He just chuckles in response. He knows I’m kidding. Hell, half the nights, I make him singmeto sleep, even if he’s just finished putting our baby down with an hour of songs himself.
I let my head come to rest on his shoulder and he loops an arm around me to snuggle me closer.
The path from that burning building to this quiet porch wasn’t straightforward. Nothing with Bastian Hale ever is. I think about the choice he made in that FBI field office, still bandaged and broken from his final confrontation with Aleksei. Without the boss, the Bratva empire crumbled. The feds swept through what remained and threw all the stragglers into cells for life.
And when the dust settled, they gave Bastian an option.
He could “come back to life” as Bastian Hale—reclaim his name, his company, the empire he’d spent a decade building from nothing. Or he could “stay dead” and disappear into witness protection with a new identity and a clean slate.
He chose the latter.
“I spent thirty-five years building a life I didn’t want,”he’d told me from his hospital bed, voice rough from smoke inhalation, half his body wrapped in gauze to keep the burns from getting infected.“I’d rather start from nothing with you than have everything without you.”
I’d cried then. Ugly, messy tears that soaked his hospital gown.
I’m not crying now.
Now, I’m just grateful.
The baby stirs and Bastian takes her. “I’ve got her,” he murmurs. “Hey there, little one. Hey, Svetlana.”
The name had been my choice. It means “light” in Russian. When I’d suggested it after a long, hard labor, he’d gone so quiet I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. But then his voice came out choked and strange, and I realized he was crying.
“It’s perfect,”he’d managed. “She’s perfect.”
Now, I listen to him settle the baby against his chest, hear the soft shushing sounds he makes, and I know that he meant it. Svetlana fusses for another moment, then quiets, seemingly satisfied with the change of scenery.
It never fails to make me melt, hearing him like this. The titan of Hale Hospitality, now reduced to absolute putty by a baby the size of a bread loaf. The mighty Bastian Hale, brought to his knees by spit-up and midnight feedings.
The evening deepens around us. I feel it in the cooling air, in the change of sounds as day creatures yield to night ones. Owls and crickets, bullfrogs and bats. All this life in the night.
Bastian’s hand finds mine. His palm is warm and rough, calloused in new places from the carpentry work he’s taken up. He built Svetlana’s crib himself. Built me this swing. Built us a life, plank by plank, nail by nail.
“The sky’s doing that thing you like,” he says.
I smile. “Tell me more.”
And he does, painting the horizon in words. How the tangerine strokes along the horizon line give way to daubs of indigo above. Gilt-edged clouds thickening way off, signaling rain to come in the night, but for now, all is clear and the first star is just starting to shine overhead.
This is our ritual now. We sit here every night as the sun goes down and he describes it to me. He’s become my eyes. And somehow, it’s made both of us see more clearly.
“Remember that morning at the lake?” Bastian asks.
I nod. Of course I remember. How could I forget? Eighty-seven days left on my countdown, sitting on cold concrete, watching a sunrise I thought might be one of my last… I’d been so afraid then. I thought the dark was something to be feared.
“I remember thinking I needed to memorize everything,” I admit. “Like I could hoard the light somehow.”
“And now?” he asks.
I consider the question seriously. The swing creaks beneath us. Svetlana makes a soft sound against his chest, dreaming about whatever it is that babies dream about.
“Now, I know you can’t hoard light,” I say finally. “You can only let it warm you while it’s there.”
Bastian’s silent for a long moment. “I used to imagine this, you know,” he says finally. “When things were bad, I’d go somewhere in my head. A kitchen full of sunlight. A porch swing. You and a little girl with my eyes and your hair. I thought it was just a fantasy. Who would’ve thought I could be so wrong?”
I seize up. He’s never told me about that night before. Not the specifics, anyway. He’s mentioned the torture in broad strokes, brief, vague descriptions of what was done to him, but never what was happening inside his head while it happened.
I turn toward him, my free hand touching his jaw, rough with evening stubble. “And now?” I ask with a tease, echoing his question from a second ago.
