43. Ariel
43
ARIEL
Judas is acting up again. It’s dark and sticky, with not a breath of breeze or A/C to break up the hot monotony of summer in Italy.
And yet I still wish I had Sasha’s heat next to me. I’m lying in bed, drowning in the oversized fabric of his shirt that I couldn’t bring myself to wash after he left. His cedar-and-mint scent still clings to the collar, though it’s starting to fade.
The twins are restless tonight, turning and kicking like they know something’s wrong. I press my palm against the spot where Thing 1 is doing somersaults. “Shh,” I whisper. “I miss him, too.”
The call earlier left a sour taste in my mouth. All those stilted words and silences that said too much and not enough.
I roll onto my side, the mattress groaning under my weight, and stare at the wall. Moonlight pierces through the shutters, painting jagged lines across the plaster. I’m so tired—of the pregnancy, of the distance, of feeling like I’m losing him all over again. I’m so tired of being tired, and I feel like I’ve been exactly this tired for a long, long time.
My phone screen suddenly blazes to life on the nightstand. Sasha’s name appears above the FaceTime icon. My heart lurches. We just talked—well, attempted to talk—less than an hour ago. What could he possibly…?
I almost let it ring out. Almost.
But my finger slides across the screen before I can stop it.
Sasha’s face fills my screen, and the sight of him knocks the air from my lungs. His hair is mussed, like he’s been running his hands through it. The usual pristine dress shirt is wrinkled, top buttons undone. There are shadows under his eyes that weren’t there when he left Italy.
“Sasha, is everything?—”
“I couldn’t sleep. Not after— Fuck, I can’t stop thinking about you.” He drags a hand through his hair, and I catch the flicker of a pink hair tie on his wrist—mine, from months and months ago. “I’m tearing myself apart here. This city, this war… it’s eating me alive, but I need you to know that I’m doing it for you. For them.”
His gaze drops to my belly, and I shift, suddenly aware of how the shirt rides up, exposing the swell.
“Sasha—”
“No, listen.” He leans closer, the screen trembling in his grip. “I’m a bastard, I know that. I’ve fucked up more times than I can count. But every move I make, every bullet I fire—it’s to keep you safe. To give our kids a world where they don’t have to run.” His voice breaks on run , and I see it: the boy beneath the scar, the one Yakov tried to choke out of him. “I’m not good at this. Staying soft, staying open—it terrifies me. But losing you… that’s worse.”
Something hot and painful expands in my chest. “You think I care about that? About territory and power? All I want is?—”
“Me,” he finishes. “I know. But don’t you see? That’s what I’m fighting for. The chance to be that man. The one who stays. The one who tends gardens instead of burying bodies beneath them.” His eyes bore into mine through the screen. “I’m not running away from that future. I’m trying to secure it.”
I press my fingers against my lips, fighting back tears. “And what if securing it kills you?”
“It won’t.” The familiar steel enters his voice. “Because I have something worth coming back for now. Something worth living for.”
A tiny foot kicks against my ribs, as if in agreement. Despite everything, I find myself smiling. “Three somethings, actually.”
His answering smile is soft and fierce and everything I’ve been aching for since he left.
The cicadas outside reach a fever pitch. Sasha’s pixelated face waits, suspended in the blue-lit dark. My thumb brushes the screen before I can stop it, smearing his jawline into a watercolor wound.
“I’m not—” My voice splinters. I try again. “I’m not angry you left, you know. Well, it’s not just that.”
He doesn’t interrupt. Just gives me the space I need to unfold everything that’s been swelling up inside of me.
“It’s that I’m terrified .” I swallow and keep going. “That I’ll spend the rest of my life explaining to our children why the city mattered more than they did. That you chose New York over?—”
He stands abruptly, camera jostling as he strides to the penthouse balcony. Night wind snarls his hair. For one heart-stopping second, I think he’ll hang up.
Instead, he flips the camera.
