Page 49 of Marrying the Pakhan

A baby. An actual baby, growing right now, in the middle of everything else currently happening in my life, a marriage that started as a legal transaction and somehow became the realest thing I’ve ever built, a man who’s kept some part of himself locked away from me for weeks now, a threat I still don’t understand hovering somewhere at the edges of everything.

I don’t know how to feel. That’s the truest thing I can land on, sitting there with a positive test in my hand. Not happy, not devastated, just entirely, completely overwhelmed by the size of it, too big to process in one sitting.

I think about Viktor, about how he’s going to take this. He never asked for a family beyond Ginger, never signed up for anything beyond a temporary arrangement that solved a custody problem and somehow, slowly, turned into an actual marriage neither of us planned on wanting. A baby wasn’t part of any version of the plan, not mine, and certainly not his.

I try to picture his face when I tell him, and I can’t land on a single version that feels certain. Joy, maybe. Panic, maybe. Some complicated mixture of both that he won’t let me see clearly until he’s decided how he wants to feel about it, the same measured control he brings to everything else lately.

I think about what he’s already carrying right now, whatever’s behind that locked door, the security that’s quietly doubled around this house, the man at the school he still won’t explain.

Adding this on top of whatever’s already weighing on him feels almost cruel, dropping one more enormous thing onto a man who’s already stretched thinner than he’s willing to admit to me.

I decide, sitting on the edge of the tub with the test still warm from my hand, that I’m not telling him tonight.

Not because I want to keep it from him. Because I want one day, just one, to sit with this news myself before I have to manage his reaction to it too, whatever that reaction turns out to be.

I wrap the test in tissue and bury it at the bottom of the bathroom trash, underneath enough other things that nobody would think to look, and I splash water on my face until the woman in the mirror looks slightly less shell-shocked than she did five minutes ago.

By the time I pick Ginger up from school, I’ve mostly composed myself, enough that she doesn’t ask why I seem quieter than usual, enough that I can nod along to her detailed account of Theo’s opinions on today’s lunch options without my voice giving anything away.

That night, after dinner, after bedtime, Viktor finds me on the porch, same spot as always, and settles in beside me without a word, comfortable in the quiet we’ve built between us over these last months.

“You’ve been quiet tonight,” he says eventually.

“Long day.”

“You keep saying that lately.”

“Because it keeps being true.” I lean into his shoulder, and he lets me, arm coming around me automatically now, easy in a way that still catches me off guard sometimes, how naturally we’ve learned each other’s shapes. “I’m okay. Just tired.”

“You’d tell me if it were something else.”

“I would.” The lie comes easier than I expect it to, and I hate a little how easily it comes, given how much I’ve resented him for the same thing these last few weeks. “I’m fine, Viktor. Just tired.”

23

VIKTOR

The morning starts ordinary enough that I almost forget, for an hour or two, everything currently sitting unresolved in a folder in my study.

Dimitri texts around nine, nothing urgent, just confirmation that the school details are in place, someone inside the building during pickup and drop-off now, quiet enough that no one but us knows he’s there. Small progress. Not enough to justify telling Harper anything yet, but progress.

I spend the morning at the club going through numbers with an actual sense of normalcy, Wednesday’s door take, a supplier renewal Dimitri’s been pushing for weeks, the mundane business that used to fill my entire day before Pavel Ivanov resurrected himself in a courtroom and rearranged my priorities completely.

I get home earlier than usual, restless in a way I can’t quite explain, and find Harper on the living room couch, feet tucked under her, a book open on her lap that she doesn’t appear to actually be reading.

“You’re home early,” she says, looking up.

“Slow afternoon. I wanted to be here.”

I sit beside her, close enough that she leans into me automatically, the way she does most evenings now, easy and unthinking, a habit built without either of us deciding to build it. We sit there a while, talking about nothing, Ginger’s homework, whether we need anything from the store, ordinary domestic noise that’s become the backdrop of my entire life somehow.

Then, mid-sentence about something else entirely, she stops.

“I’m pregnant.”

She says it flat, fast, like ripping a bandage off before she can talk herself out of it, and for a full three seconds I don’t process the words as language at all, just sound, syllables that don’t yet mean anything.

“What?”