Page 76

“I understand now,” I say. “I want more involvement. Not just wires and files and looking pretty in a garden while men put their hands on my knee. I want Hardy to train me. Properly. I want to be a real marksman. Not a boy with a borrowed pistol who got lucky in a kitchen.”

Dmitri’s hand finds my hair. Not a command. Something closer to pride.

“I will make it happen,” he says. “Hardy will love to train you. He’s been waiting for someone in this house who will treat a weapon like work instead of theatre. He won’t go easy on you, believe me. You will hate him some mornings. That is how you will know it is working.”

I almost laugh. The sound comes out small and almost innocent.

We sit with that for a while. The sun climbs. Somewhere a siren starts and then fades in another direction, ordinary, not ours.

Dmitri’s voice changes. “Last night,” he says. “Before we left. You said you had something big to tell me once it was over. It is over. Talk my darling Mylashka.”

I feel the secret sit under my tongue. “After we sleep,” I say. “I’ll tell you after we sleep.”

My Daddy laughs. Low. Tired. Dangerous still.

“It better be good,” Dmitri says. “you’ll come to learn that I do not enjoy being teased if there’s no payoff.”

I simply smile. I do not give him the edge of it. Not yet. Some truths need a bed and a locked door and a man who has already said he loves you.

“Bathe me,” I say. “So we can both go to bed. I can still feel the kitchen on my skin. The mats. The pan. Him. I want it off. I want your hands. Then I want to sleep in your bed and not wake up until I’m ready.”

Dmitri looks at me for a long second. The sunrise puts gold on one side of his face and leaves the other in the old shadow.

“There is nothing I would rather do,” he says. He stands and offers his hand. I take it. The penthouse is quiet in the way only a fortress can be quiet after a war.

We walk the hall. The bathroom is stone and glass and a tub that could hold two people who have not slept and do not care.

Dmitri runs the water hot. Steam lifts. He undresses me with the same care he used on welts and gel in a room under this one—bandage kept dry, shirt over my head, the bruise on my neck touched with his mouth once, not as a claim, as a fact.

I watch him shed his clothes. There is blood splatter that is not his. I do not ask whose. It doesn’t matter now.

My Daddy bathes me and does it with care and pride…

Cloth. Soap. His hands in my hair. The cut on my arm stings and then eases. I close my eyes and let the night rinse out of me in grey water. When he is done he wraps me in a towel that costs more than any rent I ever skipped and lifts me as if I still weigh nothing.

“Bed,” he says.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I answer, warm and now very sleepy.

In the doorway I stop him with my good hand on his chest.

“I want to be yours forever,” I say. “Not for a mission. Not until the next drama. Forever. Do you hear me?”

Dmitri’s forehead rests against mine. The sun is fully up now, stupid and bright on a city that will learn his name again before noon.

“I hear you,” he says. “Nothing will separate us. You’re locked here with me until we both meet our maker. And believe me when I say I won’t ever let another man harm you again or even come close.”

That is all I need to hear.

We sleep at last.

The secret can wait for now.

I fall under with Dmitri’s arm around me.

It was always meant to be this way, and now it finally is.

“Mmmmm, what… is… that?” I mumble, half-awake.