New York sprawls below—a beast made of light and skyscraper fangs. His voice comes rough through the speakers. “I want you to look at this, Ariel. Look at all of it very, very carefully.” His finger comes into the screen. “You see the green glow? That’s the Met. Over there, at the foot of that building, is the restaurant where we had our first dinner. The spa is to the east. If you squint, you can see Central Park, where we sat on a bench and had hot dogs. This city is filled with the places that made us us, Ariel.”
Sasha flips the camera back on his face. The expression there makes my breath seize up in my throat. Eyes black with intensity, jaw clenched tight. “And you know what? If it was going to cost me you or our children, I’d strike the match to burn it all down myself.”
I touch my quivering lips. “Sasha…”
“I used to think that the past was what mattered. There are alleys I’ve bled in out there, courtesy of my father’s hand. Stretches of asphalt that held my mother until she died. Do those get to hold the same sway over me that the places we first kissed do? No. Fuck no. The city isn’t a kingdom, ptichka. It’s a grave.”
Wind whips the microphone. Far below him, a lonely siren wails.
“But you—” He brings the phone close until his scar fills the screen, until I can count each stitch mark Yakov left. “You’re the resurrection.”
The twins kick hard enough to ripple the shirt of his I’m wearing. His gaze drops, transfixed.
“I’m coming home,” he rasps. “Not for power. Not for pride.” Callused fingers brush the camera in a ghost caress. “But for the first sunrise you wake in my arms with our children between us.”
Manhattan’s heartbeat thrums through the speakers—subway growls, taxi horns, the million chaotic rhythms that built him. But underneath, steady as a pulse:
“Because I love you, Ariel Ward.”
I shift position, trying to find a comfortable angle despite my heavily pregnant belly. His shirt, swaddled around me, rides up again as I move. Through the phone, I hear Sasha’s sharp intake of breath.
“I miss you,” I whisper into the darkness.
“I miss you, too,” he growls back. “Every part of you.”
“Which part of me, specifically? The hormonal crying? The peeing every ten minutes? Or the?—”
“All of it.” His knuckle whitens where it grips the phone. “Every impossible, infuriating inch.”
I can feel the energy shifting. From the dark, swirling angst to something… hotter. My skin is flushing, nipples hardening, as he bites his lip and lets out a barely restrained snarl that unlocks something inside me.
“Which inches do you miss the most?” I tease. I let my hand trail down and tease up the hem of his shirt. “Like… this one?”
He gulps. “That one,” he agrees. “One of my favorites.”
I hike the shirt higher, up to the bottoms of my breasts, though I keep my hips turned so that, even though I’m not wearing any underwear, all he can see of my lower half is my outer thigh.
“How about this one?”
“That one might be even better.”
His breath is haggard over the phone. Even though he’s half a world away, mine is, too. I can practically feel his imaginary fingertips replacing mine, peeling my shirt higher, until one aching nipple comes free.
“You’re such a pretty fucking angel for me, Ariel. Fuck, I want to watch you devour yourself.”
I gnaw at the inside of my cheek. “It’d be better if you were here to do it for me.”
“Oh, but I am,” he snarls. “All you have to do is close your eyes and let me take over.”
I do what he says. His voice starts to come through in a savage rumble, dripping with wet heat.
“I’d tweak each nipple into a peak. You’d feel that little zing of shock ripping through you. You’d gasp so fucking pretty for me, wouldn’t you? And I’d pass my tongue right between those parted lips so I could kiss the gasp right out of your mouth.”
I’m doing everything he says as he says it. My nipples zing, my lips part, the gasp flies free. I can hear the smile in Sasha’s voice as I obey.
“I’d take my time crawling back down you. I’d push that shirt up and off. I’d worship every fucking inch of your body.”
I groan and let my hands slide down in time with his instructions. Past stretch marks that branch like lightning forks, the dark line bisecting my belly, the thatch of auburn curls between my legs.
