Iosif
Sundays are usually my day off. But with everything that’s happened since Mia found herself at my club, it makes sense that work has to happen today.
First, a text from Zakhar to say that the woman who overdosed on Friday night has been found and the jewelry he planted on her has traced back to Vinzlee. Vinzlee’s son has accepted the course of events and is looking for no other connections to his father’s death.
There have been a few messages to Mia’s phone from Sasha, and Mia has responded with her condolences.
Ultimately, it’s now safe for Mia to return to her apartment. Only I don’t know how I really feel about that.
That's not true. I know exactly how I feel about it.
I feel like the idea of her packing the few items she has into a bag and walking out of my front door and going back to an apartment in the city where she earns minimum wage and sleeps alone is physically repellent to me.
I feel like the idea of this house without her in it, without her voice, without her smell, without her feet tucked under her in my chair, is a version of my life I no longer want to return to.
I know how I feel. I just don't have a protocol for it.
She's in the kitchen. I can hear Pavlina talking to her, the low murmur of it.
Pavlina likes her. That's not insignificant.
Pavlina has run this household for eleven years and has outlasted three of my relationships by simply being impossible to replace.
She doesn't warm to people easily. She warmed to Mia in under twenty-four hours, and I watched it happen with the specific discomfort of a man who is watching his entire domestic infrastructure reorganize itself around a woman he hasn't asked to stay.
The threat to her gone. Every operational reason for keeping Mia here has been resolved.
The non-operational reasons are a different matter.
I put the phone down and go to find her.
She's sitting at the kitchen island. Coffee in both hands.
Hair pulled back. Wearing the grey jumper again, the one that's too large, the one that makes her look like she's been swallowed by something soft.
She looks up when I come in, and there it is again, that direct, blue gaze, unguarded, and the faint color that rises in her cheeks when she sees me, which tells me she's thinking about last night and this morning and the library and the table and all of it.
Good. I'm thinking about it too.
"Morning," she says.
"Morning."
Pavlina sets a cup of coffee in front of me and disappears.
I sit across from Mia. I look at her. She looks at me.
"Zakhar confirmed it this morning," I say. "Vinzlee's death has been attributed to a burglary gone wrong. His son isn't looking for anyone else. You're safe."
She absorbs this. I watch the information land. Watch the tension she's been carrying, quietly, underneath everything, even underneath last night, ease by a fraction.
"So it's over," she says.
"The danger is over. Yes."
She nods. Wraps her hands tighter around the mug. Looks down at the coffee.
"Which means I can go back to my place," she says.
It's not a question. It's a statement of fact, delivered in the same tone I'd use. Clean. Accurate. And underneath it, something else. Something she's not saying.
"You can," I say.
The kitchen clock ticks. Outside the window, the grounds are white with frost. The same grey January landscape she looked out at yesterday morning when she asked me about the mandate, and I told her the truth because this woman gets the truth.
She still gets the truth.
"I don't want you to go," I say.
Her eyes come up. Fast.
"That's not a demand," I say. "It's not a condition. You are free to walk out of this house whenever you want. Gregor will drive you. Your apartment is safe. Your life is waiting for you. Nothing I say next changes any of that."
She's watching me with that expression I recognize. The one that means she's thinking fast behind the stillness.
"But I need you to know," I say, "that the last forty-eight hours have changed something for me. And I don't think it's something that changes back."
She sets the mug down. Her hands are steady.
"I spent all day yesterday telling myself I was protecting you," I continue.
"That I was being decent. That the right thing to do was keep my distance and manage the situation and let you go when it was safe.
" I pause. "I was wrong. Not about protecting you.
About the distance. The distance was me being a coward. "
"You're not a coward."
"I am when it comes to this." I hold her gaze.
"I don't do this. I don't sit in rooms reading with someone and feel like my life is better for it.
I don't carry people upstairs and want to do it again.
I don't wake up at four in the morning wanting someone so badly it overrides every rational thought I've had in the last decade. "
Her lips part. Color floods her face and throat.
"You asked me yesterday about a contract," I say. "An arrangement. A transaction. And I said no because I didn't want you to think that's what this was."
"I remember."
"I'm asking you something different now.
" I lean forward. My forearms on the counter.
My eyes on hers. "Stay. Not as a contract.
Not as an arrangement. Not because of a mandate or a deadline or because you need protection.
Stay because I want you here. Because I think you want to be here.
Because this —" I gesture between us, the space that has been charged since the moment she sat in my chair and argued about Edith Wharton "— is real. I think we both know it's real."
