood isn’t everything—I know that. I scrub my hands at the sink some nights and think about the men I have been and the men I refuse to be. I am not my father. I never will be. But it’s hard not to believe his cruelty and Bridgette’s rage are what made Vitaly into the man he was.

So, I worry for Yuri and Xander. But they are half Mina’s, and that may be their saving grace, if blood has an impact.

The monitor on the dresser clicks and whispers. Not a cry. Just the small sound a body makes when it remembers it is alive. I stand and lean over the crib. Yuri’s mouth works and settles. Xander kicks once and surrenders.

“They won’t be like him,” Mina says softly from the doorway.

I turn and she stands in the pool of hall light, hair loose, one hand on the frame. The shirt she sleeps in hits her mid-thigh. Bare legs. Bare feet. A goddess.

“How did you know?”

Her smile is wan. “Because I know you.”

“It’s two in the morning. Why are you up?”

“You left the bed, and I want you back in it.”

My sigh is heavier than I’d like it. She doesn’t need to know I don’t sleep much these days. “I’m not sure I will sleep.”

She smiles again. It starts slow and changes the temperature of the room. “Who said anything about sleep?”

I know that tone. I like that tone. But I haven’t heard it in over a month out of her. Odd to hear it now.

When I cross the room, she does not step back. I set my hand on the small of her back as we travel the hall together. She leans into my touch, and it feels like unearned trust.

I don’t deserve the life I am building. But I will cling to it all the same.

In our room she draws the curtain a little and lets the moon take a step inside. The lamp is off. We do not need it. I set the monitor on the nightstand and turn the volume up a notch. The green light answers. There’s a stillness to the early morning hours that settles something deep inside my chest.

Or maybe that’s her doing.

She faces me and lifts her hands to my shirt. I do the same with hers. We undo the barriers the way you work a knot in a necklace you want to wear. Patient. Interested. No rush. Bodies remember what the brain tried to file away under “Future good times.”

We have not touched like this since the night at the club. It was not a rule. It was how grief and relief argue without words. We lived in the same bed and learned how to breathe there again. Companionable, but platonic healing.

Now her palms travel my chest and the last month steps back to let this minute through. The first contact lights a fuse that was waiting, not hiding. I kiss her and the taste is home.

I take my time. I let my mouth map the line of her jaw and the thin healed scar that is part of our history. I trace the hollow at the base of her throat with a slow kiss. She breathes in and I feel the breath as if it were mine. Her hands slide to my shoulders and anchor there. When she rises on her toes to meet my mouth again, I do not make her reach far. I bend down to her.

I’d fall to my knees for her, if she’d let me. But she’s too close for that now, and I like the press of her body against mine too much to stop. She is soft and deliberate, all yes with no rush in it.

I taste every part of her in a slow dance of mouths and skin. A shoulder. A breast. The inside of a wrist. I plant wet kisses down the length of her, then back up again, until my hips are nestled between her thighs. I drag my thumb over her bottom lip as I stare into her eyes. “Are you sure?”

Her lips slide into a faint smile as she wraps her legs around me and pulls me in. “Yes.”

We do not rush. We let it arrive. When it does, we stop talking. The rest is ours.

The wet glide of our bodies is the thing dreams are made of. Unhurried, languid. Her body stretches to take my length, and all I can think of is how fucking lucky I am to be here, now, with her. How loved I feel by her. How she is a miracle.

My body aches with less poetry and more urgency, and I speed up by a breath. When she arches beneath me in ecstasy, I drive harder, longer strokes into her body. I need to feel her come on me the way I need oxygen. Her pleasure is required for me to exist.

When she breaks, I join her, too enamored of her to even think of holding out. We lie quiet while our heartbeats climb down. The window breathes a thin wind. The monitor hums, steady and small. Her hair spreads across my shoulder and tickles the skin there until I want to laugh and do. She draws a lazy line over my arm and stops when she finds the scar on my forearm. The pads of her fingers are gentle where the tissue still pulls if I move too fast.

Her voice is still breathless from our fun. “Does it bother you?”

“It reminds me⁠—”

“Of him?”

