Chapter 16
PAVEL
I want to tell her she’s wrong, but she’s not wrong.
She’s not wrong about any of it—not about the proposal, not about the timing, not about the door, or who should be the one to open it.
I understand what she said. I understand it more completely than she knows, because I have spent twenty years making decisions for people who didn’t get to make them for themselves.
Her mother. Fifteen years old and desperate enough to run toward anything that looked like escape, not realizing she was dooming her child to be haunted by that decision.
I think about that for a moment, and the particular anger I reserve for men who use their size and their authority to diminish the people in their care bubbles to the surface. Molly’s grandfather. A man I will never meet and do not need to meet to understand completely.
He was a bully. I have spent many years fighting men like that, and, in some ways, have become the same because of that fight.
I proposed to Molly like the children were the argument for marriage, like I was her grandfather standing behind her with the circumstances in my hand instead of a gun.
I understand why she said no. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that she has to say yes anyway.
I come around the desk. I don’t reach for her.
I stand close enough that she has to look up at me, and she can’t look away easily.
“I understand what you told me. I understand why you said no, and I’m not dismissing it, no matter what this may sound like.
What your mother went through is an awful thing that happened, and what you feel because of it is legitimate, and none of that is something I intend to argue with. ”
“But?”
I hold her gaze steadily. “But I need you to hear something now, and I need you to hear it the way I mean it, which is not as a man trying to get his way. It is as a man trying to keep you alive.”
Something shifts in her expression. “Keep me alive?”
“Fedor Vinogradov knows about you. Do you know who he is?”
“I’ve heard his name whispered by your men, but that’s about it.”
“That is a shame. This would be easier if you already knew.” I lean on the desk to settle in for the explanation.
“One of his men sat across a table from me and used you as a bargaining chip. He said the word safe like it was a threat, which it was, and it meant that Fedor has already identified you as the mechanism by which he intends to make me compliant.” I let that sit for a moment.
“You understand what compliant means in this context.”
Her deep breath and long exhale tell me a lot already. “So, all this time, all these precautions, Vet, it’s all… real.”
“Quite.”
“How come you never told me before?”
“That’s a valid question. One I don’t have a good answer for.
The truth is, I am selfish, and I wanted you around.
So, I didn’t tell you directly about what being with me could mean.
That was wrong of me, and for that, I am sorry.
” Why does apology feel like defeat? “But the facts remain that Fedor, an enemy of mine, knows your name and knows you are special to me. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes,” she says quietly. “I understand what it means.”
“In the world of the bratva, a girlfriend is disposable.”
“Real progressive of you people.”
I snort at that and move on. “A man’s girlfriend is a vulnerability. She’s a target of opportunity, a means to an end, something that can be used and discarded because there is no formal structure protecting her. There are no old laws, no codes, nothing that places her beyond reach.”
“Lucky me.”
I stop because I know she will not like this part.
Then I make myself continue, because what we like does not matter.
Not now. “A wife is different. There are men in the Bratva—not all of them, not even most of them, but enough—who still hold to the old ways. Men who consider a pakhan’s wife untouchable in a way that a girlfriend simply is not.
It is not sentiment. It is code, and code has weight in my world in ways that sentiment does not. ”
“Convenient for you.”
I hold her gaze, ignoring the half insult. “Fedor, for all his willingness to dismantle everything I have built, is one of those men. I have known him long enough to know where his lines are, and a wife is behind one of them.”
Molly is quiet, looking at me with those steady brown eyes, and I can see her turning it over. She wants to fight this, but she sees the math as clearly as I do. “Oh.”
“So this isn’t about romance,” I say, and it tastes like a lie. “I like you, Molly. But what I am describing is not a romantic proposal. It’s a survival strategy. A structure designed to keep you and our children alive.”
The words sit in the room, the intruder between us.
I’m not sure, in this moment, who I am lying to.
Her, or myself, or both of us equally. I like you.
As though what I feel for this woman, what has been moving through me since the word twins landed in my chest and rearranged every fixed point I have ever navigated by, is something as manageable and contained as liking.
As though the proposal that came out of me twenty minutes ago was a strategy rather than the most honest and unmanaged thing I have said in twenty years.
This marriage, if she agrees to it, will not be a strategic arrangement for me.
It will be the truest thing I have ever done.
But telling her that now, in this room, with the timing what it is and the proposal what it was, will sound exactly like what it isn’t—a man saying whatever is necessary to get the answer he wants.
Molly looks at me for a long moment. She is very still in the way she’s still when she’s thinking something through completely, rather than responding to the surface of it. “This is an impossible situation.”
There is no compromise in which we are both happy with the outcome of this situation. No happy medium. Either she is forced into a marriage to stay alive, which is her nightmare, or she dies, which is my nightmare.
“Yes. It is impossible.” From her perspective, I imagine so. But from my perspective, the impossible thing is to not take her every bristle, her every refusal personally. “Is it truly so unthinkable to marry me?”
“Not at all,” she says, and there’s something in her voice that is quieter than the rest of the conversation has been. “But until thirty seconds ago, I didn’t even know you thought of me as your girlfriend, Pavel.”
Well, fuck.
Everything Sister Mary Patrick said was right.
I have had Molly beside me for years, have been inside this thing with her for months, and I have never once used the word.
Never once made it explicit, given her the formal acknowledgment of what she is to me, what she has been.
I kept the distance because distance felt like safety, because naming it felt like exposure, because a man in my position who admits to a girlfriend has handed his enemies a roadmap.
Instead, I handed her an ambiguity and expected her to be comfortable inside it, without even explaining why.
“Then I have been a fool,” I say quietly. The words come without difficulty. “I should have asked you to be my girlfriend. To be with me. Properly, explicitly, the way it deserved to be done.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I convinced myself that you deserved to feel safe, rather than targeted.”
“Even though being with you makes me a target?”
I close my eyes to avoid the anger on her face. “Yes. For that, I am sorry, Molly.”
She swallows hard. “I see.”
“There are many things I should have done right. I don’t want this to be one of them. This is something I can fix. I will do anything within my power to keep you safe. All three of you.”
“How do you keep us safe from you?” Her voice wobbles as her question burns. “You kept me in the dark—”
“Let me bring you into the light. Let me keep you safe with a ring.”
The silence that follows is a different quality than the silences that preceded it.
She looks away from me, toward the window, toward the city laid out in its evening amber and cold white, and she is quiet long enough that I don’t try to fill it.
Molly’s silences are working silences, and interrupting them is counterproductive.
Then she says, without looking back at me, “Will it be a big ring?”
Something loosens in my chest with an almost physical sensation. “The biggest I can find. If that’s what you want.”
“Not the biggest.” She looks back at me, and there’s something in her face that is almost a smile, the slightly crooked one that does something structurally unsound to my concentration regardless of the circumstances. “I don’t want to get mugged.”
I look at her for a moment. “Is that a yes?”
The smile grows by a degree, and I watch it grow, and underneath it there is something that hurts to see—a twinge of sadness, the trace of a thing she is setting aside in favor of what she has to do. I do not acknowledge that pain, but I will not pretend it doesn’t exist.
I will give Molly Bennett the life she deserves. Better, even.
“Yes, Pavel,” she says quietly, and the sadness in her smile is a small blade that I accept as my due. “I’ll marry you.”