“By the time I got that low, you’d be so ready for me. But I’d wait just a minute longer. Not too much longer, because I’m so fucking ready for you, too, Ariel. But one minute. Because nothing is better than watching you squirm.”
“I want you, Sasha.”
“Have me then. Let me lap you up while I clench your thighs in my hands. Let me slide two fingers into you and twist them in that way that makes you fall the fuck apart. Let me hear you moan while I do it, because nothing in the world can ever make me harder than you telling me you want me as bad as I want you.”
I’m touching myself now, rubbing my clit in a blur as my back arches up off the bed.
“By the time I finally push inside you,” he purrs, “we’re both so close to coming, aren’t we? We’re both right on that edge. It won’t take much. I’ll pin your face against my chest so your moans are for me and me alone. And I’ll fuck you so slow and sweet that you don’t know where one stroke stops and the next begins. You’ll come for me once, right on my cock, because you’re a perfect filthy angel. Maybe I’ll even let you come a second time. And then right when I can’t possibly hold back anymore, I’ll come, too.”
“I’ll take it,” I gasp. “I’ll take it all. I want you so, so badly, Sasha.”
He grins. “Good girl. Show me how you fall apart. And Ariel… you’d better look at me when you come.”
The pressure builds cruel and sweet—ripe peaches splitting their skins. His choked groan as I crest syncs perfectly with the pulse between my legs. White light fractures the screen when I start to convulse, his shirt damp with sweat and other things.
“I— I— I— I love you, Sasha Ozerov.”
Post-climax tremors make the phone wobble in my grip.
When I finally still, he’s breathing like he ran here from Manhattan. We stare at each other through the pixelated wreckage—naked in ways that have nothing to do with skin.
I gulp, my mouth suddenly dry. “Did you…?”
Sasha shakes his head. “No, and I don’t want to. I’m saving myself for you, ptichka. When I get back — that’s when I fucking get back, not ‘if’—I’m going to give you every single part of me. Head to toe, heart to soul. And then I’m going to give you more babies, once we have these ones in our arms. And more, and more. Do you hear me, Ariel? Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” I whisper through tears and aftershocks and heartache and love. “Yes, Sasha, I believe you.”
Neither of us wants to hang up. I lie down, but I prop my phone on the pillow beside me, adjusting the angle so I can still see Sasha’s face through my heavy-lidded eyes. The tender way he’s looking at me makes my heart squeeze in my chest.
“You should sleep,” he murmurs.
“So should you.” I nestle deeper into the pillow, pulling his shirt tighter around me. “Big day of mobster stuff tomorrow.”
His lips quirk. “Something like that.”
“You know what I mean.” I yawn, unable to fight the post-orgasmic drowsiness anymore. “Just… be careful, okay?”
The twins shift inside me, settling down for the night. I place my palm over the spot where Thing 2 just kicked. Through the screen, I see Sasha’s eyes track the movement.
“I wish you could feel them,” I whisper. “They’re so active tonight.”
“Soon.” His voice is rough, strangled. “I’ll be home soon.”
The word home catches in my chest. I don’t have to ask where exactly home is anymore. I know what he’s say: It’s wherever we are together.
My eyelids grow heavier with each blink. Sasha’s face blurs at the edges, but I fight to keep looking at him. I’m afraid that, if I close my eyes, he’ll disappear forever, washed away like chalk drawings in the rain.
“Sleep,” he says again, softer this time. “I’ll stay on until you do.”
“Promise?”
“I swear it.”
His face is the last thing I see as consciousness starts to slip away—those blue eyes watching over me, protective even through thousands of miles of digital distance.
Just before sleep claims me completely, I hear him whisper something. The words float through my mind like dandelion seeds, too delicate to grasp fully.
“Marry me, ptichka .”
But I’m already drifting off, unable to tell if it’s real or just another dream about the future I want so desperately with him.
That’s okay. If he means it, he’ll ask me again when he’s home.