“Of you. Of the knife you didn’t have to use. Of your willingness to use it, and save our family, even if that meant losing me. Of how much I love you for that.”

She pushes up on an elbow and studies me. “You have been watching the boys at night.”

“It is a comfort I allow myself. To see with my own eyes that they are safe.”

“You guaranteed that a month ago.”

“It’s not only their physical safety I worry about, Mina. I worry about what I can’t see.” A breath saws out of me as I lie back and stare at the ceiling. “What if…what if my father is in them? His malice⁠—”

“Your father is dead. He doesn’t live in them. Those boys are yours⁠—”

“Vitaly was mine too.”

“He was a grown man who made his own choices. Yes, you and his mother influenced him, but he was still responsible for all the bullshit he did as an adult. Don’t pretend he was your puppet who was helpless to your whims, because if he was, you and I have a problem.”

I snort a laugh at that. “Certainly not. But how much of one’s actions are due to your blood and how much are due to how you were raised?”

“I’m pretty sure people have been debating that since the dawn of history, and I don’t think we’re about to definitively answer that question at three in the morning.”

I know she’s right. She’s always right. It’s mildly infuriating, but also a comfort. “I suppose that’s true.” I kiss her hair. I taste shampoo and something addictive and sweet that belongs only to her. “They will not be like him.”

“No. They will not. We won’t allow it. His life is not their destiny, Roman.” She settles again. The silence is a blanket laid over a day that agreed to lie down. I listen for the truck on the far road that always passes at half after three. Mina does not move. Her breathing deepens into that steady pattern that says her body trusts this minute. I close my eyes to listen better.

We drift. Minutes loosen their grip. So does the fear. I curl around her body and take a face full of hair for my troubles. I don’t mind it, though.

“Sorry I woke you when I got up earlier.”

“Mmflp.” A moment later, her soft snore weighs me down.

Vitaly’s life is not my sons’ destiny. They will be their own men, and with luck, they will find their soul mate easier than I found mine.

A low rumbling sound startles me. I blink in the early morning light and try to find the source of it. Almost no cars come this way, and certainly not this early. It’s to the left of me, though, and that’s where the window sits⁠—

That’s Roman’s side of the bed.

Oh my god, he’s snoring. Since when does he snore?

He’s on his back, mouth half-open, forearm over his forehead. His body is the most relaxed I think I have ever seen him. The muscles in his face are totally slack, and when I pick up his other arm to test it, it drops straight down.

The man is completely unconscious to the world.

His nightmare son is dead. A month of reassurances from me might have finally cracked into his thick skull. And last night’s sex was…it shifted something inside of me. Maybe it did that for him too.

I slide on a robe and pad downstairs. It’s very early to be up, but I like stealing the small hours of the morning for myself.

Water pulls through the coffee grounds and fills the kitchen with a smell that means a new day is on its way. I lean on the counter and watch the stream turn from thin to dark. The machine makes a choking sound as it finishes. Mug. Spoon. Sugar, I keep swearing off. Cream, I never will.

A month ago, I flinched at every noise—the clack of the machine, the refrigerator’s cough, a car outside, a distant dog’s bark. Today, I set the mug down and nothing jumps inside me. The absence of panic is its own sound.

I sip. Heat sits on my tongue. I’m not primed for the next startle. My lungs fully inflate when I breathe.

It feels odd to be this relaxed.

Accepting what happened has been strange. For more than a year, Vitaly haunted my corners. He left me alone through most of the pregnancy, but that didn’t stop his ghost from haunting me for those months. Abuse worms its way into your brain and nibbles at the parts you thought were yours, even after it’s over. It has echoes.

And when he started his bullshit in full again, he threatened my mother. Our sons. He tried to kill Roman. And me. Did unspeakable things to other people. It didn’t last long, but a short reign of terror is still a reign of terror.

And now, it’s over.

Since I began dating him, my nervous system was primed for conflict and problems centered around Vitaly. I spent so much energy dealing with him. Now, all that energy has to go somewhere else. Or, so I thought.

