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“You are jealous of Maksim,” I say, and I blink, startled by how strange the words feel, this untouchable man confessing envy of his softer brother.

“I am,” he admits without a flicker of shame. “He knows how to give a woman curated gifts and laughter and romance. Those are languages I never learned. My father raised a soldier, not a suitor, and by the time I understood the difference it was far too late to relearn it.”

“You’ve been learning them fast,” I say, my eyes softening, just a fraction.

“Only because Yuri keeps feeding me terrible suggestions,” he says, and I laugh, a bright, lilting sound, and he stays completely serious.

“I know how to hold power and how to be the one holding the cards,” he says. “I don’t know how to love a person. No one ever taught me how.”

My smile fades.

“Yelena made me believe feelings were a kind of duty,” he says. “Something you owed and paid on schedule, like a debt. I ran my whole heart like a ledger, always in the red. And then I met you.”

“You force me to face the truth,” he says. “You refuse every arrangement I try to make. Including the ones I make for you.”

His thumb traces a slow line across the back of my hand. “I’m not good at romance,” he says. “But I love you.” Three plain words, and they move through me deeper than any grand speech ever could, and warmth unfurls in my chest. He doesn’t dress them up. He doesn’t try to make them prettier than they are. He sets them down between us the way he might lay a weapon flat on the table, surrendered, and that plainness is the most convincing thing he could possibly have said.

“I love who you are,” he says. “Not because you carry my child. Not because you need my protection. You.” His Adam’s apple bobs hard, and I can see how much the honesty of it costs him. “I will respect your work,” he says. “Your decisions, your need for time, whatever patience you require from me. I will give you all of it, and I will not decide a single thing for you again.”

“Even letting me go?” I choke out.

His hand tightens around mine, and pain flashes bright across his eyes. “If that is what you truly want,” he says. “Then yes.”

His hand has gone rigid and burning around mine, and it betrays every ounce of the calm he is forcing into his voice.

The knot of misgivings I have carried in my chest for weeks finally loosens all the way. This is the exact thing I have been waiting to see. Not more flowers, not a bigger gesture, but a man willing to respect my choice even when the choice would gut him. For once there is no possession in the way he holds my hand, no ownership, only a grip that would open the second I asked it to.

“I was wrong too,” I say, and I swallow before adding, “About some of it.”

“You don’t need to take responsibility for my mistakes,” he says, his voice lowering.

I lay my other hand over the top of his, closing him between both of mine, and I press a kiss to his knuckles. “It was my fault too,” I say. “I kept hoping you would understand me without my ever saying anything out loud, because it felt safer kept to myself.”

“That was not fair of me,” I say. “Expecting you to read a mind I refused to show you.”

Lev stares in that unwavering way of his, not missing a single word.

“I pulled away because I loved you too much, not too little,” I say. “The lies hurt worse than they should have, because I was terrified I was only another person you had placed somewhere and would move again when it suited you.”

His breathing stops, and my own heartbeat speeds up in my chest. The confession runs both ways now, and there is no taking it back.

“I saw your real effort,” I say. “Not the flowers, and not the store, which is still absolutely ridiculous, by the way. You cannot buy a woman an entire boutique where every inch of it screams extravagance and call it courtship.”

“Yuri told me that too,” he says. “After I signed the papers.”

“Then Yuri is smarter than both of us, and I’m a bigger imbecile than I thought,” I say.

“I saw you ask if I needed you instead of grabbing me,” I say. “I saw you stop chasing and start waiting.” The tension eases out of his eyes as I speak, and something younger and softer surfaces underneath it.

I sway toward him across the moving car, pulled into his orbit, without reaching for the handrail at all, trusting the small space between us and nothing else. Lev holds perfectly still, as though the smallest movement might make me change my mind.

“Are you still waiting for instructions?” I ask, and I lick my lips.

“Yes,” he says.

“Then come closer,” I say, my voice like honey and sin.

Our knees touch, and his cedar scent folds around me, clean and dark and familiar, and he smells like danger. “Kiss me,” I tell him, and his pupils dilate.