“She’s out,” I say softly.
He nods. “She held on until we both sat,” he says. “Then she dropped. She trusts us to keep the watch now.”
We ease our hands free and slip out of the room. He closes the door halfway, the way she likes.
For a moment, we stand in the dim light of the hall, only inches apart.
“Come,” he says quietly.
He leads me to the office instead of the bedroom. That surprises me. The desk lamp is on. The room feels too formal after the softness of Nadia’s room.
The city lights spill through the window. His computer is dark.
“What now?” I ask.
He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket.
For a second my shoulders tense. Old reflex. Men like him usually reach there for guns, not anything soft. His hand comes out with a small, dark velvet box.
My heart stops.
He looks at it, then at me. The lines on his face are deep tonight. There is soot at the edge of his hairline he missed in the shower. His knuckles are still raw.
“I thought about waiting,” he says. “I thought about some clean future day, with no burns on my hands and no fresh bodies on the lake. I thought about a church my grandmother liked and a priest who never took my money.”
He shakes his head a little.
“But the truth is, this is who I am,” he says. “And it is who you are now too. We are people who walk out of blast zones and still have to pack school bags in the morning. Waiting for a quiet day means we never do this at all.”
He opens the box.
The ring inside is simple. Plain band, one stone. The metal is warm in color, not too shiny. It looks old, not new. “It was my mother’s,” he says. “She wore it for a short time. Then my father drank it away in a card game. Years later, when I was already someone else, I bought it back from the man who took it. I kept it in the safe and told myself I would burn it one day. I never did. Now I know why.”
My throat tightens.
“Raina,” he says. “We built this backward. We had war and blood and secrets and Nadia. We had survival before we had any kind of promise. I want to change the order now. I want to stand with you in front of people who have no guns in their belts and say the words the clean way. I want to give our daughter parents who chose each other in the light, not only in the dark.”
He takes a breath. His hand does not shake, but his voice is rough and his eyes carry a strange warmth in them. “Marry me,” he says. “Let’s put your name on my papers, on my house, on every piece of my life. Let’s do this so no one can call you anything but my wife and Nadia’s mother and the woman who stood beside me when everything else tried to fall.”
The words hit me one by one. They land in places I did not know were still open.
I step closer. “You think we need a priest to make that true?” I ask. My voice is soft, but there is a smile somewhere under it.
“No,” he says at once. “We already live it. This is not about them. This is about you. About us. I want you to have the choice. Not just the fight.”
“You’re late with that,” I say, but there is no heat.
“I know,” he says. “I am still asking.”
I look down at the ring. At his bruised hands. At the floor that shook this morning when Ilya’s echo reached here. Then I look back up at his face.
“You’re an idiot,” I say quietly. “You drag me out of a bomb house, make me watch you strangle your past, come home with your head split open, and then think you need to ask if I want you.”
His eyes flicker. “Is that a yes?” he asks.
“It’s a yes,” I say. “Of course it’s a yes. It was always going to be a yes, you stubborn man.”
The breath leaves his body in one rush. Some of the tightness in his shoulders drops. He looks for a second like that boy from theblock he told me about, the one who had nothing and still kept his back straight.