But the truth is, I live in a world without him, and all that energy is just…gone. The stressed-out part of my brain is like a partially deflated balloon. I thought for sure I’d redirect that frenetic energy to my boys or myself or my marriage, but I don’t have it anymore. It’s something I needed to protect myself, and now that I don’t have to do that, it left me.

I am so fucking happy about that, and that in and of itself feels wrong. A man is dead. There should be mourning or something, shouldn’t there? He was a human being.

Mostly.

Roman is calm about it. That calm unsettled me at first. I worried calm meant cold. It doesn’t. He was ready to let the law take Vitaly, ready to make the system hold him. But after Vitaly threatened me and our boys to Roman’s face, there was nothing left to debate.

Roman acted. He says it felt like justice.

I agree completely.

Never thought I’d be the type. I’ve always said people deserve second chances, and maybe that’s why I found bad boys so appealing. I thought I could be their second chance at a good life, while they kept their edge. Maybe that’s what Roman is for me now.

He would do it again to keep us safe. A year ago that thought might have frightened me. Now it steadies me, because I know that if he hadn’t finished Vitaly that night, I would have done it. I would have either killed Roman or Vitaly, there is no debate about that in my mind. Roman says that makes me the perfect wife for a pakhan.

I can’t say he’s right, since I’m not a pakhan, but I hope to be the perfect wife for him.

Often I find him in the nursery at two or three in the morning, in the low chair between the cribs. I’ve caught him there many times. Most of the time, I let him have his private time with our sons. But when he looks particularly forlorn, I try to shake him out of it.

The spoon clinks as I rinse it. The window over the sink frames the yard and the pond. Early light lies flat on the grass. A thin mist lifts from the water. If it were warmer I’d step out barefoot. It’s cold, so my toes curl on the marble floors.

I haven’t been in this house for very long in the grand scheme of things, but it’s already become a place I know by heart.

I grew up in a house that was ours, or so I thought. But then my father died, and I learned how fast a bank comes calling when you can’t make payments. Then, it was rental after rental. Moving in with a boyfriend I thought would be permanent, and finding out how wrong I was. One place after another that belonged to someone else when the chips were down.

Two months isn’t enough to erase the memory of feeling constantly, unpredictably adrift.

A quiet question keeps me company in the early morning light. Who am I now that the worst has happened, and I’m still standing?

I’m not the woman who thought she could fix a man. I know better now. I’m not the woman with fatherless behavior. I’m a mother and a wife. I’m not employed, but I’m also financially settled.

So much has changed in the past few months that it’s hard to catch up to reality.

Sometimes I touch the scar on my jaw and try to unravel all the complicated feelings attached to it. Closure is an odd concept. People say you have to forgive your enemies to move on, but I don’t think that’s true at all. I don’t forgive Vitaly for what he did to me. I never will. Forgiveness isn’t for him. It’s for me.

I forgive the girl who stayed too long with the wrong men.

I make small vows as I rinse the mug. Fear is not my identity. Love will not make me blind. I ask for help when I need it. I won’t shrink myself for Roman, our sons, or anyone else. That part of my life is over, just like all the energy I had created to deal with Vitaly.

That’s closure.

Some mornings I worry that loving a man like Roman will make me hard where I want to be soft. Then he tips my chin and asks if I want tea or coffee, and the worry feels silly. He makes me softer, not weaker. He makes me braver, not louder. He says I do the same for him.

I carry my mug to the door and nudge it open with my hip. Cold air nips my face. The deck boards are damp, but I walk them barefoot anyway. My breath shows and vanishes. I step out and pull my robe tight. The pond smells like clean water and weather.

The boys sleep late in the mornings, a grace I do not question. They wake up when the day is already running. For now, I have my quiet time. A month ago, I used it to check locks I had just checked. Today I watch the stripe of light on the water and let my mind think without bracing.

It’s the lack of bracing that feels misplaced or like it doesn’t belong to me. Bracing is an old habit that I tried to make useful. How do you prepare for the future without dreading what’s to come? How do you handle what might happen, if you haven’t already imagined a thousand terrible possibilities?

But still, my head is quiet. My body is loose.

Mom says I sound lighter when I speak now. I hear it too. Peace has a tone if you know what to listen for.

