Page 40

“I’m being honest.” He almost smiles at that, something wry pulling at the corner of his mouth.

I asked for the truth, and I got it. It’s not comforting. But at least now I know what I’m dealing with.

“How old were you? When your father died, and all of this landed on you.”

“Twenty-Eight.” He says the number flat, without hesitation. “I’d been running the shipping side for six years already, so people assumed I was ready. I wasn’t. I learned how to order a man killed and how to sit across from his widow at the funeral in the same month, and I had maybe four people in this entire organization I actually trusted not to use that first year against me. Everyone else was waiting to see if I’d survive it.”

“That sounds lonely, though.”

“It was.” He looks at me for a long moment, something unguarded in his expression I haven’t seen from him before, not even on the terrace, not even in the quietest moments we’ve shared since. “Nobody asks that question. Most people ask what happened, what I did about it, and how I held onto the operation, but nobody asks whether it was lonely.”

“I’m asking.”

“I know.” His voice softens. “Yes. It was lonely. For a long time, actually.”

“Keep going,” I say. “Tell me the rest of it.”

And for the first time since I walked into the wrong penthouse months ago, he does.

“My father used to take me down to the port when I was a boy. Before any of this had a shape I understood.” He’s looking somewhere past me now, not at me exactly. “There was a corridor, third berth from the harbor office. He’d stand there for an hour sometimes, just watching the ships come in, and I never understood why until years later. That corridor is where this whole thing started. To me at eight years old, it was just docks. Men doing a job. I didn’t know I was looking at the reason my life would end up the way it has.”

“Did he ever tell you? What it actually meant?”

“Not until I was older. By then it didn’t feel like a story anymore. It felt like a debt I hadn’t agreed to inherit.”

He’s quiet for a second, and when he speaks again, there’s something lighter in it. “You want to know how I met Yuri?”

“Obviously.”

“Bar fight. I was twenty-three, still finding my feet, and some man decided I looked like an easy target. Yuri was three seats down, uninvolved, and somehow ended up finishing the fight I started badly. Broke the man’s nose in one hit.” A real smile pulls at his mouth now, rare enough that I notice it immediately. “Afterward he told me I owed him a drink for saving me from myself. I bought him one. Then another. We’ve been arguing about who actually owes who ever since. Neither of us has ever actually settled it.”

I laugh, real and unguarded, the first time in longer than I can remember that a sound like that has come out of me without effort behind it.

27

ARTEM

We stay in the library long after the stories run out; the fire burns down to embers, neither of us in any hurry to be the one who ends it.

The house has gone quiet around us.

Eventually the conversation quiets on its own, not from lack of things to say but from the type that settles in after giving someone more of yourself than you’ve given anyone in years. I watch her stretch, the motion unhurried.

“We should talk about how dangerous things actually are right now,” I say, because the honesty I promised her on the terrace doesn’t get to stop just because tonight’s been good. “Tomas’s phone had a message asking him to confirm whether you’re pregnant. He never got to answer it before Yuri caught him. But they’re looking for that confirmation now, actively, and that changes how much time we actually have.”

Her face sobers slightly, though she doesn’t pull away at all. “I know. I’ve been thinking about it too.”

“Security’s tighter than it’s ever been around here now. But it’s not entirely enough.” I hold her gaze, wanting her to understand the weight of it without it becoming another wall between us. “I need you to know that every day from here forward is going to carry more risk than the ones before it. I won’t pretend otherwise.”

“I don’t want you to pretend otherwise, not to me.” She reaches for my hand, threading her fingers through mine, her grip steadier than I expect it to be. “I told you. I can carry the truth.”

We sit with that for a moment, the fire popping in the grate, and I don’t want to talk about danger anymore tonight. I want to look at her.

Firelight catches the side of her face, warm against her skin, and she’s watching me back, no urgency in her at all tonight.

“Come here.” Her voice is barely more than breath.

I move from my seat and sit beside her on the couch. Close enough that my thigh presses against hers. Close enough that the firelight shows me every detail.