He means it.
I reach across the desk and pick up the pen. Find my signature line at the bottom of the partnership agreement. Press the pen to the paper. And sign my name.
Not because I have to. Not because my family’s debt requires it or because I have nowhere else to go or because the arrangement leaves me no choice. Because I’m choosing it. Because I’m choosing him. Eyes open, fully informed, with the complete picture in front of me for the first time since this began.
I set the pen down and push the document back across the desk.
Luca looks at my signature for a moment. Then he looks at me. “There’s one more thing,” he says.
I raise an eyebrow.
He opens the bottom drawer of his desk and takes out a smaller envelope. Sets it in front of me.
I open it. Inside is a single document. Not a business agreement. Not a legal contract.
A letter. Handwritten. His.
I start reading, and by the third line, my hands have gone very still.
“Luca,” I say quietly.
“Keep reading.”
I read to the end. Set the letter down.
Look up at him.
“You want to renew our vows,” I say.
“I want to marry you properly. The way it should have happened the first time.” His voice is even, but his eyes aren’t. “Not a transaction. Not a contract. Just us, in front of whoever you want there, saying what we actually mean.”
Outside the study door, I can hear the twins coming down the hallway, Mila’s voice carrying over Alexei’s, both of them looking for us the way they always do when we’ve been out of sight for too long.
I look at the letter in my hands. Then I look at him.
“Ask me again tonight,” I say. “When the twins are in bed.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. Just slightly.
“Tonight,” he says.
The study door bursts open, and Mila appears in the gap with flowers in both fists and Alexei right behind her, and whatever was about to happen between us folds itself away into something we’ll come back to.
But it’s there now.
And we both know it.
41
LUCA
Renat’s networktakes eleven days to dismantle completely.
Not because it’s complicated. Because I want it done properly. Every contact, every front company, every man who took a payment from the Malikov faction in the past three years identified and dealt with individually. No loose ends. No one left standing who might decide six months from now that finishing what Renat started is worth the risk.
Maxim runs the eastern district operation himself.
I didn’t ask him to. He came to me on the third day with a map and a list of names and said he wanted to handle it personally, and the way he said it told me this wasn’t about proving something to me. It was about the twins. About Mila spending hours on a warehouse floor and Alexei walking out of that building with his fists clenched and his jaw set and his four-year-old face doing things no four-year-old face should have to do.