The door opens behind me. For a breath, the old current in my neck rises and fades like a memory I don’t appreciate my brain holding on to. I don’t turn. I already know who’s there. It’s not an attack, and it never will be again.

Roman’s arms come around me from behind, warm and careful because he is always careful with me. I lean back. The space between my shoulders and his chest fits the way it should.

“You’re up early,” he says into my hair.

“So are you.”

“Habit.”

“You seemed like you were sleeping well when I got up.”

He chuffs a laugh. “You know what? I was.”

“Did I wake you?”

“I’m not sure. But last night was the best night of sleep I think I have ever had.”

I cover his hands with mine. His fingers are nicked and strong. I like their record. He stands so close his breath moves my hair. We watch the pond go from pewter to silver where the light finds it. A pair of ducks drop and change course at the last second.

“What are you thinking?” he asks me.

The old me would have smiled before speaking because I know how it changes the tone of my voice into something more attractive or suitable to a man’s ears. The smile is how I faked being the perfect girlfriend to rough men. It was a mild manipulation that kept them happy and kept me safe from their tempers.

The new me smiles because my husband asks only the questions he wants honest answers to. “I’m thinking how strange it is to accept that something is over. All that fear ended in one night. The next morning the house felt different. I’m still adjusting.”

“You’re allowed to feel strange.”

“I know.” I’m still unsure how Roman has processed shooting his own son dead. It’s hard on him, I know that much. I understand he felt justified, and he was, but Vitaly was still his son. So I add, “And so are you, by the way. Allow to feel strange, I mean.”

His tone dips. “Working on accepting that.”

“I’m also thinking about the man in my kitchen who likes coffee he pretends not to like.”

“Lies. I love coffee. I don’t love that you win arguments by handing me a mug.”

“If you could hold on to an argument longer than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, you might win one someday.”

He laughs into my neck. It’s warm. It travels down my back like an answer. “You’re very convincing when I’m caffeinated.”

“Logic is funny that way.”

We stand there while the mist thins. His warmth seeps into me, and it’s times like this that I wish we could stay this way forever.

But he clears his throat the way he does when he wants to ask something, but he’s not sure if he wants the answer. But he’s always brave enough to ask. “Do you want to go back to the firm?”

“I’m not sure. I liked the rhythm of the place. I liked feeling useful. But I like being home with our boys and making a life here too. That feels more useful right now, especially after everything.”

“Whatever you want is good by me, Mina. You make the choice. I will support whatever verdict you render.”

“Thanks for that.” Choices are something I’ve rarely had, and now, I have a life ahead of me that feels full of them. It’s a little overwhelming, but the good kind of overwhelming.

“More coffee?”

“Yes, please.” I pass him my mug, and he leaves for the kitchen.

I never knew there could be a good kind of overwhelming before Roman came along and told me we were getting married. Life was always overwhelming me before him. Either with bills, or a bad man making worse decisions, or working too much.

When I was living through all of that, I could have never imagined my life would go this way.

Soon the twins will wake. One will frown. One will smile. Both will demand the day start when they say so. Being their helpless servant, I’ll kiss two bellies and a forehead that smells like sleep. Roman will pretend to argue with a baby with smiles and a mocking pointed finger, and he will lose that argument as he changes their diapers.

The door opens again. I still don’t jump. Large hands slide around my waist. His mouth finds the spot behind my ear that always makes me lean. I fit my shoulder against his chest.

“Coffee number two,” he says, pressing a fresh mug into my hands.

“Thank you.”

“You ready?”

I’m not sure what he means, but I’m ready for anything.

Because I’m finally home.

Six Months Later

The house is loud with good noise. Hammers. Laughter. A rolling cart squeaks down the hall. Mina stands in the doorway with paint chips fanned like a deck. She holds court with the decorator and three movers who wait for her signal. I stand behind her with a boy on each hip and a stain on my shirt that used to be oatmeal.

She kisses the air near my cheek so she doesn’t smudge me. “This wall,” she tells the crew, “pulls the light wrong. Move the bookcase again.”

They nod. The case rises. The floor creaks. The twins clap as if a parade has gone by.

