Chapter 27
PIPER
Nikita comes closer, and for once, after everything, there’s nothing chasing either of us.
That’s the thing I notice first, lying in a borrowed bed in a house none of our enemies knows we’re using. There isn’t a name left for either of us to hunt.
Every other time he’s put his hands on me, something waited on the other side of the door, a meeting, a threat, or a name he had to hunt before dawn.
Now there’s a locked house, a quiet road, and a whole morning with nothing in it but him, and when he braces above me and looks at my face like he has all the time in the world, it’s because he does.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” he says, but he is already sliding one hand up my side slowly, like he hasn’t already memorized every part of me.
“You heard what Mila said. Gentle is fine, as long as I stop the second anything hurts.” I pull him down by the back of the neck. “She didn’t say lie there like a corpse.”
He laughs against my mouth, and I feel it more than hear it. He kisses me thoroughly and without rushing, and I let myself sink into it because for once I’m not bracing for the moment it gets interrupted.
He kisses his way down my throat and my collarbone to my breast, taking his time at each place until I’m the one getting impatient.
I trace the scars across his back, the ones I know by heart now.
I don’t flinch from them and he doesn’t tense when I touch them.
We’ve done this enough times that there’s no performance left in it.
There’s just his weight and his warmth and the low, certain way he says my name when I arch up into him.
“Slow down,” he says when I try to hurry us. “We’re not going anywhere.”
We aren’t leaving. No one is coming, and that relaxes me more than his hands do. The door is locked from the inside because we want it that way, not because something’s trying to get in, and I have never once in my life had that.
He settles between my thighs and rubs the head of his cock through my wet slit before he pushes inside my pussy, slowly and deeply, and I make a sound I don’t try to muffle because there’s no one to hear it and nothing to hide.
He fills me completely and holds there, buried to the hilt, his forehead against mine, both of us sharing breaths.
“There you are,” he says, like he found me, like I wasn’t the one who walked into his house two months ago and refused to leave.
Then he moves, and I move with him, and it builds without hurry, each stroke deeper than the last. I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer, and he braces on his forearms so he can watch my face, which he does the entire time, holding my gaze.
The heat winds tighter with every stroke, low and insistent, and I chase it against him while he murmurs things into my skin—my name, that he loves me, that I’m safe, and that he isn’t going anywhere.
“I’ve got you,” he says when I start to shake. “I’ve got all four of you.”
That’s what does it, the words more than the friction or the angle.
I clench around his cock and come with my face pressed to his shoulder, and he holds me through every wave of it, slowing but not stopping, drawing it out until I’m limp underneath him.
Then he lets himself go, buried deep, my name the only word he has left, and he presses his mouth to my temple as he comes inside me and stays there, shaking but holding on.
Neither of us moves for a long time after. He stays inside me. I keep my arms around him as we breathe together in a quiet that isn’t waiting for anything.
“That was different,” I say finally, into his hair.
“It was safe.” He lifts his head and looks at me. “It’s the first time I’ve ever touched you without a war on the other side of the door.”
“I liked it.”
“I’m glad you liked it.” He kisses me, unhurried even now. “You’re going to get a lot of it.”
I wake to the smell of butter and something sweet, and to an empty space beside me still warm from him.
I find him in the small kitchen with his sleeves shoved up, studying the pan with the same concentration he once gave security maps, though the pancakes are defeating him in a way bratva nemeses never did.
There’s flour on the counter and on him.
A bowl of batter rests beside three ruined pancakes that didn’t survive the learning curve.
“You’re cooking,” I say from the doorway, and I don’t bother to hide how much I’m enjoying this.
“I’m making pancakes.” He doesn’t turn around. “Sit down. You’re supposed to be off your feet.”
“You don’t know how to make pancakes.”
“I’m learning in real time. Sit down anyway.” He points the spatula at a chair without looking at me. “There’s tea. Don’t get up for it, I’ll bring it.”
I sit, because arguing would mean losing the sight of Nikita Rusakov, who ran a criminal empire without letting anyone photograph his face, frowning at a bubbling pancake like it’s a spy. He flips it. It folds in half. He swears in Russian, quietly, and I laugh so hard I have to hold my stomach.
“You could just admit you can’t do this.”
“I kept this house hidden for four years and I brought down the man who abducted you. I’m going to make you a functional pancake before this morning is over.” He slides a lopsided one onto a plate and sets it in front of me with a fork, dead serious. “Eat that one. It’s holding together.”
It’s too dark on one edge and folded awkwardly in the middle, but it’s cooked through, and it’s the best thing anyone has ever made me, because he made it in a kitchen, on a morning with nothing chasing us.
I eat every bite while he watches me like the pancake is a verdict, and when I tell him it’s good he tries so hard not to look pleased that he gives himself away completely.
Platon arrives while I’m on my second cup of tea, letting himself in with the ease of long habit, because he earned a key years ago.
“You look rested.” He takes the coffee Nikita hands him, black, and stays standing. “I have the last of it, if you want to hear it now or after breakfast.”
“We want to hear it now,” Nikita and I say together, and Platon almost smiles.
“Adrian’s death closed the internal investigation.
He was the only person directing the betrayal from inside.
The two guards he compromised are in custody and cooperating.
” He drinks. “Lazar and the men who surrendered on the island are in federal custody, and every one of them is more interested in a deal than in loyalty to a syndicate that no longer exists. Rahil’s operation is finished.
His records are evidence now, and his assets are frozen.
The illegal operations are closed, and the remaining Rusakov structures are moving through the legitimate channels we established.
There is no active threat left tied to either of you.
” He looks between us. “It’s all over. I’ve spent four years telling you that with qualifications, and today, I get to say it plainly. ”
Nikita sets down his cup. “I want to step back.”
Platon doesn’t look surprised, which tells me he’s known this was coming longer than Nikita has.
“I want to step back from all day-to-day operations,” Nikita says.
“I want you to oversee the restructuring, the foundation transition, and the legitimate businesses once they’re running.
You know every part of it, and I trust you to finish it without me looking over your shoulder.
I want to spend the next several months learning to make a pancake and being in the room when these three arrive, not signing authorizations at two in the morning.
” He glances at me. “For too many years, I’ve been the man everything runs through.
I’m done. I want a smaller life. I want this one. ”
“I know you do,” Platon says. “I’ve known since the morning you started dissolving companies instead of building them.” He finishes the coffee. “I’ll take it, on the condition that you actually stay stepped back and don’t call me at two in the morning to check my work.”
“I make no promises.”
“You never do.” Platon’s phone rings. He glances at the screen and softens in a way I’ve never seen before, and he answers it with a quiet, “I’m coming out now. I’m finishing up here,” in a tone that is unmistakably not business.
He hangs up into a silence I’m enjoying enormously.
“That was Maren,” I say. It isn’t a question.
“It was.” Platon meets my gaze without a flicker of apology, and that’s how I know it’s real, that he isn’t hiding it.
“She’s waiting in the car because she refused to interrupt your first quiet morning.
We’ll come back properly after you’ve had a few days to recover.
” He sets the empty cup in the sink. “She’d have come in now, but she said, and I’m quoting her, that she ‘wasn’t going to interrupt your first quiet morning in six days just to gloat about being right. ’”
I arch a brow. “What was she right about?”
“She didn’t specify.” He almost smiles. “Congratulations to both of you on all of it.” Then he’s gone. I hear the car door and Maren’s laugh through it before it shuts. I sit in the warmth of a morning where the two people who kept us alive are driving off together to a life of their own.
“Did you know?” I ask Nikita when the car’s gone.
“I suspected. