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He doesn’t shush me or fix me or hand me a single one of the clever, deflecting things I know live in him by the dozen. He doesn’t perform comfort. He just stays, his back against the tub, his head tipped so I can feel it resting lightly against my arm, and he lets me come apart, and he witnesses it. And somewhere in the wreck of myself I understand that this—this silence from the most relentlessly verbal man I’ve ever met—is the truest thing he has ever given me. He has nothing to say, and instead of finding something anyway, the way he always has, with everyone, his whole life, he is simply here. Unperformed. Just a man on a bathroom floor, keeping vigil.

When the worst of it finally ebbs, I turn my head to look at him, swiping at my swollen eyes with the back of my wrist.

And he’s crying too.

Silently, the way I imagine he does everything that’s real—no sound, no show, just water sliding down through the blood and the bruises on that ruined, beautiful face, his jaw set hard against it. He’s looking at me like I’m something he can’t believe he gets to look at. Like he’s braced, underneath the grief, for me to turn that face away from him—to hate him for the thing he did in that room, for the body he made of my father.

I don’t.

I can’t even find it in me to try. He killed the man who would have killed me, who sold me, who never once chose me—and he did it with his hands shaking and his words spent and his whole body wrecked, and then he carried me out through fire and brought me home and washed the blood off my face so I wouldn’t have to wear it, and he is weeping on my bathroom floor because of what it cost me. There is no court in me that convicts him. There never was going to be.

“Get in,” I whisper. My voice is destroyed. “Please. Get in with me.”

He does.

It takes him a while, and it costs him—I hear the breath hiss out between his teeth as he lowers himself into the water behind me, and I twist to help him, mindful of the ribs, of the eye, of all the places he’s broken on my account. The tub was never built for two, let alone for a man his size, and the water sloshes high and we don’t care. He settles back against the cool porcelain and gathers me in against his chest, and I feel the unsteady knock of his heart against my spine, and his arms come around me slow and careful, like even now, ruined as he is, the only thing he’s worried about is being gentle enough.

We don’t speak for a long time. The candle gutters. The water cools by degrees. His chin comes to rest in my wet hair, and I listen to him breathe, each one a little catch where the ribs are, and I lay my hand over his forearm where it crosses my middle, and I think about my father, and I think about the man behind me who is nothing, nothing like him, and I think about the thing I have known for days and carried alone through the worst hours of my life.

The thing I tried to tell him in his kitchen, a lifetime ago, before the world ended.

I feel it rise in me, and for once I don’t draft it forty different ways first. For once I don’t run the numbers or hedge the finding or wait for a better moment, because I’ve learned tonight that there is no such thing as a better moment, there is only this one, and the people you choose to spend it with.

“I would never do this to my child,” I say.

I feel him go still against me. Not tense—still. Listening, the way only he listens.

“What he did. What he chose. The—the selling, and the leaving, and the leaving me to find out what he was at the wrong end of a gun.” My throat closes and I push through it. “I would burn down the world before I let one single thing touch them. I would die first. I’d kill first, even. I understand that now. I understand you now, all of you, in a way I never did before tonight, because there is a line in me I didn’t know was there until—”

I turn in his arms, the water surging, until I can see his face, that battered, disbelieving, tear-streaked face, and I put my hand flat against his chest over the broken parts and I tell him the rest of it.

“Until them. Leonid. I think I’m pregnant.”

For a moment he doesn’t move at all. The whole loud, lethal, restless engine of him just—stops. His eyes drop to where my other hand has gone, low against the water, against the place where there is nothing yet to see and everything in the world to feel. Then they come back up to mine, and they are doing something I have never watched a person’s eyes do, breaking open and putting themselves back together at the same time, and the man who has not had a single word for me all night opens his mouth, and the only thing that comes out, cracked and wrecked and barely a sound at all, is:

“Ours.”

Not a question. Not really. But I nod against his hand anyway, and the sound he makes then is the second-worst sound I’ve heard all night and the most beautiful—a single broken sob, swallowed hard—as he folds himself around me in the cooling water, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, his hand splaying wide and reverent over the place where our impossible, terrifying, enormous future is just beginning to be real.

Chapter 25 - Leonid

Six Months Later

There was a time—most of my life, if I’m honest, and I’ve gotten into the ruinous habit of being honest—when I slept in a soundproofed box in the sky, behind triple glazing, in a silence so complete you could hear your own pulse keeping its lonely time. I told myself it was peace. I told myself a lot of things in that penthouse. The truth was it was a very expensive way to be alone with the one problem I couldn’t solve.

I don’t sleep there anymore. I don’t really go there at all.

Now I wake in a converted church in Roxbury, in the room where the vestry used to be, to the click of two sets of Dobermann nails on old stone, to Div—fully healed, the ungrateful bastard, with nothing to show for the bullet but a notch in one ear he wears like a war medal—dropping his entire eighty-pound weight onto the foot of the bed where he is absolutely not allowed. To Mara grumbling at him about it. And, best of all, to the sound of the shower running, and a woman murdering a Bollywood song two rooms over, off-key and unbothered and completely, ruinously mine.

The light comes through the old stained glass in long jeweled bars across the floor—cobalt and amber and that deep, ecclesiastical red—and lands on the bed, and I lie there in it for a minute and let myself be a man who has, against every available piece of evidence, gotten exactly what he didn’t deserve.

This was only ever a safehouse. The one place I curated for love instead of show, sure, the library and the myths and the dogs—but a place I came to disappear. It’s not that anymore. There are butter-yellow dishes in the cupboards now, because she painted a set to match cabinets she misses. There’s a nursery being built where a storeroom used to be, two of my largest, most terrifying soldiers currently arguing over the instructions for a Scandinavian crib like it’s a hostage negotiation. There are Post-its on my four-hundred-year-old reading table in her handwriting. It’s a home. It’s ours. And in three months it’ll belong to someone roughly the size of a baguette, who I already love so much it frightens me.

The singing stops. The water cuts off. And a minute later Meera comes out wrapped in a towel that no longer closes all the way around her, and the sight of her does what it always does, which is to knock the air clean out of me.

She’s seven months along. She glows in a way I used to think was a thing people said and not a thing that happened. Her hair’s wet down her back, her belly’s round and high and impossible, the diamond on her left hand throwing little chips of light around the room because I have no restraint and bought a ring you can probably see from orbit—and she catches me staring, and she rolls her eyes, and she says, “No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”