“She’s going to be terrifying when she’s older,” I tell her.
“She’s already terrifying. I’m raising a small warlord.” Daria tilts her head back against my knee. “Pyotr is completely useless when she turns those eyes on him. He gives her whatever she wants and then looks at me like I’m supposed to be the bad guy.”
“Youarethe bad guy. You’re the mother.”
She giggles, and for a while, my life stops feeling like a bad drama, and some sense of normalcy settles around us.
Before she leaves, she pauses at the door with the now empty bag over her shoulder. “By the way, Pyotr told me Tony intercepted a Morozov shipment yesterday. Millions of rubles’ worth of product was seized before it cleared the port, based on Lev’s intel. Dmitri hasn’t said much about it, but Boris told Pyotr it bought Lev some breathing room.”
I open my mouth, trying to figure out how to respond to that, but all that comes out is a broken sound.
“I’m not telling you what to do with it,” she adds. “I just thought you should know.”
She hugs me once more, shorter this time but no less firm, and then she’s gone, and the room settles back into quiet.
I sit with what she said for hours.
What I can’t get over isn’t whether he has genuine feelings for me. It’s whether a man can spend two years building you up in his head and still love the real version once he has her—or if he only ever loved the version he made.
I don’t know. And that’s its own hell.
But underneath all of it, there’s one question I can’t let go of. Before I do anything else, I need to hear the answer.
Once Daria leaves, I lock myself in the bathroom, turn on the shower, and wait for the pipes to start rattling. There’s a guard outside my door, but he won’t come in unless he has a reason.
The bathroom window opens onto a narrow stone ledge that runs along the side of the house. It’s stupid, cold, and exactly the sort of thing Daria would call a terrible idea, but it gets me out without asking permission.
I edge along the wall to the service stairwell, slip inside, and make my way to the west wing, my pulse pounding harder at every turn. By the time I reach Lev’s door, I’m furious all over again that I’m here at all. I knock before I can talk myself out of it.
He opens the door and for a second, neither of us says anything. He looks like he’s slept about as well as I have. He’s in a gray shirt, barefoot, and he doesn’t move to let me in or ask me to come inside.
“I’m not here to forgive you,” I declare straight away. “I want to be very clear about that.”
He presses his lips into a hard line and nods. “All right.”
“I haven’t moved past what you did. I don’t know if I will. But I have one question, and I need you to answer it honestly.”
He nods for me to continue.
“Did you ever plan to use me against my family?”
He doesn’t look away or even take a moment to breathe before he answers, “Never.”
He says it the way I state a diagnosis I’m certain of. No qualification, no softening, nothing attached to it.
I look at him for one beat longer, long enough to check the answer against his face and find nothing there that fights it. He lets me look. He always has. Whether that’s the most honest thing about him or the most practiced, I can’t tell right now.
I nod once, then walk back down the corridor.
I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t know what to do with any of this. But I know the difference between a man who tells you what you want to hear and a man who answers before he has time to come up with something better. His answer came without hesitation.
What the hell I’m supposed to do with that, I don’t have a fucking clue. But forgiving him isn’t in the cards right now. Maybe not ever.
