Epilogue
Iosif
The deadline was midnight.
It's now nine fourteen in the morning, and Yury is sitting in the chair across from my desk with a cup of coffee he hasn't touched, looking at me the way he's looked at me since I was twelve years old and broke a window with a baseball: patient, disappointed, and entirely unsurprised.
"You understand what this means," he says.
"Yes."
"The terms were clear. Twelve months. An heir. You were present when I laid them out. You nodded. You didn't argue."
"I didn't argue because I intended to find a way to comply."
"And yet."
"And yet," I agree spreading my hands in front of me.
He picks up the coffee. Sets it down again without drinking. A tell. Yury doesn't have many, but that's one. It means he's angry and choosing not to show it, which is somehow worse than if he showed it.
"Your cousins managed," he says. "Vitali. Leon. Avros. Even your brother, and we all know how he felt about it. All of them found a way. Some of them found a way in less-than-ideal circumstances, but they still found a way."
"Their circumstances were different."
"Their circumstances were comparable. The point is not the difference, Iosif. The point is the commitment. You gave your word."
I lean back in my chair. Look at the man who raised me after my parents died. When he was barely a man himself. Broad shoulders, sharp eyes. Hands that have done things I'll never ask about, clasped on his knee with the stillness of a man who learned patience the hard way.
He's right. I gave my word.
"I love her," I say.
He blinks. It's the closest I've ever seen Yury come to surprise.
"I know you love her," he says. "I knew it that first morning when you stood in your kitchen and told me you wouldn't use her. I'm not questioning whether you love her. I'm questioning why loving her didn't produce the outcome we agreed on."
"Because I refuse to rush her."
"Rush her." Flat. "It's been five months. Women know what they want, especially women as clever and clear-headed as Mia."
"She's been through something most people don't survive, Yury. She killed a man. She lost her entire life and rebuilt it inside mine. She has a job she went back to because she needed something that was hers. She has a best friend she’s had to lie to for months.
She's twenty-four. I wasn't going to put a ring on her finger and a baby in her belly on a timeline dictated by family politics. "
"So instead, you let the deadline pass."
"Yes."
"Knowing the consequences."
"Yes."
He's quiet. The office is quiet. Through the closed door I can hear the faint sounds of the house, Pavlina in the kitchen, a door closing somewhere upstairs. Mia is up there. She was still asleep when I came down, her hair fanned across my pillow, one hand resting on the space where I'd been.
Five months. She's been in my house for five months, and every single one of them has confirmed what I knew the first night.
She belongs here. With me. In my chair with her feet tucked under her, in my bed with her back against my chest, in my kitchen arguing with Pavlina about whether garlic belongs in porridge, which was a conversation I never expected to witness and which lasted forty-five minutes.
She's mine. I'm hers. That part isn't in question.
The part in question is the heir.
"I'll accept the consequences," I say. "Whatever you decide. Remove me from the inner circle. Restructure my share. Whatever it is, I'll take it. But I won't apologize for putting her wellbeing above a deadline."
Yury looks at me for a long time. His expression is unreadable, which means he's feeling several things at once and hasn't decided which one to lead with.
"You are," he says slowly, "the most stubborn man I have ever raised. And I raised five of you."
He opens his mouth to say something further, and that's when the door opens.
No knock. No warning. The door swings inward and Mia is standing there in one of my shirts, just the shirt, bare legs, hair unbrushed. She's holding something in her hand and her face is doing something I've never seen it do before.
She's shaking.
Not the way she shook that first night. Not fear. This is different. This is adrenaline and shock and something underneath both that looks, from where I'm sitting, a lot like joy.
"Iosif—" She stops. Sees Yury. The color drains from her face and floods back in the space of a second. "Oh god. I'm sorry. I didn't know you had a meeting. I'll come back."
She's already turning. Already retreating.
"Stay," Yury says.
She stops. Looks at him. Looks at me.
I'm already on my feet. I don't remember standing. My eyes are on the thing in her hand, small, white and plastic, and my chest is doing something that I don't have a name for.
"Close the door," Yury says. His voice has changed. Something in it I haven't heard before. "Come in, Mia."
