She tilts her face toward me, a smile tugging at her lips. “I already told you — Maren is going to be my maid of honor. I’m not getting married until that can be true.” She pauses, drawing a breath that carries the full weight of the conviction behind it. “It would break her heart. And it wouldn’t be the same for me if I couldn’t share that moment with the only person who’s been by my side through all of this.”
“We are going to find her,” I reply, still holding her hand.
“You can’t guarantee that.”
“I can guarantee that every resource I have is working toward it.” I hold her gaze. “Trust me with this.”
I watch the moment her expression settles, the tension easing, the doubt yielding to something steadier. She nods.
“The wedding,” I say. “Tell me again that you want it.”
She laughs — the small, slightly exasperated version. She turns to face me fully, her head on the pillow, the morning light illuminating her features. “Of course I want it. I just want Maren to be there too.”
I pull her toward me. “I know. And she will be.”
She comes, and I finally feel her body against mine, my hand finding its way into her hair.
“You called me your queen last night,” she says against my chest.
“You are my queen.”
“In Russian.”
“Moya koroleva.” I say it into her hair.
She tilts her head up.
“I want to be,” she says. “Officially.”
“You can sit on the throne.”
Her brow furrows in confusion. I take her hips, pulling her up and over me, positioning her above me with the ease that still makes her eyes go slightly wide. Months of this, and she still hasn’t fully adjusted to the disproportion of our respective sizes, which I find —satisfying, is not a sufficient word but will have to do.
“Rolan.”
“Moya koroleva,” I say, pulling her forward. “Sit.”
Understanding dawns. The color rises in her cheeks. She moves, her knees settling on either side of my face.
“This is—” She loses the sentence when my hands close around her hips and my mouth finds her. The sound she makes in the first second runs through me like a current.
Her hands bury themselves in my hair.
I take my time. I’ve learned her — the geography of her responses, the places that make her go still and the places that make her lose the stillness, the exact moment her breathing shifts to tell me she’s close.
She says my name when she orgasms. Not as a breath, not as a whisper — my name, clearly, fully, in the voice that has no composure left in it.
I bring her down. Hold her face in my hands.
“Otkroi glaza,” I say. “Open your eyes.”
She opens them. Hazel, green-heavy today, the gold submerged — watching me from the face I have memorized in every light this room has offered.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you too.”
I position myself and enter her slowly, the pace drawing from her a long exhale, the full-body release of a breath held too long. Her hands find my chest. Her eyes remain on mine.
