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“You’re changing,” he murmurs against my mouth. “I like watching it happen.”
“I noticed.”
He smiles a little into the next kiss. The want rises between us, clear and mutual, but neither of us reaches for more. The restraint feels deliberate on both sides.
When he finally pulls back, it’s only by a few inches. His hand remains on my stomach a moment longer, thumb still moving in those small strokes, before he eases it away.
He pulls back first, just slightly, enough space to breathe again, though his hand doesn’t leave my stomach right away.
“We should get some sleep,” he says, and his voice still carries the roughness from a minute ago, unconvinced by his own suggestion.
“Should we?”
“Probably not tonight.” A small, wry smile pulls at his mouth. “Doesn’t mean I’m going to listen to my own advice.”
I laugh, surprised by how easily it comes, and some of the charge in the room settles into something warmer instead, still humming underneath but no longer urgent. He tugs the hem of my discarded dress off the floor and folds it without being asked, setting it over the chair, an oddly domestic gesture from a man who spent his first months here questioning me at gunpoint in a room I never chose to be in.
“You’re smiling,” he says, catching me watching him do it, an easy quiet settling over the room now that has nothing left of the earlier tension’s urgency in it.
“I’m allowed to.”
“You are.” He crosses back to me, pressing a kiss to my forehead this time instead of anywhere more charged, gentler than anything else tonight, a promise of sorts folded into the small gesture. “Get changed. I’ll wait.”
He climbs into bed beside me anyway, pulling me back against his chest, his hand finding its way back to my stomach in the dark as it belongs there now, a habit forming faster than either of us seems to be tracking, one more unspoken thing that’s crept into place between us over these last few weeks.
“Goodnight,” he says against my hair.
“Goodnight.” I close my eyes, his hand warm against me, the tension from earlier still sitting quietly in the room, unfinished but not unwelcome, something we’ll come back to eventually, on our own time, without either of us needing to rush toward it tonight.
I fall asleep faster than I expect to, his heartbeat steady against my back, and for the first time since I noticed the dress fitting differently this morning, I don’t feel exposed by the change at all.
I feel seen.
29
ARTEM
I have Marek double the perimeter patrols starting Monday, staggering the shifts so no pattern repeats itself twice in the same week. I go over the rotation with him twice, checking for the exact gap that let Tomas move as freely as he did for as long as he did.
We reinforce the east gate too, the one Tomas used most often for his own comings and goings before Yuri caught him, a soft point in the property I should have hardened months ago instead of trusting the standard lock and a rotating guard to hold it.
New cameras go up along that stretch by Wednesday, feeding directly into a monitor bank Yuri checks personally now instead of leaving it to whoever’s on shift alone. I have the feed routed to my own phone as well, a small redundancy that costs nothing and might catch something an exhausted guard misses at three in the morning.
It’s the kind of work that used to satisfy something in me. The sense that enough diligence can outpace any threat if you’re willing to put in the hours. Lately it doesn’t land the same way. I finish each adjustment and immediately start calculating what still isn’t covered instead of feeling any relief at what is.
Yuri finds me on the east perimeter Thursday afternoon, inspecting the new camera placement himself rather than trusting the installer’s word that the angles cover what they’re supposed to cover.
“They’re not backing off.” He says it without preamble, the way he says most things that matter. “I’ve got two separate contacts telling me the Sokolovs have gone quiet the last week. They’ve not stood down, though. Just quiet.”
“Quiet how, exactly?”
“No chatter through the usual channels or movement on the routes we’ve been watching because they’re regrouping.” He crosses his arms, watching the same stretch of fence I’ve been studying. “Viktor’s patient when he wants to be. He’s not going to make another move until he’s confident it will work.”
I already knew that. “How long do you think we actually have left?”
“No way to know for certain, not yet. Weeks, maybe. Could be longer if he’s rebuilding contacts after losing Tomas.” Yuri’s jaw tightens. “Could be days if he decides the risk of waiting outweighs the risk of moving too soon.”
That range isn’t nothing to work with, but it isn’t much either, a window wide enough to plan around and narrow enough to keep me from ever fully exhaling.
