"Jana." The word carries nothing I can name and everything I understand. "Inside. Now."
I go inside. Through the glass door I watch what happens, and I watch it the same way I watched in that restaurant bathroom two weeks ago — not flinching, not looking away — because I have already crossed the line where I get to pretend I don't know who this man is and what his hands can do, and looking away doesn't change what happens, it just means I'm lying to myself about it.
It's not long. It's not clean. When it's over, Daniil says something to Rafail, and they exchange four words I can't hear through the glass, and then Rafail turns toward the entrance, and I step back from the door.
He comes through and stops in front of me, and he is breathing harder than usual, his knuckles split and dark, his jacket intact because he never wears anything he can't afford to ruin, and his face — his face is doing something I have not seen it do before. The control is there, barely, stretched over something that is not anger exactly but runs deeper and hotter than anger, and his eyes when they find mine are the eyes of a man who has just spent forty-five seconds understanding how close something came to going differently.
"The car," he says.
"Rafail—"
"The car, Jana." His voice cracks on the word — barely, just at the edge, a mere fracture, and that crack is more frightening than the controlled fury would have been, because I have never heard it before and I understand instinctively that he hasn't either.
He doesn't speak in the car. He sits beside me with his hands open on his knees, and I watch his chest expand and contract and expand again, the deliberate rhythm of a man remindinghimself how to be contained, and I don't fill the silence because there is nothing to fill it with yet.
We're through the estate gates when he finally speaks.
"This." The word comes out stripped of everything. "This is exactly why you're not leaving. You understand that?"
"I'm fine—"
"You are fine because Daniil was there." He turns to look at me, and the control in his face is the thinnest I have ever seen. "You are fine because I had someone watching the facility before you arrived, because I did not send you out into this city in a car without eyes on where you were going, because whatever you think about what I am and what I do — I kept you safe. And you nearly—" He stops. His jaw locks. "You walked out of that building without looking."
"I had Daniil—"
"You walked out of that building without looking, Jana." His voice drops. "You walked out like a woman who belongs to no one. Like a woman, nothing is coming for. And that is not your life anymore, and I need you to understand what that means."
My hands are in my lap, and I press them flat against my thighs and say nothing, because he is not wrong and I know it, and the admission costs me something.
"If anything happens to you." The words come out ragged at the edges, not the controlled cadence he uses for everything else. "If anything happens to you—" He stops. Starts again. "The world is not safe. You understand me? Not for anyone in it. I will—" His jaw works. "Everything I've built. Every arrangement, every alliance — gone. I will not be rational about it. I am not capable of being rational about it." His chest rises hard. "So you do not walk out of buildings without looking. You do not tell Daniil to wait in the lobby. Your safety is the one thing that is not negotiable. Not with me."
The car stops. We're at the house. I find the first aid kit in the bathroom without asking. He follows me in and stands at the sink, and I run warm water over his knuckles, and he lets me, which is already its own form of a statement from a man who does not let people tend to him. I work methodically, the way he taught me, without meaning to — cleaning each cut, checking the depth, the same careful attention he applied to my lip the night of the restaurant, and the symmetry of it sits between us without either of us naming it.
I'm almost done when I turn his wrists.
The scars are there. Those silver lines I've been aware of peripherally since the night he first let me close enough to see them, that I've never asked about because the time was never right, and because some things wait until the person carrying them is ready to put them down. I press the cloth gently against the old skin. Not cleaning. Just holding.
He goes still. Completely, utterly still.
I look up at the mirror, and his eyes are already there, already on mine, and what's in them has nothing of the controlled winter gaze, nothing of the flat steel of business or threat. Just him. The parts of him that live below the surface.
I lift his hands. Both of them, his damaged knuckles and his scarred wrists cradled in my palms, and I press my mouth to them — first one, then the other, slow and deliberate, and the shudder that moves through him at the contact is a single involuntary thing, the kind of response a man cannot manage into submission.
I hold his wrists a moment longer. These hands cleaned my wounds at his bathroom counter after the restaurant. These hands ended a man's life outside this building an hour ago. The scars beneath my thumbs are decades old, and the cuts across his knuckles are fresh, and I am standing in a bathroom holding all of it, understanding that there is no version of him wherethose two things are separate. He comes whole, or he doesn't come at all.
My chest pulls tight. Then settles.
"Jana." My name in his voice like that, scraped down to its frame. "I don't know how to do this." The words come out rough and low, like they're fighting him on the way out. "I know how to—" he stops. His grip tightens. Starts differently. "Taking. Holding. That I know." He swallows hard. "This is — I don't. I don't know what this is."
He turns his hands in my palms, "This I know. My world leaves scars that don't fade. I don't want that for you, but I can't fucking let you go. You're the first thing I've wanted to keep in forever. Keep forever. This happened," I look down at his wrists. "Because I was the same as you. No one cared about me except my grandmother. The other Ismailovs kept me at a distance out of loyalty to my stepmother. They chose her; no one chose me. Then, when I was nineteen, their enemies came for me. Took me and held me until my father paid—seven fucking days later. I sat chained in a warehouse, in the same clothes, with no food, and only sips of water. There were no bathroom breaks. No trips to clean myself. Soiled and filthy for a week. To this day, I cannot sleep with clothes on. Can't. I sawed my wrists until I almost cut my hands off, but there was no escape. Only waiting and hoping for mercy. Until I learned, there is no mercy. Only vengeance and the settling of debts. My cousins came for me, found me on the border between insanity and death."
My brows furrow. "Your cousins, not your father?"
He doesn't answer. "My father is not a man who loves or cares. He owns. He owned my mother but only for one purpose. I didn't serve a purpose at nineteen."
"And now?"
"Now, I don't give a fuck. I only know, I don't want to be what my father was. I've told myself I wouldn't be. But—His jaw locks. "I don't know how to want something this much without losing—"
