Rodion was on the phone constantly—with Yegor, with his brothers, with people whose names I didn't recognize. I caught fragments of conversations: entry points, timing, contingencies. The language of violence, spoken with casual efficiency.
I overheard him talking to Demyan midafternoon, his voice carrying from the study.
"This is my territory. My operation. I have enough men."
A pause while Demyan responded.
"If I need help taking out a washed-up Irish captain with eight men, I don't deserve to run New York."
The confidence in his voice should have reassured me. Instead, it made the knot in my stomach tighter. This was his world—a world where men discussed killing other men with the same casual tone I used to discuss treatment plans with colleagues. I'd spent twelve years running from this world, and now I was married to someone who lived at its center.
Later, I heard him on the phone with Kirill. The conversation was shorter, more clipped.
"I'm not underestimating anyone."
A pause.
"My head is fine. But I appreciate the concern."
Another pause, then: "I'll call you when it's done."
He hung up and stood in the doorway of the study, his eyes finding mine across the living room. Neither of us spoke. We didn't need to.
I tried to work. Pulled up my laptop, reviewed my session notes, prepared for tomorrow's appointment with Benjamin.But my concentration was fractured, my thoughts circling back to the same questions.
What if something went wrong? What if he didn't come back? What if I were left alone again, with nothing but a baby and a name that didn't belong to me?
The questions spiraled, each one darker than the last. I recognized the pattern—catastrophic thinking, a hallmark of anxiety. I'd helped dozens of patients work through the same spirals. But knowing the mechanism didn't stop it from happening.
By late afternoon, I gave up the pretense of productivity and wandered into the kitchen. Cooking had always calmed me—the focus required, the transformation of raw ingredients into something nourishing. I found flour and butter and began making biscuits, my hands moving through the familiar motions while my mind churned.
Aunt Hannah had taught me this recipe. Summer afternoons in her Vermont farmhouse, flour dusting the worn wooden counters, her voice calm and steady as she guided my hands through the steps.
"Baking is about patience," she'd said. "You can't rush it. You can't force it. You just have to trust the process and let it become what it's meant to be."
I'd been sixteen, still raw from my mother's death, still learning how to exist in a world that had become suddenly, terrifyingly unsafe. The biscuits had been a lifeline—something concrete and achievable when everything else felt impossible.
Now, standing in Rodion's gleaming kitchen with its marble counters and professional-grade appliances, I found myself reaching for that same anchor.
Trust the process. Let it become what it's meant to be.
If only life were as simple as biscuits.
Rodion found me there an hour later, flour dusted across the counter and a tray of golden biscuits cooling on the rack.
"You bake when you're stressed," he observed.
"I bake when I need to feel useful." I wiped my hands on a towel. "There's only so much waiting I can do."
"I know the feeling."
He leaned against the counter, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read. There was tension in his shoulders, a tightness around his eyes that betrayed the calm he was projecting. For all his confidence on the phone with his brothers, he was feeling it too. The weight of tomorrow.
"You're scared too," I said.
"I'm always scared before an operation. It keeps me sharp."
"That's not what I meant."
