“Vadim.”
My name again. Less accusation this time. More warning.
I stopped.
She stood under the warm hall light with sweater sleeves pulled over her knuckles and bare feet in thick socks Irina must have laid out for her. Her face had color again, not much, but enough. The rose-pink lipstick was gone. She had washed it off in the guest room, along with the powder. Her mouth was bare now. Her eyes looked bigger without the auction’s softness painted around them.
“I’m not going to break if I don’t finish soup,” she said.
“No,” I said. “You’re not.”
“And I’m not going to be grateful on command.”
“I did not ask for gratitude.”
“You keep not asking for things.”
“Would asking help?”
Her lips parted.
The air tightened around us.
Not soft. Not safe.
Charged.
She felt it too. Her fingers tightened around the too-long sweater sleeves.
I should have sent her into the guest room and walked away. I should have called Lev, my mother, the doctor at my father’s house, every man whose throat needed my hand around it by morning.
Instead, I stood in my hallway and watched Nadia weigh fear, anger, and the danger she should have run from.
“What do you want?” she asked.
I answered before wisdom could interfere. “You.”
Her breath caught.
“But not like they did,” I said. “Not for a night. Not as a price paid to another man. Not bent under debt. I want you in my bed because you came there. I want my ring on your hand because you put it there. I want our son raised knowing his mother stoodbetween monsters and her family before she ever stood beside me.”
She stared at me as if every sentence had put another locked door between us and opened another one at the same time.
“That’s insane,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“You know that?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still saying it.”
“I’m trying not to say worse.”
Her face flushed. “Worse?”
I took one step toward her, slow enough that she could move away.
