Epilogue
Elena
The apartment feels different now. Softer. The glass walls no longer echo; they hum quietly with life. The city below still roars and blinks and burns, but up here it feels a world away, as if we’ve built something sacred above all the noise.
The cello rests against my shoulder, the bow gliding over the strings in the same rhythm I’ve played a hundred times before.
The lullaby. The one Artem’s mother sang when he was small.
The one I played every night through the long months of waiting, when our son’s heartbeat was still only a sound on a monitor and Artem would rest his head against my stomach, listening.
Now Lev sleeps just a few rooms away, small and perfect and endlessly loved.
The door opens softly behind me. I don’t have to turn to know it’s Artem, I can feel the shift in the air, the heat that always follows him.
He doesn’t speak at first. I hear the rustle of his jacket as he hangs it up, the low hum of his voice carrying through the apartment as he murmurs to the baby, soothing him back into sleep.
I keep playing.
When Artem appears in the doorway, he’s barefoot, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair tousled from the wind.
He carries Lev against his chest, one big hand supporting our son’s head.
The sight still makes my heart ache, the most dangerous man I’ve ever known, holding the most fragile thing we’ve ever made.
He sways gently, his voice low and rough as he hums the lullaby in time with my bow. The same tune his mother once sang. The same one that binds us now, grief, memory, and love folded into a single melody.
When the song ends, I set the cello aside. Artem lays Lev in his crib, tucks the blanket around him, and stands there for a long moment just watching. Then he crosses the room to me.
“You saw the doctor today,” he says quietly.
“I did.”
His fingers brush the inside of my wrist, tracing the faint scar where the bow sometimes bites. “Can I?” he murmurs. “I need you so much, solnyshko.”
I smile, leaning into his touch. “Then take what you need. Take me.”
He studies me for a moment, that same look in his eyes, fierce, possessive, impossibly tender. The look that says I’m still his beginning and his ending.
We undress in seconds and then he is over me, pressing his hard length into my warm center with a groan so desperate it shakes something loose in me.
“So warm, so wet, so tight,” he says it like a mantra, like I’m the perfect fit for him.
The burn of the stretch is welcome, I’d missed it in the month since giving birth.
“Look at you,” he says and I feel the blush colour my cheeks.
My body is so different now. My breasts heavy and leaking, my stomach still soft and loose and stretch marked.
“You’re perfect,” he says, slightly increasing the pace of his rhythm.
“Fuck, solnyshko, I missed this. I missed you.”
He swipes his tongue over my breasts, kissing and sucking where silvery lines have appeared. “So full, so beautiful.”
My milk lets down and begins to leak little rivulets over my breasts. When he sees, his pupils blow and so does his load. He is as surprised as I am, his eyes wide, his mouth slack as he pumps me full of his cum.
“I’m sorry, solnyshko, you just too fucking sexy splayed out like this.
It was too much. But I can make it up to you.
” He pulls out of me, I immediately miss the stretch, but when his mouth clamps over my clit, my entire body relaxes into the swirl of his tongue and the pressure building from my core.
He slides two fingers into my pussy, our combined juices making everything slick and slippery, and curls them just right.
I buck beneath him and he continues to work me relentlessly.
The orgasm crashes over me, pulling me under, lifting me up.
His tongue never stops, even as I squirm and shake beneath him.
I’ve missed this. I’ve missed his worship, I’ve missed feeling the electric currents that zap through me when he brings me to orgasm this way. I’ve missed feeling alive.
“That’s it, solnyshko,” he says as I come down from the high, whimpering. “Let’s show the world who you belong to.”
The rings glitter on my finger, my body is still soft from carrying our child. My skin is flushed from coming apart for him. “I’m not sure what more evidence the world needs,” I finally manage when I’ve caught my breath.
He sucks one last time on my clit, hard and heavy, and my sensitive body jerks in response.
His eyes go to my breasts, wet and shiny from leaking. My eyes go to his cock, already hard again and leaking precum.
“Please,” he says, and something about this man begging for release at the sight of me breaks me open on a primal level.
Blood pounds in my ears as I nod my head.
Then he is inside me again, pounding into me like his very life depends on fucking me until the world stops turning.
My breasts bounce from the force of his thrusts, and I hold on to them, trying to ease the ache, but the pressure just makes more milk bead at on my nipple.
He groans, bringing his mouth down and taking one in his mouth, suckling fervently as he thrusts. Flicking his tongue over my nipple, he groans and reaches between us to my spent clit.
“Please Artem,” I say, my back arching, my body desperate for him to hit that deeper place inside me. “Fuck me harder.”
He comes undone then, my own orgasm weak and tired, my clit throbbing with exertion. He comes loud with each desperate spend of his cock, the sound reverberating through me, then collapses over me.
“Solnyshko,” he finally says when we’ve both caught our breath. And that’s all he needs to say because I know exactly what he means.