The possessiveness should have frightened me. Should have reminded me of all the reasons this was complicated, dangerous, potentially disastrous.
Instead, it felt like the truest thing I'd ever known.
"More?" I asked when the plate was empty.
She shook her head. "I'm okay. That was—" She paused. Looked at me with something soft and uncertain in her eyes. "Thank you."
"You don't need to thank me for taking care of you."
The words came out rougher than I intended. More honest than I should have allowed.
Her breath caught. That small sound again, the one that hit me like a fist to the chest every time she made it.
"Maks—"
"Finish your water," I said gently. "Then we'll talk."
She obeyed. Of course she obeyed.
And I sat there watching her drink, my hands aching with the effort of staying still, and wondered how I was supposed to survive loving someone this much.
Wetalkedaboutlogistics.Where she'd sleep, how we'd work, the timeline for examining the pieces I'd flagged.
At least, that's what I told myself we were doing.
In reality, I was barely tracking the words coming out of my own mouth. My attention was fixed on something else entirely—the way she kept shifting closer on the couch, unconscious gravity pulling her toward me inch by careful inch. The way her eyes kept drifting to my hands, then away, then back again. The particular quality of awareness that hummed in the space between our bodies.
"I'll set up a workspace for you tomorrow," I heard myself saying. "Secure systems, access to my databases, everything you'll need for the authentication work."
"Okay." Her voice was soft. Distracted.
She was watching my hands.
I followed her gaze, saw what she was seeing—my fingers resting on my thighs, deliberately relaxed. The same hands that had killed three hours ago. The same hands that had assembled her dinner, that had held her face in the gallery, that had typed patient messages to her every night for five months.
"I'm trying to reconcile them," she said quietly. Reading my thoughts, the way she always seemed to. "Your hands. What they've done. What they could do."
"They're just hands."
"They're not." She looked up at me. Those grey-green eyes, endless and uncertain. "They're part of you. All the parts of you."
The air between us had gone thick. Heavy with things we weren't saying, with the weight of everything that had happened since she'd fallen into my arms in a Chelsea gallery and changed the trajectory of my entire life.
"Maksim."
Just my name. Soft. Uncertain. But the way she said it—like she was testing the shape of it, like she was asking permission to use it—made something crack open in my chest.
"The things I told Lis." She was looking at her hands now, not mine. Picking at the cuff of my sweater—my sweater, on her body, claiming her in ways I didn't have the right to. "About what I am. What I need."
She couldn't finish the sentence. But I heard the question underneath, the fear she couldn't quite voice:
Do you still want me? Now that you know who I am in person? Now that you've seen me panic and run and fall apart? Now that I've seen who you really are?
The question deserved an answer. The most honest answer I could give.
I reached out slowly.
Giving her time. Giving her space to pull away, to reject the contact, to decide that whatever was building between us was too complicated or too dangerous or too much.
