She's quiet for a long moment, and the quiet has a different quality than the one in the guest room — less certain, more searching. She pulls the sheet up to her collarbone. Her eyes stay on mine.
"What will it take," she says, "for you to understand that this doesn't work by force?"
"I'm not forcing anything."
"You just carried me down a hallway."
"You didn't fight me."
Her mouth tightens. "That's not the point." She pushes herself up to sit fully, the sheet pooling at her waist, and the look on her face is the one I've come to recognize as Jana at full strength — not angry, not afraid, but precise, her intelligence bearing down on something she needs me to hear. "You want me to be yours. I understand that. But how will you ever actuallyknowI am, if I've never been given a real choice?" She holds my gaze. "You can't force someone into a relationship, Rafail. You can keep them. You can arrange it so leaving is impossible. But what you get from that isn't what you want from me. And I think you know that."
The room is quiet.
She's right. That's what makes it land the way it does — not as an argument I can dismantle but as a thing I already know and have not yet decided what to do with. I look at her in the low light, this woman who walked into a room with me for money three weeks ago and has been rearranging my understanding of things ever since, and I don't have an answer. For perhaps the first time in a conversation with her, I have nothing.
I don't give her the silence as a weapon. I give it to her because it's the most honest thing I have.
She watches me not answer. Something in her face shifts — not victory, not softness. Recognition. She lies back down, pulling the covers up, and turns onto her side facing me with her eyes still open.
I lie in the dark with her question.
I don’t answer it.
Not when the truth might send her walking.
Chapter ten
Jana
He wants to come with me.
He doesn't say it. Won't ask it. But he's standing in the entry hall when I come downstairs, jacket on, phone in hand, and gives me a hard stare when I appear with my coat and bag. He's positioned himself in the space between the door and the stairs. Not blocking. Just present, completely and without apology.
"Daniil will drive you," he says.
"I know." I pull on my coat. "You told me last night."
"And he stays with you."
"Rafail, it's a care facility in Brookline. The average age of the other visitors is sixty-five."
His jaw shifts. One degree. "Daniil stays with you."
I look at him for a moment — this man who has spent two weeks purchasing, negotiating, threatening, and carrying me down hallways, who slept with his hand in my hair last night, and whose first act this morning was to give me a hug and squeeze that almost broke my ribs. This is a fight I won't win and probably shouldn't try.
"Fine," I say. "He can wait outside."
"Inside."
"Rafail." I stop in front of him, close enough to make the point. "My grandmother is seventy-three years old and she raised me in a two-bedroom apartment in Dorchester on a school counselor's salary and she has never, in her entire life, been in the same room as a man like Daniil. I am not walking into her room with your enforcer." I hold his gaze. "She won't understand any of this."
His expression doesn't change. But something in it does — underneath the controlled surface, the barest shift, the way a wall shifts when pressure is applied to the wrong side of it. His jaw tightens, and his brows lower, but I don't budge. This,this thing we have, does not touch my grandmother.
"Lobby," he says finally.
"Lobby," I agree.
He steps aside. When I pass him, his hand comes up and catches my wrist — not gripping, just contact, brief and deliberate — and then releases. I don't look back. But my hand throbs all the way to the car.
