"No," he says. "I'm not."
The next week settles into a rhythm that feels, for the first time, like ours.
He kisses me in the morning before he leaves. A real kiss, brief and warm, his hand on the back of my neck like he needs one last point of contact before he walks out the door.
He calls me in the afternoon. Not every day, but often enough. Quick calls. Ordinary calls that mean more than he knows, because every one of them says I'm thinking about you. I'm thinking about us.
And at night, he reaches for me.
Not the way he did on our wedding night, careful and controlled and wrapped in obligation. He reaches for me like a man who wants his wife. Who needs her. Who has stopped pretending that what happens between us in the dark is anything less than what it is.
I'm falling for him.
I know I am. I can feel it in the way my chest tightens when I hear his car in the drive. In the way I save small things to tell him at dinner, a funny thing Darya said, a bird I saw in the garden, a recipe I want to try. In the way I lie awake after he falls asleep and listen to him breathe and think about how two weeks ago, I was a stranger in his house and now I can't imagine being anywhere else.
I know it's fast. I know this marriage was built on obligation and politics and a council that wanted to control his family. I know that none of the reasons we ended up here have anything to do with love.
But I also know that he sees me now. That he meant it when he said it. That the man who looked at me across the kitchen with flour on his shirt and something broken and honest on his face is the real Anton, and everything before that was armor.
I don't say it yet. The word. It's too soon, and we're both too careful, and there are still parts of his world I don't have access to, parts he keeps behind the closed door of his study, parts that come home with him in the tension of his shoulders and the tightness of his jaw.
But I feel it. Growing quietly in the space between us like something planted in soil that nobody expected to be fertile.
On a Tuesday morning, a month after the wedding, I wake up nauseous.
I make it to the bathroom before anything happens. Barely. I kneel on the cold tile and wait for the wave to pass, my forehead pressed against my arm, my stomach rolling.
It fades after a few minutes and I sit back on my heels and breathe.
It could be nothing. A bad night's sleep. Something I ate. Stress, though I'm less stressed now than I have been in weeks.
Or it could be something else entirely.
I press my hand flat against my stomach and think about Anton and the way he worships me, the way hefillsme, night after night, nothing between us. Think about the council's demand.
My heart starts hammering.
I don't say anything to Anton. I won’t until I know for certain. He leaves for work and I kiss him at the door the way I always do and I smile and I don't mention that twenty minutes ago I was kneeling on the bathroom floor wondering if everything is about to change.
I drive to a pharmacy two towns over, because I'm an Orlova now and people might notice. I buy the test, then I go in another pharmacy and buy two more. I drive home. I sit on the edge of the bathtub with the box in my hands for ten minutes before I open it.
Then I take the test and wait.
Three minutes. That's what the box says. Three minutes, and then a line or two lines, and then my life either stays the same or it doesn't.
I stare at the little window. Count the seconds. I think about my mother's voice telling me that a Bratva wife's most important duty is to bear children. Then I think about Anton's voice, rough in the dark, saying my name like it's the only word he knows.
Two lines.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub, in the bathroom that smells like his cologne, and I stare at two pink lines and I feel everything at once. Joy so sharp it hurts. Terror so deep it takesmy breath. And underneath both, steady and warm and certain, the knowledge that I want this.
Not because the council demanded it or because I was trained for it. But because the life growing inside me belongs to me and to the man who held my face in his hands and told me he saw me.
I press my palm against my stomach.
"Hi," I whisper.
And then I cry in grateful disbelief, with my hand over my mouth and the test balanced on my knee. I cry the kind of tears that come when something you didn't dare hope for turns out to be real.