She closes the door. She takes three steps into the room and stops. Her eyes are on mine. Bright. Wet. Her lower lip is caught between her teeth.
"I was going to wait," she says. Her voice is unsteady. "I was going to wait and plan this whole surprise for tonight, but I just—I couldn't—" She holds up the test. "Two lines. I took three. They're all two lines."
The room goes very still.
I look at the test. I look at her. I look at the test again.
Two lines.
Something detonates in my chest. Silent. Massive. The kind of detonation that rearranges the landscape.
"Mia." My voice doesn't sound like mine.
She reaches across the remaining distance and I take the test from her hand and look at it. Two lines. Clear. Definitive. I set it on the desk.
I look at Yury.
Yury is looking at Mia with an expression I've seen exactly once before — the morning after his son was born, standing in a hospital corridor at four a.m. It's not a soft expression. Yury doesn't do soft. But it's something close. Something adjacent.
"Mia," he says. "Sit down."
She sits in the chair next to his. She's still shaking. I come around the desk and stand beside her. My hand finds her shoulder. She reaches up and grips my fingers.
Yury leans forward. Elbows on his knees. Those sharp, pale eyes, the same shape as mine, fixed on her.
"Do you understand what this means?" he asks. "Not just the pregnancy. The family. What having this child commits you to. The name. The life. All of it."
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't look away. I watch her straighten in the chair the same way she straightened that first morning when she walked into a kitchen full of Dubovich men and introduced herself.
"Yes," she says. "Of course I understand."
"This isn't a normal family. The child will carry obligations. Expectations. There will be things you learn about us that you cannot unlearn."
"I know." Her voice is steady now. The shaking has stopped.
"I've been here long enough to figure most of it out.
I know what this family is. I know what he is.
" Her hand tightens on mine. "I'm choosing this.
I think I chose it that first night." She swings her eyes up to me and I watch them fill with tears which she presses back like a champ.
Yury watches her for a moment. Then he looks at me.
"She's better than you deserve," he says.
"I know."
"Don't waste it."
I smile at Mia. "I won't."
He stands. Picks up his coffee. Puts it down again, the tell, but different this time. He's not angry. He's something else.
He walks to the door. Pauses.
"I expect an invitation to the wedding," he says, without turning around.
Then he's gone.
The door clicks shut. The room is quiet.
"He said wedding," she says.
"He did."
"We haven't talked about—"
"I know." I let go of her hand. She blinks. I see the flicker of confusion cross her face, and then I drop to one knee in front of the chair.
Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
I take her hand again. Her fingers are trembling. Mine aren't. For the first time in months, mine are completely still.
"I don't have a ring," I say. "I have one. It's in the safe. I've had it since January. But it's in the safe because I was waiting for the right moment, and this isn't the moment I planned."
"You've had a ring since January?"
"Since January."
"That's when we met."
"I'm aware."
"Iosif Dubovich, you've had an engagement ring in your safe for five months and you didn't—"
"I was waiting," I say. "I told you. I wasn't going to rush you."
She stares at me. Then she laughs. It's the laugh from the library, the first real one she gave me, bright and raw and full, and it fills the room the same way it filled the library that night.
"You absolute—" She shakes her head. "Ask me."
"Marry me."
"That's not a question."
"It's not meant to be."
She looks at me. I look at her. She's in my shirt with no ring and messy hair and bare feet on the floor of my office, and she's carrying my child, and she is the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me.
"Okay," she says as she breaks into a massive grin.
One word. The same word she's given me from the start. In the corridor. In the office. In the kitchen. In the library. In this office. Every single time, that word. Small and clear and certain.
I pull her out of the chair and into me. She wraps around me the way she always wraps around me, legs and arms and all of her. Her face presses into my neck. I feel her breathing. Fast. Unsteady. Happy.
"I need to get the ring," I say against her hair.
"Later."
"It's a good ring."
"I’m sure it is, but I need something else from you right now." She pulls back. Looks at me. Drops her mouth to mine with a kiss that tells me exactly what she wants. “I’m super horny,” she murmurs, wriggling against me.
I carry her out of the office and through the hallway and past the kitchen where Pavlina looks up from whatever she's doing and sees Mia in my arms, and the look on my face, and Pavlina smiles in a way that says she already knows.