“I have help.”
“From who? Timur?”
He doesn’t answer that directly. Instead he steps forward, and I find myself pulling back until the counter stops me—cool edge against my lower back, nowhere left to go. He doesn’t close the remaining distance. He just exists in it, close enough that I’d have to make a deliberate choice to put more space between us.
I don’t.
“For Hannah—for all three of us—I will do everything in my power to come back from this. That’s the only promise I can make right now. But when it’s over, I’d like the chance to be more than just the man who kept you safe.”
Something inside me goes very still.
He’s not asking for forgiveness. He’s not negotiating. He’s just standing there, telling me the truth the way he always told me the truth—plainly, without softening it into something easier to hold.
And the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I can’t argue my way out of, is that Nikolai Rogov has never lied to me. Not once. Every damage he ever caused came from choices I could trace back to reasons, however devastating. Never from a lie.
He’s still watching me. There’s heat in it, undisguised, but underneath that something more gentle, more careful. Like he’s waiting for a door I haven’t decided to open yet.
I’m aware of exactly how close he is. The warmth radiating off him. The particular way the air changes when he’s this near, like my body remembers before my mind catches up.
I should step back.
I don’t.
“Want to do something about it?” he asks. Quiet. Not a challenge—a question.
“About what?”
“This.” His eyes drop briefly to my mouth, then back up. “Whatever’s been sitting between us since the balcony.”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out.
Four years of grief. Four years of rebuilding. Four years of telling myself I was done with this man, that I was stronger than whatever we were to each other.
And here I am, backed against a kitchen counter, not moving.
“Yes.” It comes out barely above a whisper. But he hears it.
For the first time in four years, I stop fighting.
I let him in.
Chapter Fifteen
Nikolai
I shoulder the bedroom door open and we cross the threshold still tangled together, her hands in my hair, my arms around her.
When the backs of her knees hit the bed, we go down onto it and I catch my weight on my forearms.
I stop.
Just for a moment.
She’s beneath me, chest rising and falling, lips parted, eyes searching my face. I look at her the way I haven’t let myself look at her since I came back—without the guard, without the distance I’ve been keeping between wanting and taking.
Blyad.
Four years.
