I noticed it suddenly—the absence of his familiar weight at the foot of the bed, the silence where his breathing should have been. The traitor had probably already defected to whoever was making food. Four years of loyalty, of being my anxious shadow, of refusing to let anyone except me close enough to touch him,and he'd abandoned me for a man with a spatula and a warm kitchen.
I couldn't even blame him. Some part of me wanted to do the same thing.
I lay still for a long moment, cataloging my body the way my therapist had taught me. Start with the extremities. Work inward. Name what you're feeling.
Exhausted. That was the big one—a bone-deep tiredness that went beyond sleep, beyond physical. The kind of exhaustion that came from running on adrenaline for forty-eight hours and then crashing hard.
Achy. My shoulders, my neck, the small of my back. Tension held too long in too many muscles, now screaming in protest.
Strung tight with something I didn't want to name.
The last one was harder to pin down. It wasn't quite anxiety—I knew anxiety, had lived with it for thirty years, could recognize its particular flavor by now. This was different. Sharper. More focused.
Want.
The word arrived unbidden, and I flinched away from it.
But my body remembered anyway. My body remembered the way he'd said "Good girl" last night—quiet, warm, the exact tone he'd used a hundred times in our Discord conversations. Two words. Just two words, and something in my chest had cracked open, had softened, had responded with a desperate, instinctive surrender.
I'd felt it in my shoulders. In my jaw. In the particular loosening of muscles I hadn't realized I'd been clenching. The whole architecture of my anxiety had shifted at the sound of his voice, rearranging itself around those two small words like they were a key to something I'd been trying to unlock my entire life.
Good girl.
He'd touched my face.
I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to block out the memory, but it was too late. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers on my cheek. The roughness of his thumb. The way he'd held me—gentle, careful, like I was something fragile and precious and worth handling with care.
And then he'd let go.
The letting go was the part that kept catching in my chest. Not because it hurt—though it did, a little, in ways I wasn't ready to examine. But because of what it meant. What he was telling me without words.
Your choice. This has to be your choice.
He could have kissed me. I'd seen it in his eyes—the wanting, raw and desperate and barely controlled. He'd been close enough that I could feel his breath on my lips, close enough that one small movement would have closed the distance.
But he hadn't. He'd held my face and looked at me like I was the only real thing in the world, and then he'd stepped back. Given me space. Let me decide.
The restraint felt like both gift and loss.
I wanted to see him, so I plucked up the courage and got out of bed.
Ifollowedthesoundsofcooking, one hand trailing along the wall for balance I didn't quite need but wanted anyway. The hardwood was cool beneath my bare feet. The light from the floor-to-ceiling windows was thin and grey—overcast day, maybe, or early enough that the sun hadn't fully committed to rising.
The kitchen opened up at the end of the hall, all clean lines and expensive appliances, the kind of space I'd only ever seen indesign magazines and the apartments of people who hired me to authenticate their collections.
Maks stood at the stove with his back to me.
He was wearing different clothes than last night—soft grey t-shirt, worn jeans that sat low on his hips. His feet were bare. The domesticity of it hit me somewhere unexpected, a sharp little ache in my chest. This was what he looked like in the morning. This was what he looked like when he wasn't being the Fox, or the bratva officer, or the man with blood on his hands.
Ghost lay sprawled at his feet like he'd lived here forever.
My ridiculous, anxious, trauma-survivor dog who'd spent three years hiding behind my legs at every stranger—he was stretched out on the kitchen floor like he owned the place, his long grey body forming a comma around Maks's bare ankles. One of his ears twitched when I appeared in the doorway, but he didn't get up. Didn't come to me. Just lifted his head, acknowledged my existence, and went back to watching the man at the stove with devoted, food-motivated intensity.
Traitor. Complete and utter traitor.
Maks turned at the sound of my footsteps. Something warm moved through his expression—relief, maybe, or tenderness. The corners of his mouth lifted in that small smile I was starting to recognize, the one that made his whole face softer.
"Good morning." His voice was quiet. Unhurried. "How are you feeling?"
