"We're married." He stands, pulling me up with him. "Twice now, apparently."
"Twice." I look at the two rings on my finger—the flashy original and the simple new one. "The first one was survival."
"And this one?"
"This one's home."
His expression does something complicated. Soft and fierce and everything I didn't know I needed until he gave it to me.
"Home," he agrees. "Now let me take you to bed and consummate this proposal properly."
"We're already married. Twice. Consummation's redundant."
"Then let's be redundant." He lifts me, my legs wrapping around his waist automatically. "Multiple times. Until neither of us can walk tomorrow."
"Promises, promises."
"I always keep my promises, kotyonok." His mouth finds my throat. "You should know that by now."
Somewhere past midnight,bodies tangled in sheets that smell like us, I dream of my father.
Not the nightmare. Not the one where the boat burns while he drowns, or drowns while it burns, or some impossible combination that leaves me gasping awake with his name lodged in my throat.
This dream is quiet.
We're on his yacht, anchored somewhere warm. The sea stretches endless and calm, and he's wearing that stupid captain's hat Mom always hated.
"Izzy." He smiles, and it's his real smile—the one he saved for when we were alone, away from society and expectations and the performance of being Davenports. "You look tired."
"I am tired."
"Good tired or bad tired?"
"I don't know anymore." I sit beside him, bare feet dangling toward water that glitters like liquid diamonds. "Is there a difference?"
"There's always a difference." He puts his arm around me, and he's solid. Real. Warm the way I remember from childhood, before I learned warmth was just another weapon. "Good tired is when you've built something. Bad tired is when you've destroyed something. They feel the same at first. The difference is what you have left after."
"What do I have left?"
"You tell me."
I think about it. Really think, the way I haven't let myself in twelve months of motion and survival.
"Sergei. Mila. The company. A life that doesn't make sense but works anyway." I lean into him, breathing salt air that smells like memories. "A daughter who quotes me at myself. A husband who makes terrible pancakes and refuses to admit it. Money that used to feel like a prison and now feels like possibility."
"That sounds like good tired to me."
"But I also have—" My voice cracks. "Mom in prison. Matthew in the ground. Bodies I helped put there. Blood on my hands that doesn't wash off no matter how hard I scrub."
"I know."
"Doesn't that make it bad tired?"
"No, Izzy." He pulls back, looking at me with those warm brown eyes I used to take for granted. "That makes it both. Good and bad. Building and destroying. That's what surviving looks like when the alternative was letting them win."
"I killed people, Dad."
"You protected people. Different verb. Same outcome sometimes."
