That makes something close to a real smile cross my face. Jess knows me better than I realized.
"I always map exits," I say. "Force of habit."
She studies me for a moment. Then she pulls me into a quick, hard hug. "If you need me, you call. I don't care what time it is."
"Thank you.”
She leaves, though a little reluctantly, and then it's just the Orlovs and me.
Artem and Elena take the baby and say their goodnights before they head upstairs. Lena hugs me again, warm and genuine. Kira presses my hand and gives me a look that says more than words before she leaves with Anton. Anastasia passes me on her way out and inclines her head, just barely, and says "Welcome to the family" in a voice so flat it could be a greeting or a condolence.
Then the house is quiet.
Yevgeny appears beside me in the hallway. He's taken off his jacket. Rolled his sleeves to the forearm. It shouldn't make a difference but it does because the formality of the day has been like armor for both of us, and watching him shed even a small piece of it shifts something in the air between us.
"There's a house on the east side of the estate," he says. "It's ours. I had it set up for us this week."
Ours.
We walk. The estate is large, manicured, lit by low landscape lighting that makes the paths between buildings glow amber. The air is cold and clean and I pull it into my lungs and try to settle the noise in my head.
The house is smaller than Artem’s but made the same way, with stone and wood. It’s two stories and has a covered porch with a light on above the door.
He opens the door and steps aside to let me in first. I walk past him and smell his cologne, something warm and woody, and my body reacts before my brain catches up.
The inside is simple. Clean. Warm in a way that feels lived-in, not staged. A kitchen with a coffee maker on the counter. A living room with a deep couch and bookshelves lining one wall.
"We also have a wing in the main house available to us," he says, reading my expression. "But I thought you might prefer the…privacy." He looks at me for a beat. Then he moves to the kitchen and takes down two glasses and a bottle of vodka from the shelf above the stove.
"Drink?" he asks.
"Please."
He pours. Hands me a glass. Our fingers brush and the contact is brief but specific, and I feel it travel up my arm and settle somewhere between my ribs.
We sit. Him on one end of the couch, me on the other. A careful distance. Enough space to breathe. He leans back and takes a slow drink and doesn't rush to fill the silence.
"I'm not going to pretend this is normal," he says after a while. "Two strangers sitting in a house after a ceremony neither of us planned. That's not normal."
"No, I guess it isn’t, even in our world." Arranged marriages are a thing of the past. Forced marriages died out a long time ago. This sits somewhere in between and neither of us grew up expecting it.
"I'm also not going to pretend I don't want you. You saw that at the reception. You were watching me with the baby and you saw it and I let you because I don't lie to the people in my life."
My breath catches but I cover the sound with a sip of vodka.
"But this doesn't happen tonight unless you want it to." He turns the glass slowly in his hands. "There's no pressure. No expectation. No timeline. When it happens, it happens because you chose it. I need that to be clear."
"And if I never choose it?"
He looks at me. A slow, measuring look that makes my skin warm. "You will."
It's not arrogance. It's certainty. The same certainty he had at the altar when he leaned in to kiss me and said those words instead.
"What you said to me," I start, and then stop because I'm not sure how to ask this without giving myself away. "At the ceremony. When you kissed me. What did you mean?"
He doesn't answer immediately. He takes another drink. Sets the glass on the table beside him. Looks at me with those steady, seeing eyes.
"I meant that I've watched you for three weeks, Stefania. I've seen the way you move, the way you assess a room, the way you hold yourself like someone who's been trained to disappear. That's not something a girl learns at a home gym three days a week."
