Chapter 26
PAVEL
The silence that follows after she learns Vet lives has a quality. I watch it move through her, turning into bewilderment.
“What?”
“She was shot. That was real—I want to be clear about that, because the rest of it is complicated and I need you to understand that the danger she was in was genuine. She was hit twice, and it was serious, and there was a period in which the outcome was not certain.” I hold her gaze steadily.
“But she survived. And when it became clear that she would survive, Igor and I made a decision.”
Molly is very still. “What decision?”
“I explained the situation to her, and I asked her if she was willing to play spy.” I pause.
“She agreed. She made contact with Fedor’s organization as a woman with a grievance—she had been shot, for no reason that I had seen fit to explain to her.
She told him she faked her death in order to escape me. ”
Tears spill down Molly’s cheeks. “That sounds like her.”
“She told him that she was tired of being undervalued and mistreated by a man who considered her expendable. She said she was happy to tell them everything she knew, and she told them enough to be credible, and Fedor—”
“Bought it,” she says.
“He has always been susceptible to a capable woman with a good story. It’s one of his consistent vulnerabilities.
Not to mention the fact that Vet has a reputation that makes her an asset to anyone.
She told him she didn’t hold her shooting against him—that was just business.
But when I told her to play dead, it was a bridge too far for her reputation.
” I watch her face continue its processing.
She snorts a laugh, then blows her nose from all the crying. “Dammit, I think I love her.”
“Should I be jealous?”
“Like a sister, you jerk.”
I smile, confident that Molly does not hate me for keeping this from her.
“Given her injuries, she couldn’t do much outside of touring his operation.
That was what we needed. The information she fed us from inside is how we knew the compound layout.
How we were able to go in the way we went in, with the precision that kept my men alive.
Vet is the reason it worked. She is back overseas now, under a new identity, doing what she does. ”
Molly looks at me for a long moment. Then she picks up the pillow beside her and hits me with it.
It’s not a violent blow, and I accept it without moving. She hits me with it again, which I also accept, because I have earned this and I know I have earned it.
“You let me grieve her,” she says. “I sat in that hospital bed, and I cried about her, and Igor was sitting right there, and neither of you—”
“I know.”
“I told you she was my friend. I told you that while you were standing there, and you knew, and you said nothing—”
“I know, Molly.”
“Why?”
“Igor told you about Vet in front of the doctor, because the doctor could have been on Fedor’s payroll. If Igor had told you the truth, your reaction would not have been genuine. He did it to keep the doctor in the dark.”
Her eyes turn sharp. “Igor used me.”
“Igor used you to keep Vet safe within Fedor’s organization. I cannot think of many better reasons to be used. Can you?”
She’s quiet for a breath. “But you could have told me when we got home, when we were alone, any—”
“I still didn’t know who here was in with Fedor, if anyone. I didn’t know if there were bugs listening to our private conversations either. Now that Fedor is dead, Igor is doing a sweep of our properties. We will know soon whether he had people here.”
“And you let me just…”
I hold her gaze. “I made a calculation. I weighed your grief against Vet’s security. I am sorry for hurting you, but Vet is safe and alive now. I believe you will see the cost of your grief to be worth her life.”
She looks at me for a moment. The pillow is still in her hand. She puts it down. “That’s the most honest you’ve ever been about making a call.”
“You have been asking me to be honest about my calls. I’m attempting to honor that.”
Something changes in her expression—her heat begins to fade into something more complex, as anger yields to relief, exhaustion, and the emotional aftermath of grief that proves to have been premature. “She’s really alive?”
“She is really alive.”
Something crosses Molly’s face that’s not quite a laugh and not quite a sob and is entirely human and entirely her, and she presses one hand over her mouth for a moment and breathes through it. “Will I see her again?” she asks, when she has finished breathing through it.
“When it’s safe and when her cover allows it, yes. That is a promise.”
She nods, absorbing this. Then she looks at me with the directness that means a subject change is coming. “I’m still not going to Chicago.”
“I know.”
She blinks. “You’re not going to argue?”
“You made your argument. I’m not in the habit of relitigating decided matters. You are staying. I have accepted this.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.”
She narrows her eyes slightly. “You’re afraid of it.”
“Enormously.”
“But you’re also—” She tilts her head, reading me with the accuracy she has been developing for months, and something in her expression shifts into something warmer and quieter. “You’re glad.”
I look at her for a moment. There is no response to that that is not a complete confirmation of everything she has just said, and we both know it. “Both of those things simultaneously, which is apparently the condition of my life now.”
“The conflicted pakhan,” she says, with the dry lightness that lives in her voice when she is settling back into herself after something difficult.
“Something like that.”
She considers me for a moment with those steady eyes. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life being afraid for me, aren’t you?”
“In all probability, yes. And vice versa, I imagine.”
“And I’m going to spend the rest of my life being annoyed about what you don’t tell me.”
“That seems likely.”
She smiles, setting the world right again. “And we’re going to argue about it regularly.”
“I expect so.”
She nods, with the grave consideration of someone reviewing the terms of an agreement they have already signed. “Okay. I can work with that.”
“Can you?”
“I’ve been working with it for months. I’m practically an expert.
” She tilts her head. “I will need you to get better at the telling-me-things part, though. The Vet situation—that cannot happen again. Not telling me she was alive while I was sitting in a hospital room crying about her is—” She stops, and the lightness dims briefly into something more genuine.
“That was a lot, Pavel. That was a lot to carry alone.”
“It won’t happen again.”
She looks at me to determine whether I mean it. I mean it, and she can see that I mean it, and she nods once. “Pavel.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a very strange man.”
“You chose me,” I point out.
“Repeatedly,” she agrees, without any indication that she regrets this.
I am afraid. I will be afraid. It will not leave.
It will be present in every decision I make about her safety, the children’s safety, and the architecture of the life we are building in the middle of a world that does not readily accommodate the kind of thing we are attempting.
It’s a fear I will live with, however long this life is.
I am also, underneath all of that, in the room with my wife in the early morning light, more glad than I have been since I understood what being glad felt like. Both things. Simultaneously.
The conflicted life of a pakhan who made the mistake of falling in love with the right woman, a mistake I have absolutely no interest in correcting.
I pull her close to me, letting her warmth invade my space. A warmth I have craved my whole life until I found her. “Sleep. You need it.”
“You need it more,” she says. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m just saying. For a man who just won a war, you look remarkably rough.”
“Wars are rough.”
“Mm.” She settles back against me. “For what it’s worth, I think you look very handsome for someone who looks terrible.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s a compliment,” she clarifies. “You’re welcome.”
“I’m going to sleep. Tomorrow, I will punish you for being such a brat.”
“Good idea,” she says, with the satisfaction of a woman who has arrived at the correct conclusion. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
I lie back. The light comes through the curtains, and my wife is beside me, and the house is quiet around us. There will be more battles because there are always more battles, and my wife is here and will not be moved, not even by me.
It is the most terrifying thing in the world. And yet, I sleep.