I still don't know how to feel about any of this.
For seventeen years, I've defined myself by what I do. The enforcer. The commander. The man who keeps the Kashkin family safe through violence and strategic brilliance. It's a role I understand, a purpose I've never questioned.
But fatherhood? That's something else entirely. That's not about strength or strategy. That's about... what? Love? Nurturing? Being present in a way I've never been present for anyone?
I think about my own father. Alexander Kashkin, who wrote love letters to my mother and taught me to shoot and died in a hail of bullets on a deserted road. What kind of father was he? The memories are faded now, softened by time and grief, but I remember his hands—big and calloused, capable of violence but gentle when they ruffled my hair or steadied my grip on a rifle.
I remember his voice, deep and warm, telling me that a man protects his family above all else. That love is not weakness but strength. That the measure of a man is not in what he takes but in what he builds.
I was fifteen when he died. Fifteen when I stood over his body and swore vengeance. Fifteen when I became the thing I am now—cold, controlled, deadly.
But I'm not fifteen anymore. And the life growing in Bianca's belly deserves better than a father who only knows how to destroy.
I find myself in the greenhouse.
The damage here is worse than in the main house. Shattered glass crunches under my boots. Plants lie trampled and broken, their pots overturned, their soil scattered across the flagstone floor. The restoration Bianca worked so hard on has been undone in a single night of violence.
Sergei's men came through here during the kidnapping. Trampled her sanctuary on their way to take her from me.
But not everything is destroyed.
In the corner, protected by a fallen shelf, the fern she saved still survives. Its fronds are dusty and bent, but it's alive. Persisting. Refusing to die despite everything that's happened around it.
Like her. Like all of us.
I crouch beside it and brush the debris away, setting the pot upright. A small gesture. Meaningless, perhaps. But it feels important. It feels like something she would do.
This is what she does. She nurtures. She heals. She brings dead things back to life.
Maybe she can do the same for me.
***
I return to the bedroom as night falls.
Bianca is still asleep, but she's shifted position, curled on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek. The bandages on her wrists are stark white against her skin. Evidence of what sheendured. What she survived. What she fought through to come back to me.
I should let her rest. Should go back to my study, review reports, do the work that never ends. But I can't make myself leave.
Instead, I pull the armchair closer to the bed and sit down, watching her sleep the way I've done so many nights before. Except now everything is different. Now there's a heartbeat inside her that matches the rhythm of my own.
I think about the ultrasound. That tiny flicker on the screen, that whooshing sound that filled the room. Evidence of life, of future, of possibility. A heartbeat where there was nothing before. A person being built cell by cell, breath by breath, inside the woman I—
I stop the thought before it can complete itself. There are words I'm not ready to say. Not even in my own head.
I never wanted children. Never thought I'd have them. The world I live in is too dangerous, too bloody, too full of enemies who would use my family against me. Bringing a child into that seemed cruel. Selfish. A weakness I couldn't afford.
But the child is coming anyway. And I have to figure out how to be a father in a world that doesn't allow for softness.
Bianca stirs, her eyes fluttering open. She blinks at me, disoriented, then seems to remember where she is.
"How long have you been sitting there?" she asks, her voice thick with sleep.
"A while."
"Watching me sleep?"
"It's becoming a habit."
