I consider the question. A week ago, I would have deflected. Given something sharp and surface-level that kept the real answer hidden. But I'm sitting in a window seat in a house that smells like coffee and baby powder, wearing my husband's sweater, and these women have spent the last two hours treating me like I belong here.
"He's patient," I say. "I didn't expect that."
"Aidan's always been patient," Grace says, shifting Lorcan to her shoulder. "Liam says it's his most dangerous quality."
"Liam's right," Katya adds. "Killian is patient but he runs hot. What you see is what you get, and it's usually a lot all at once." She smiles in a way that tells me she wouldn't have it any other way. "But Aidan... Aidan plans. He waits. And by the time you realize he's been waiting, it's already done."
"That tracks," I say, and the three of them laugh, and I find myself smiling in a way that doesn't feel false.
Iris launches into a story about Aidan when he was fourteen, something about a boy at school who bullied Iris and how Aidan didn't say a word to anyone about it for three weeks and then one day the boy showed up with a black eye and a sudden, permanent desire to be polite to every girl in the building.
"He never admitted it," Iris says. "To this day. But I know it was him because the boy's older brother came to our house to complain and Aidan just stood in the doorway and stared at him until he left."
"That also tracks," I say, and this time I'm the one who laughs first.
By the time I walk back to the stables, as Aidan and I both now call our home, I'm lighter than I've been in as long as I can remember. My cheeks ache from smiling. There are photos on my phone that Iris took of all four of us, and in one of them I'm holding Lorcan and Grace is leaning over my shoulder and we're both looking down at him, and my face in that photo is someone I barely recognize. She looks happy.
I change into something comfortable. Leggings and a thin sweater. I pull the brochures out from the bedside drawer where I moved them after Aidan left this morning, and I spread them on the kitchen counter. This time I read them properly, out in the open, where the light can reach them.
The introductory psychology program at the university thirty minutes away has a part-time option. Two years. Classes three days a week. The prospectus describes it like it's the most normal thing in the world, studying the human mind, and I read every page and I let myself imagine being someone who does this. Who sits in a lecture hall and takes notes and learns the language for all the things she's been observing her whole life.
I'm still reading when I hear the front door open.
"Aidan?" I call, without looking up. "There's food in the oven. Your mom dropped off a..."
I stop. The man standing in the doorway of our home doesn't look like the man who kissed my forehead this morning and left me in bed.
His shirt is streaked with red. Dark and wet across the chest and one sleeve, soaked into the white cotton in uneven patches. His knuckles are split on his right hand, raw and swollen. There's a smear of blood along his jaw that he either doesn't know about or hasn't bothered to wipe away.
His eyes find mine and they're dark and flat and burning with something that makes the air in the room change pressure.
I go still. Something old and automatic surges up my spine. The instinct to assess. To calculate the threat. To determine whether the blood means danger for me.
It passes in a second. Because this is Aidan. And the way he's looking at me isn't threatening. It's protective. Furious and protective, and the fury isn't directed at me.
"It's not mine," he says. His voice is rough. Lower than usual.
"Whose is it?" I ask, my face folding into something that feels like disbelief and surprise all at once.
He closes the door behind him and stands there for a moment. I watch him decide how much to tell me. I watch him weigh honesty against protection, and I know the exact moment he chooses honesty. Because that's what he asked of me, and he won't offer less than he demands.
"Gregor Malekonosh," he says. "A council member. He's been running his mouth about you. Calling you mysullied bride. Saying the Irish Orlovs got what they deserved. Used goods for a second-rate branch."
The words land like stones dropped on glass. I feel each one. Sullied. Used. Second-rate. The vocabulary of my father's world, the language I grew up breathing, the words that taught me to build walls in the first place.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever apologized.
His eyes flash. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. Malekonosh is an ass, talks too much when he drinks, but Linchenko had it coming for years.”
"Linchenko?" I ask, because I know he was the man I was almost married to.
Aidan's jaw flexes. "I dealt with him too."
I look at the blood on his shirt. The split knuckles. The controlled devastation in his expression.
"I didn't plan this, Tanya. But I won't apologize for it."
A week ago, I would have been furious. My first instinct would have been to freeze him out and reclaim the situation on my own terms. But a week ago, I didn't know what it felt like to have someone fight for me.
