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He lifts his hand. Brushes his thumb across my cheekbone, very lightly. His skin is warm and a little rough.

“Tell me no,” he says, low.

I don’t.

He kisses me.

I expect it to be careful. He’s been so careful with me since the moment he walked in the door. Wiping his feet, asking before he came, waiting for my answers.

But nothing about this is careful.

His hand slides into my hair and tilts my head back, and his mouth is warm and certain on mine. He tastes like honey and black coffee. His other hand finds the small of my back and pulls me in until I’m pressed against the whole hard length of him, and I make a sound I’ve never made in my life. It’s small, and shocked, and embarrassing.

He swallows it.

I grip the front of his sweater with both hands and hold on.

When he finally lifts his head, I’m breathing like I’ve run up all three flights of stairs. He doesn’t let go. He rests his forehead against mine, and I can feel his breath on my lips, coming as hard as mine.

All that stillness, and underneath it, this.

“I should tell you something,” he says roughly.

“Okay,” I whisper.

“If you marry me, Galana, I’m not just going to be a husband on paper. I’m not going to sleep in another room and wait out a deadline.” His hand tightens in my hair, just a little. “If you say yes, you’re mine. It will be our house. Our bed. Our kids. All of it, for real.”

CALEB

She didn’t answer me.

Milana came back down for orange juice before Galana could. She took one look at us, standing far too close by the fridge with Galana’s hair half wrecked by my hand, said “Urgh,” and walked straight back out again. We heard her on the hall, yelling for Zhenya.

Galana pressed both hands to her face and laughed into them, helpless and mortified. I stood in her mother’s kitchen and watched her do it, and I thought, That. I want that every morning for the rest of my life.

When I left, she walked me to the door. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no either. She just put a foil-wrapped slice of medovik in my coat pocket and told me to eat it later, when nobody was watching.

I ate it in the car at the end of her road. My man Leo watched me do it from the driver’s seat of the SUV and very wisely said nothing.

Ivor is in Chicago for nine days.

He keeps a penthouse on the Gold Coast that he uses twice a year. It’s all glass and white marble and modern art, which I’m fairly sure his wife chose to annoy him. When the eLeoator doors open, the first thing I see is a plastic fire truck abandoned in the middle of a forty-thousand-dollar rug.

The second thing I see is my cousin on his hands and knees behind the sofa, wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit and a paper crown.

He reaches under the sofa and pulls out a toddler by the ankle, gently, like a man retrieving a cat. The boy shrieks with laughter. Dark hair, dark eyes, a Reznikov through and through. “Natasha. Our son is eating a crayon.”

“He’s your son when he eats crayons,” calls a woman’s voice from the other room.

Natasha comes through from what looks like a home office. She’s slight and fair, with stormy gray eyes and the kind of face that misses nothing. I met her once at the christening. I liked her immediately, which surprised both of us.

“Caleb.” She kisses my cheek. “He’s been unbearable all morning. He’s cleaned his gun twice.”

“I have not,” Ivor says.

“He has,” she tells me, and scoops up the boy and the crown in one practiced motion. “We’re going to the park. Try not to kill each other.”

When the eLeoator closes behind them, the penthouse goes very quiet. Ivor stands, brushes off his knees, and pours two glasses of vodka from a bottle on the sideboard. He hands me one and sits in a white leather chair like a king on his throne.