Page 53 of Marrying the Pakhan

Dimitri arrives that afternoon with a folder considerably thicker than the last one, and we sit together at the same table where I gave Harper the smallest possible version of the truth an hour earlier.

“You told her,” he says, not a question, reading it off my face the second he sits down.

“Some of it. Enough to earn me a few more days before she stops accepting partial answers.”

“How’d she take it?”

“Better than I deserved. Worse than I’d hoped.” I push the folder open between us. “Walk me through what you found.”

Dimitri lays it out. Photographs clipped to a timeline that now stretches back nearly five months, longer than either of us initially estimated.

A second address surfaces, a warehouse on the industrial side of the river, leased under yet another shell company with threads leading back to the same dissolved entity behind the sedan.

“This is where he’s actually operating from, I’d bet on it,” Dimitri says. “The storage unit’s just overflow. This is the real base.”

“Confirmed, or educated guess?”

“Educated guess, backed by utility usage that doesn’t match an empty warehouse. Someone’s running equipment in there regularly. Could be exactly what we’re looking for.”

“I want eyes on it. Discreetly. I don’t want anyone spooked before we understand what we’re looking at.”

“Already planned for tomorrow night.” Dimitri closes the folder partway, studying me. “You’re different today. Calmer than you’ve been in weeks, even with everything that’s happening.”

“I stopped waiting for something to happen to me. That changes how a man carries himself.”

“Good. You’ve needed that shift for a while now.” He stands, gathering the folder. “For what it’s worth, I think you made the right call telling her something, even if it wasn’t everything. She deserved that much, at minimum.”

“I know.”

He leaves, and for the first time since that courtroom, I feel like I’m finally building toward an ending instead of just waiting for one to happen to me.

I only hope the ending arrives before Harper’s patience for partial truths runs out first.

25

HARPER

I’m curled on the couch with my feet in Viktor’s lap when I notice he’s stopped reading entirely, book forgotten, open against his knee, just watching me instead.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing. You look tired.”

“I am tired. Growing an entire human is apparently exhausting work.”

He sets the book aside and runs his thumb along the arch of my foot, slow, absent, a touch that used to feel impossible for a man like him and now just feels like Tuesday.

Ginger’s already asleep upstairs, worn out from a full day of school and the diorama sequel she’s apparently already planning for next semester, and the house has that particular quiet it gets once she’s down, settled and still, just the two of us and whatever’s left of the evening.

“You’ve gotten good at that,” I say.

“At what?”

“Noticing things before I tell you. My feet. What I’m actually hungry for versus what I say I want. The exact moment I need to sit down before I know it myself.”

“I pay attention.” He says it simply, like it’s the most obvious explanation in the world, and maybe for him it is.

“Most people don’t pay attention like this.”