She doesn't say anything for a long moment.
I wait. I'm good at waiting. It's one of my better skills, the ability to sit inside an uncomfortable silence and let it resolve on its own terms.
"Your uncle's mandate," she says quietly.
"Irrelevant."
"It's not irrelevant, Iosif. You have a deadline."
"I had a deadline before you walked into my club. It's not why I'm asking."
"People will think it is."
"I don't care what people think."
"Your family will think it is."
"My family can think what they like. Yury already thinks he called it. Zakhar will be smug. My cousins will have opinions. None of that has any bearing on what I'm saying to you right now."
She looks at me. Those blue eyes. Steady.
Clear. The same clarity she had when she told me to stop deciding for her, and the same clarity she had when she sat in this kitchen and offered herself up like a solution, except now there's something else in it.
Something warmer. Something that has been building since a corridor and a torn dress and a woman who didn't cry.
"I have an apartment," she says. "And a job. And a best friend who's just lost her uncle because of me."
"I know."
"I earn minimum wage. I have student debt. I own approximately four nice dresses, one of which is currently evidence in a covered-up murder." The corner of her mouth moves. "I'm not exactly what your uncle had in mind when he issued a legacy mandate."
"My uncle had heirs in mind. I have you in mind. There's a difference."
Something shifts in her face. Softens.
"You barely know me," she says.
"I know enough."
"You know me in crisis. You know me scared and sleep-deprived and wearing borrowed clothes. That's not—"
"I know you argue about Wharton. I know you drink your coffee with both hands.
I know you push food around a bowl when you're thinking.
I know you offered to help a stranger because you saw two problems and thought they could solve each other.
I know you told me to stop deciding for you, and you were right.
" I pause. "I know what you sound like when you come. And the way you taste…"
Her breath catches. The flush deepens.
"That's enough to start with," I say. "The rest I'll learn."
She's quiet. Her fingers trace the rim of the mug. I watch her think. I watch the calculations run behind her eyes, the practical ones, the emotional ones, the ones that involve risk assessment and self-preservation and the specific, hard-won caution of a woman who has been let down before.
I wait.
"If I stay," she says slowly, "I stay as myself. Not as a solution. Not as an arrangement. I keep my job. I see Sasha. I have my own life that exists outside of whatever this is."
"Yes."
"And if it doesn't work—"
"Then you leave. No consequences. No debts. No leverage."
"You say that now."
"I'll say it again in a month. And the month after that. And the month after that. As many times as you need to hear it."
She looks at me for a long time. The kitchen is quiet. Frost on the windows. Coffee cooling between us.
Then she smiles.
Not the ghost of one. Not the scaffolding. A real, full smile that starts in her eyes and reaches her mouth and changes the geometry of her whole face, and I feel it hit me in my chest like a fist.
"Okay," she says.
One word. The same word she's given me twice before. In the corridor of my club when I told her to come with me. In my office when I told her I was taking her out of the city. Both times it meant I'm trusting you against my better judgement.
This time it means something else.
"Okay," I say back.
She laughs. Short and bright and real. "That's it? Just okay?"
"What were you expecting?"
"I don't know. Something more dramatic. You swept books off a table last night."
"That was a different context."
"It was a very effective context."
I look at her across the kitchen counter, this woman who killed a man in self-defense and walked through a city alone and landed at my door by accident and argued about literature and told me to stop being careful and chose me, and I think about the mandate and the deadline and my uncle and my cousins and every single one of them falling, one by one, into exactly this.
I understand them now. Every one of them. The way they looked at the women across from them and saw the rest of their lives.
I reach across the counter and take her hand. Her fingers are warm from the coffee. Small in mine. She lets me hold them.
"I need to call my uncle," I say.
"What will you tell him?"
"That I've met someone."
"Will he approve?"
"He'll approve of the outcome. The details he can learn to live with."
She turns my hand over. Traces a line across my palm with her fingertip. A gesture so small and so intimate it does more to me than anything that happened last night.
"Iosif," she says.
"Yes."
"I'm glad I found my way to your club."
I close my hand around her finger. Hold it.
"So am I," I say.
My phone buzzes. Yury.
I ignore it.
He can wait. They can all wait. The mandate, the deadline, the family, the operations, the empire. All of it can wait.
Right now, I'm sitting in my kitchen holding the hand of a woman who looks at me and sees the man instead of the empire, and that is enough. That is more than enough.
It's everything.