We make our way to the sitting room. The late afternoon light comes through the bay windows in long warm bands, falling across the couch, the floorboards, the ordinary surfaces of a house that is slowly becoming something it hasn’t been before. Hannah is upstairs sleeping, one of Nikolai’s staff checking in on her. Through the window, the willow trees move against the lake, their branches trailing the surface of the water.
Nikolai sits beside me, and I pull my knees up and turn toward him the way I always do—instinctively, without deciding to.
“There’s something you need to know.” he says. “About your mother. I’m sorry for not telling you earlier, but—”
“I know,” I say quietly.
He looks at me.
“I was close enough to hear. Before I took the shot.” I turn toward the window. “Collateral.”
Nikolai says nothing. He doesn’t offer comfort or explanation and I’m grateful for both absences—there’s nothing to say that would change the shape of it, and he knows that.
I watch the willow branches drag through the water and let myself sit with it. My mother. A name I’ve been pulling at for years, a question I thought I’d never get to finish asking. The answer, when it finally came, arrived in the worst possible way, in the worst possible place, from the worst possible man.
And now he’s gone too, and the question is closed, and I’m still here.
I spent so long believing that knowing would be the thing that finally let me breathe. I’m not sure it works like that. But I’m breathing anyway—steadier than I expected, in a room full of afternoon light, beside a man I thought I’d lost and didn’t, with our daughter asleep upstairs.
Time teaches you to carry things differently. It teaches you to let some of them go.
“Are you okay?” Nikolai asks.
I turn back to him. His blue eyes are steady on mine, patient in the way he’s learned to be patient with me—without pressure, without filling the silence before it’s ready.
“Yes,” I say. And I mean it in the way I haven’t been able to mean it for a long time.
He reaches over and tucks a strand of hair back from my face, his hand coming to rest against my cheek. Outside, the willows move. Upstairs, Hannah sleeps.
I lean into his hand, and he draws me in, and the chapter of what we were to each other before all of this—the grief, the distance, the years of not knowing—closes quietly behind us.
What comes next is ours to write.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Nikolai
The last time I walked these halls with any urgency, it was toward a woman in a lemon silk dress who had no business being as difficult to forget as she turned out to be.
Today she’ll be wearing white.
I cross the lobby and step out into the afternoon, where the sun is doing something generous with the light. The violin has already started and the small congregation is seated.
Neither of us wanted a large wedding. The guest list is short enough that I know every face in it, and that was the point. After everything we’ve been through—the years of hiding, the violence, the particular exhaustion of living at permanent high alert—what we wanted was this.
Quiet. Chosen. Ours.
Timur falls into step beside me as I reach the altar.
“Nervous,bratan?”
“Da.”I adjust my cufflinks without looking at him. “Obviously.”
He smirks, but has the good sense not to comment further.
I have stood in rooms with guns leveled at my head and felt steadier than this. I have almost bled out on concrete floors and kept my thinking clear. The Bratva trained me to be calm in the kind of situations that unmake other men, and none of that training is doing a single useful thing for me right now. My heart is conducting itself with complete independence from my wishes.
Lauren Watson has always had that effect on me. She could be standing in a kitchen stirring something on the stove and I’d feel it—that particular interior collapse that I spent yearstelling myself was manageable and eventually stopped bothering to argue with. She is the only person who has ever had full access to whatever is underneath all of it. I don’t know whether to be grateful for that or terrified.