The nannies hover a step back. They are good and kind and organized. I hired them because Mina asked. She worked without a net for too long, and she deserves more help than her mother can provide at her age.

I shouldn’t think of it that way—her mother is four years younger than me. But Jennifer has her own life now, and I refuse to impose when I can hire help.

I still carry my sons myself as often as I can. Xander rides my right hip. Yuri hangs on my left and tries to steal my watch. They have learned to walk, but most of their walking is getting underfoot of the construction crew that Mina’s hired.

Xander twists and points at the rug, so I set him on his feet. He toddles toward a stack of blocks with the focus of a general. Yuri watches, decides no, and tucks his face into my collar. I am a large man with more scars than I plan to count. A boy hiding in my neck still makes me feel like I’ve won something big.

Mina lifts a hand. The movers adjust two inches and wait. “There,” she says. She squints, nods once, and glances at me, so I give her the smallest smile. She smiles back and keeps moving.

It’s been like this for weeks.

Remodeling is inconvenience turned into a plan. Dust finds places I did not know existed. A hallway disappears for a day and returns with a better idea. The alarm panel beeps while a man rewires it so it cannot be tricked. The dining table arrived too big for the door, so a steady hand took off a leg outside and put it back on in the hall.

The security team twitched until I told them to breathe. This is not a siege. This is a future.

“What do you think of this finish?” Mina asks as she holds up swatches.

They are identical, as far as I’m concerned. Brown is brown. But each one has a different name, and she appears to think of them as different. This feels like a test I can’t pass, when it should be a test I can’t fail.

“Which are you leaning toward?”

“I like this one,” she says, pointing to the brown one. “But the undertones in this one could make all the difference with the lighting.” She points to the other brown one.

“Hmm,” I mutter, hoping to sound convincing. “I think you’re right about the lighting for that one.”

“Yeah, but in a good way or a bad way?”

Crap. “In a good way.” I hope.

She smiles. Success! “That’s what I was thinking. Good call. Okay, guys, we’re going with this one…”

I sit in the rocking chair near Xander, while Mina takes her crew elsewhere. Yuri sits on my lap, happy just to sit there. “Boys, marriage, in my experience, is a multitude of land mines that might be nothing at all or could be an hour-long discussion of the undertones of identical browns. If she wants to move a wall, you move a wall. If she wants to keep the old stove because it heats the kettle fast, you keep it. Those are the little things that keep her happy.”

I readjust Yuri because he’s getting big enough to cut off my circulation if he’s not sitting right. “The things I care about, I’ll dig in about. I care about sight lines. I care that the front steps hold a stroller and three bags without making anyone dance to find them. Everything else is her kingdom. Remember that.”

I set Yuri down, because Xander is reaching for him, and the pair play with balls together. The contractor pops his head in, scanning the room for what, I don’t know. He smiles at the kids in a way that looks like a wince and then like a grin. “Little bosses, eh?”

“They get it from their mother.”

Mina hears and tosses me a look down the hallway. I raise my hands like a man caught stealing cookies. The men laugh, and then she grins. “Don’t you forget it.”

Later on, we’re in the kitchen, while the construction crew does things to the boys’ room. It’s been like this for a while—moving rooms to accommodate the latest decision. Jennifer teases that I’ve opened a can of worms and that Mina will never stop redecorating because she’s never had the chance to do it before now.

When she gets bored of ordering them around, Mina leans into my shoulder. “You sure you want this chaos? It will be another week if I’m lucky. Maybe two.”

She means months, not weeks, and that’s still an underestimation, if the plaster dust is any indication.

“I want it all. Put your hands on everything and make it yours.”

“Even when you can’t find your desk for three days?”

“I can write at the kitchen table. Or on the stairs. I have done worse with less.”

She laughs and tucks two chips back into the stack. “You are patient with me.”

“I’d give you the world if I could. This is just a house.”

She kisses my cheek, and that’s enough for me to put up with living in a construction zone for at least another four months.

The boys pull free at the door and make it three steps before they fall into each other and argue in a language only they understand. I separate knees from noses and set them on their feet. Teresa takes their hands and starts the tour toward the garden. They look back to make sure we are watching. We are.

