Now I am waiting.
The cold has seeped through my layers, settling into my bones the way it always does in this place. My fingers are numb inside my gloves. My breath clouds in the air, each exhale a small ghost that dissipates before it can travel more than a few inches. I have been cold for three months. I have forgotten what warmth feels like.
But I do not move. I do not seek shelter. I stand on the tarmac and watch the sky because if Ivan is coming for me, I will be standing here when he arrives.
The jet appears as a dark shape against the clouds.
At first I think I am imagining it—a trick of the light, a pattern in the grey that my desperate mind has shaped into something meaningful. But the shape grows larger, resolving into the sleek, predatory lines of a Gulfstream. The sound of engines reaches me across the frozen distance, a high whine that vibrates in my chest.
My heart is pounding. Three months of numbness, of careful compartmentalization, of telling myself that hope was a weakness I could not afford—all of it crumbles.
The landing is smooth. Professional. The aircraft taxis toward the terminal where I am waiting, engines whining as they power down.
The door opens. The stairs descend.
Ivan steps out.
He looks different. That is the first thing I notice—the way he carries himself has changed. The uncertainty I sometimes glimpsed in him, the flickers of doubt that appeared when hethought no one was watching, have been replaced by something harder. Something that does not question its own right to exist.
He looks like a Pakhan.
But his eyes find mine across the tarmac, and in that moment, the transformation falls away. Beneath the authority and the power and the weight of whatever he has done to get here, I see the man who held me in a cheap motel room and whispered that he would never let me go.
I am running before I realize I have started to move.
The distance between us collapses. The cold wind, the watching guards, the jet with its engines still cooling—all of it fades into irrelevance.
He catches me.
His arms wrap around me with a force that drives the breath from my lungs. I bury my face in his neck, breathing in the scent of him—cologne and coffee and something underneath that is simplyIvan—and for the first time in three months, the ice in my chest cracks.
I am shaking. I cannot tell if it is the cold or the relief or the overwhelming reality of his arms around me after months of reaching for a body that was not there.
“You came.” The words come out broken, muffled against his coat. “You actually came.”
“I told you I would.” His voice is rough, cracked with emotion he is not bothering to hide. His hands move across my back, my shoulders, my arms. Gripping. Checking mass and solidity. Checking to make sure I am real. “I told you I would come for you.”
“I told you I would wait.”
“I know.” He pulls back just enough to look at my face. His hands cup my jaw the way they did in the Processing Room. “I knew you would.”
His thumbs trace my cheekbones. His eyes search my face, cataloging the changes—the hollowness that three months of bad food and worse sleep have carved into my features, the new lines around my eyes.
“You are thinner,” he says.
“So are you.”
His mouth curves in something that might be a smile, but it looks more like pain. “We will fix that. Together.”
His mouth finds mine.
The kiss is not gentle. It is not the careful, measured contact of two men who have time to rediscover each other. It is desperate, hungry, the collision of two people who have spent three months in separate hells and are finally allowed to touch.
I grip the front of his coat and pull him closer, needing to feel every inch of him against me. His tongue slides against mine and I make a sound that is half sob, half moan.
When we finally separate, we are both breathing hard. The cold wind is still cutting across the tarmac, but I cannot feel it anymore.
“My father is gone,” Ivan says. His eyes are locked on mine, fierce and certain. “I am the Pakhan now. And you are never leaving again.”
