She smiles. “He talks about you too. Since the phone call about the twins, he’s barely talked about anything else.” She releases my face and steps back, but her composure is threadbare. She must have heard about the kidnapping from Adrian or maybe Viktor and came without being asked, which means she drove four hours overnight because she couldn’t accept this happened from a distance without seeing everyone is well.
Adrian appears from the hallway. “Mama, I told you we’d come to you when…”
“When it was safe.” She turns to him with an expression that allows for zero negotiation. “I’ve been waiting for ‘when it’s safe’ for thirty years. I’m done waiting.” She looks back at me. “Are you hungry?”
“I ate, but I could eat again.”
“Good.” She sets her purse on the counter and opens the refrigerator as if every kitchen in the world belongs to her. “Adrian, go handle whatever Viktor needs. I want to talk to Aurora.”
He looks at me, and I nod, so he goes.
Irina makes tea she produces from supplies that weren’t there this morning, meaning she brought her own. She sets two cups on the table and sits across from me. “Tea first, then perhaps a nice Russian meal.”
I nod in agreement as my stomach growls. She just laughs.
“My son has never brought a woman to me before.” She wraps her hands around her cup. “Not to meet me, not to talk about, and certainly not to call me about at midnight sounding like the world had ended. The man I heard on the phone last night was someone I’ve been waiting decades to meet.”
So, she heard about it from Adrian. He must have called her after I was asleep. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he was terrified, and he let me hear it.” She takes a sip. “Sergei, Adrian’s father, was never afraid. He was calculating and powerful. He treated fear as a weakness that required elimination despite being the most paranoid man I’ve ever known. He couldn’t see the…hypocrisy of that. Adrian inherited the strategy but not the coldness, and the difference is the reason I’ve spent his entire adult life hoping he would find someone worth being afraid for.”
It’s an odd statement from his mother, but I understand what she means. My tone is reassuring when I say, “He was afraid for me.”
She nods and sets down her cup. “A man afraid for you will protect you whether you want it or not. A man afraid of losing you will ask what you need and then fight to give it to you. Adrian is doing both, but he’s not trying to control you. I can tell by how he talks about you.”
I tilt my head slightly. “How does he talk about me?”
“Like you’re the most interesting person in the world, and he can’t quite believe you chose to stay in his.” Her smile is complicated and carries decades of watching her son build walls and hoping someone would make him want to tear them down. “He told me about the hospitality program, the horseback riding, and the shopping trip where you bought practical clothes. Last night, he told me you fight back, which tells me you’re strong enough to stand at his side.”
I swallow hard against the pressure building behind my eyes. “I’m not always strong.”
“No one is, but we fight when we have to. The point is that you make your own choices, and Adrian respects them even when they scare him.” She leans forward. “That is everything I hoped for him.”
Adrian’s phone conversation carries through the wall as a low murmur, and Irina and I sit with the tea, the quiet, and the strange comfort of being understood by Irina after only fifteen minutes.
That evening, Adrian finishes his calls and joins us in the kitchen. Irina has made dinner from groceries she brought in a cooler in her trunk, and the three of us eatpelmeniwith butter and dill, alongside pickled vegetables at the small table with our knees touching and the canal water catching the last of the sunset through the screen.
“I still want school.” I say it to Adrian because the conversation matters, and because the kidnapping has made the hospitality program feel more urgent, not less. “I still want to buildsomething legitimate for myself, and I don’t want surviving this to become a reason to postpone it.”
“Surviving this changes none of those plans.” He sets down his fork and gives me his full attention. “If anything, it makes me more certain I want to help you reach them. The restructuring is designed to give you a world worth building in.”
“What about the babies?”
“We’ll figure out the timing. If the next intake works, you’ll apply. If the one after is better, you’ll apply then. Either way, the program happens.” He picks up his fork again. “I’ll have Viktor vet the campus properly this time, but I’ll ask you before I schedule anything.”
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Irina watches the exchange from across the table with an expression I can’t fully read but suspect is satisfaction. She doesn’t comment. She just eats her dinner and lets us negotiate the future for which she’s been hoping. When the dumplings and vegetables are gone, she brings out simple tea cakes dusted in powdered sugar, served alongside strong Russian tea. I eat a second one, groaning as I do so. “These are too good.”
She pushes the plate closer. “You’re eating for three.”
I chuckle at that but take a third cookie. “One for each of us,” I say before drinking more of the tea.
After dinner, Adrian goes to his office to call Viktor about Karpov’s escape route and the intelligence Grigor has been assembling. Irina and I clear the table together, and the domesticity of it, washing dishes with my boyfriend’s motherwhile he handles criminal operations in the next room, is surreal, and I almost laugh.
“I want to tell you something.” Irina dries a plate and sets it in the cabinet. “I want you to hear what I mean, not just how it sounds.”
I turn off the water and face her. “Okay.”