If someone had told me I would love this part of my life the most, I would have laughed. I spent years building rooms where other people could forget the world. I did not believe I would ever get a room like that for myself. Now the whole house is a room like that, even with banging and dust and a sofa going through a door sideways.

The rest of the world has faded into background noise and little else. It is more than I thought I could ask for.

In the afternoon, Leon arrives. I haven’t heard from him in a long while, and when he brought up the meeting, I was happy to take it, but he didn’t provide details as to why he wanted a meeting, which is odd for him.

He steps into the entry and stops. He looks at the plastic on the floor and the scaffolding that kisses the ceiling and the toy truck lodged under a chair. He looks at me and smiles the way an older brother smiles when he catches a younger one happy. “You look like a man who went to a market and bought everything.”

“And then some.”

“Good.” He takes my hand in both of his and squeezes. “You deserve this.”

“I did not think I would hear that from you.”

“I did not think I would say it.”

We walk to the library because the crew has not touched it yet. It still smells like paper and lemon oil. We sit. I pour whiskey. He drinks and smiles as he studies my face. “It has been some time, and I hope time heals wounds enough for me to ask this. What happened with Vitaly?”

Bold of him to ask, but then again, we are bold men. “Is that what you came to discuss?”

“One of two things I came to discuss. I know he is dead. I suspect you had a hand in it. But there is only so much that rumor allows me to piece together.”

Of all the men breathing, Leon Valivov is one of the few I respect. So, I tell him the truth. He knows enough about Vitaly to know I’d be lying if I prettied up the tale, so I give it to him plain.

Leon does not interrupt. When I finish, he nods once. “You were right,” he says. “Olga could not have seen that and remained in love with you. She would have broken that night. She would not have stood there with a knife, ready to finish things had you not done the job.”

“Olga, for all her kindness…” I’m not sure how to end that sentence. “I agree. It would have broken her. She was too gentle for this world.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “She used to tell me you were two men. The one who smiled at her and the one the world needed. She believed the second killed the first when you married Bridgette, but she was wrong about that. I see now that the first survived and built a house where he can live.”

“He had help.”

“Oh?”

“Mina is⁠—”

“The right woman for you.”

I chuckle. “Picked up on that, eh?”

He laughs, full-throated and open. “The construction vehicles dotting your lawn gave that away before I even walked inside and saw the messes. Roman Ekimov does not upend his family home for just anyone.”

“This place might have been the Ekimov family home before, but now, it’s starting to feel like a home for my family.”

“I am glad for you, truly.” Noise from the rest of the house reaches us, distracting us both briefly. His smile fades, and the air shifts. “Now, for the other reason. I came because I need help.”

I nod. “How can I help?”

“Trouble overseas,” he says. “I need hands I trust and a mind that stays calm when others go loud.”

Considering he works with his family overseas, this could go a number of ways. “Business or family?”

“Both,” he says. “Isn’t it always?”

“You have people⁠—”

“I do. They are good. They are not you. More to the point, my people are also my family’s people. I could hire outside help, but there’s no one I trust more than you, and since I am the secondary caretaker of your family, I hoped I could cash in that favor before you leave this mortal coil.”

I cannot see my face, but I know my expression tells him he must be joking. “First of all, the threat from Vitaly is over⁠—”

“Da, but just in case some overenthusiastic gunrunner gets the better of you, I still consider myself to be in that position.”

“Fair enough. Secondly, there are no favors between family. We do for each other as we would want done for us. So, tell me everything.”

He does, and I am surprised he doesn’t want to handle this himself. But he explains, “The doctor says it’s my heart. If I get too riled up, that could be the end.”

“I didn’t know you’re sick⁠—”

“I’m not,” he says with a sigh. It’s the same sigh strong men give when they know they’re beat. “But my cardiologist is paid to worry, and in the past few years, he’s worrying a lot.”

He’s scared, and he doesn’t want to admit it. Can’t blame him. “I’ll handle it, Leon. You have my word.”

He stands and grips my shoulder. “Thank you. I will not forget this.”

I see him out, and when Mina joins me at the door, I have one question for her. “How do you feel about Moscow in winter?”

The End