Chapter 25
MOLLY
“No. I am not packing in the morning. Or ever.”
He looks at me. “Molly—”
“No.” I move the book off my lap, and I sit up straighter. “I have listened to my husband after he lied to me. Multiple times. After he abandoned me in the middle of the night with guards, warning them to watch out for me or else.”
“You heard that?”
“Your voice carries, husband. If you didn’t want me to hear you, then you should have that door soundproofed. I have heard everything you said, and I understand it, and I’m telling you that my answer is no.”
He’s quiet, watching me, and I can see him preparing the argument. I speak before he can deploy it.
“You have been making decisions about my life since before I knew there was a decision being made,” I say.
“Vet. The cameras on my building. The routes and the protocols and the counter-surveillance and all of it—you built a structure around me without telling me it existed, and I have made my peace with that, because I understand why you did it and I understand what it cost you and I understand that it came from the same place everything you do comes from, which is the need to protect what matters to you.”
“You are holding that against me in this—”
“No. This is different. This is you deciding where I live. Where I raise our children. Whether I get to be beside the man I married or whether I get to be safe in a city that is not mine, with a woman who is wonderful and is not you, waiting for a life to begin that has already begun. Ordering me around like I’m your employee instead of your wife. ”
“The safety—”
“Do you want me for your wife or your employee, Pavel? Which is it?”
“You are my wife—”
“Then treat me like it. I woke up in a hospital because of the violence of your world. You are not surprising me by telling me it’s dangerous. I know there are more people like Fedor out there. I’m not a fool. I’m here telling you that I know all of it, and I’m choosing a life with you anyway.”
He stares. He just stares at me for a full minute, and I can’t read him right now. “How—how can you pick this life?”
“I pick you. This life is a part of the package.” I shrug.
Tears edge the bottom of his lashes. “You deserve so much more than this—”
“I love you. Nothing else matters to me.”
Something moves through his expression. He doesn’t speak.
“Vet is gone,” I say, and the saying of it does what it always does, which is press on the place that has not stopped hurting and will not for a long time.
“Vladimir is gone. And I will not let what happened to them be the reason I leave, because leaving would mean that Fedor won something from them after he killed them, and I’m not willing to give him that.
I’m not willing to let him take me out of my own life. ” I look at Pavel steadily. “Are you?”
The room is very quiet. He looks at me for a long moment. “You do not understand what I am afraid of.”
“Then tell me what you’re afraid of.”
“I’m afraid of a morning when I wake up, and you are not in the world.
I’m afraid of a version of my life in which the thing I have done by loving you is the thing that ends you.
I cannot—” He stops. “I cannot live with being the cause of that. I would rather lose you to Chicago than lose you to this world entirely.”
I get up from the bed. I stop in front of him, and I take his face in my hands, and I look at him from very close, at those pale blue eyes that are not cold at all.
“Then we fight. Together. That is what I am asking. Not to pretend the danger isn’t real.
Not to ignore the cost. Just—fight for us the way you fight for everything else you refuse to lose.
Because I refuse to give something up for fear of losing it. ”
He looks at me for a long moment, and then his hands come up to cover mine where they rest on his face. “You are the most stubborn woman I have ever encountered in my life.”
“You should have thought about that before you married me.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. The almost-smile that lives in my heart. “Yes,” he says. “I should have.” And then he kisses me.
He folds me into his arms and lays me onto the bed, and only then do I remember I’m naked. Saved us some time. He peels his layers away, and my heart stops. “Your arm!”
There’s a cut that runs circular around his right forearm, smeared with blood and clasped by butterfly bandages.
“It’s fine—”
“That is not fine!”
But I know the look in his eyes. He has seen me spread out on the bed before him. Nothing will change his mind now. “When I touch you, the pain is gone. Do you want me to stop touching you?”
I laugh. “That’s manipulative as fuck, and you know it.”
He grins as his hand skims up my left inner thigh. “Do you want me to stop touching you?” Then he touches me there, the barest flick of his thumb on my clit.
“You’re such a bastard—”
“You say such cruel things, wife.” He finishes undressing, managing to keep his thumb working me over the whole time. “Perhaps I should find a way to silence that cruel mouth.”
“Do it.”
I thought he meant to fuck my face. But he spread my thighs wide instead, propping my legs over his shoulders as he dives into me with his tongue.
I’m lost in seconds—holding my breath, mind blank, body shaking.
After I overheard his conversation with my guards, I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop him.
There is no stopping that man on a mission, and more than that, I wanted Fedor dead for what he did to me and mine.
I hated the thought of what could go wrong, but I knew it had to be done, either with or without my consent.
So, I stayed put. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.
I paced, cried, had another shower, made the guards fetch me more soup, tried and failed at journaling, watched YouTube videos on three dozen different topics to distract myself, and none of it worked.
Nothing stopped me from picturing Pavel with a bullet hole in his forehead like the guy in the car.
So I tried to process that. Held on to the image, while I made myself think about what I’d do next. I had hours to come up with something and came up with nothing.
The only thing I knew was that I was going to fuck my husband if I ever got the chance again. It was puerile and odd, but it was the only thing that made sense to my body and my heart.
I need this man the way I need oxygen. I need him in me, the weight of him on me. There is nothing but that need.
I dig my fingers into his short hair to ride his face, and as the heat builds in my core, I know this won’t do it. It’s not enough.
“I want you inside me, husband.”
He growls into me, then climbs onto the bed, onto me, not slowing, not gentle. As he climbs, he presses his cock into me, and pops his hips the moment we are eye to eye, to shove himself as deep as deep goes.
We groan together, and I pull him down for a kiss, relishing the feel of him.
That certain weight, that fullness. The scruff on his chin, the grip of his hands on mine.
I let him take me, all of me, and I meet him thrust for thrust in this, because we are in this together, no matter what he says otherwise.
I feel his pulse in his cock. The swell of him. It’s not like him to be close this soon. But it’s been a strange night.
He rolls us so I’m on top, and I take all of him inside of me, leaning onto his chest to hear his heart beat. To count them, catch the rhythm of him. Slowly, we start up again, rocking to each other, faster and faster. Bliss bubbles up inside of me, and when I come, he does too.
Afterward, I’m wrapped in the warmth of him, and I feel—I feel like someone who has fought for something and won it, and is now in possession of it for the first time, which is not peace exactly, but is better than peace because it is real.
“I’m still afraid,” he says, into my hair.
“So am I.”
“That doesn’t resolve anything.”
“No. But we’re doing it anyway. Together. That’s the whole point.”
“You will not go to Chicago.” It is not a question.
“I will visit your friend one day. On a vacation. With you. When this is actually over.”
“And if it is never actually over?”
I shrug. “Then we will figure out what over actually looks like for people like us, and we will keep figuring it out, because that’s what you do when you have chosen something.
” I hold his gaze steadily. “I will always choose you. Every day. Vladimir and Vet did not die for nothing. I won’t let their sacrifices be in vain. Will you?”
“No. But in the interest of no longer keeping secrets, there is one more I should tell you, and you might choose Chicago after you learn the truth.”
“There is nothing you can say to chase me away, Pavel. When will you learn that?”
He gulps. “Vet is alive.”