“Jesus,” I mutter, “are you made of ice?”
“I’m cold,” Eliana complains. “Warm me up.”
I turn around and swallow her up in an embrace. She feels tiny in my arms, even though I’m all too aware of the bump of her baby belly between us.
She sighs happily and burrows her face in the crook of my armpit. “Is it weird that I like your musk?” she mumbles. “Even when it’s, like, sweaty and stuff?”
“Oh, definitely. Strange. Repulsive. They ought to lock you up and throw away the key.” I press my nose to her bed-warm scalp. “But they’ll have to lock me in there with you, because I like your scent, too.”
She giggles against my chest. Feeling her melt into me and knowing it’s because she trusts me to keep her safe and warm… Fuck, that sets off strange flurries of sparks in my chest.
“How’s the stomach?” she asks.
“Manageable.”
“Are you fibbing, Mr. Hale?”
“Fine. It hurts like hell.” I kiss the top of her head. “But I’ve had worse.”
She frowns. “You’ve been shot before?”
“Not like this. But I’ve eaten Zeke’s attempt at pad woon sen. Frankly, I prefer the bullet.”
“Isn’t he, like, a professional chef?” she asks. “Atyourrestaurant?”
“He has his talents,” I admit. “Thai food is not among them.”
She laughs again, then presses a kiss to the center of my sternum. “Bastian…”
“Uh-oh,” I interrupt. “Why do I feel like you’re about to tell me something I don’t want to hear?”
“More like I’m about to ask you a favor that you won’t be able to refuse.”
“I didn’t know I’d impregnatedThe Godfather,”I tease.
She scowls in a way that really does look just like Marlon Brando, which just makes me laugh louder. She slaps a hand over my mouth and hisses not to wake her mother. “Don’t be an ass,” she scolds. “I was just going to say that I want to take our morning walk.”
I hesitate. There are a million fucking reasons that’s a bad idea. For one, the wound in my abdomen throbs at the mere thought of moving faster than a shuffle. If something happened out there—if Aleksei’s men found us, if I had to run or fight—I’d be operating at maybe ten percent capacity. Probably less.
Every instinct screams to stay inside.Stay hidden, stay small. Don’t give the universe another opportunity to fuck us over.
But Eliana is already reaching for her stick, her jaw set in that stubborn way I’ve learned means arguing is pointless. And besides, we can’t live like prisoners forever. We can’t cower in this borrowed suburban house and call it a life.
If these mornings are all we have left—if Aleksei finds us tomorrow or next week or next month—I want to give her as many of them as I can.
“Let me grab my jacket,” I say.
She grins, which is like a sunrise in and of itself. Goddammit, I’d do anything for this woman.
I’d do fucking anything.
Outside, we fall into rhythm like we’ve been doing it our whole lives. Eliana has one hand on her stick and the other hand looped through my arm.
“What do you see?” she asks. “Describe it to me.”
So I tell her. A woman jogs by with a bobbing blond ponytail and neon running sneakers. Lawn sprinklers catch the early sun and cast tiny, refracted rainbows across manicured grass. A slouchy pre-teen waits alone at a bus stop, hunched over his phone with massive headphones clamped to his ears, completely oblivious to the world.
It’s the beautiful, colorful mundanity of it all that makes me happy, against all odds. When the world is this calm and predictable, I can almost believe that there’s a place in it for Eliana, our child, and me to all be safe and happy together.
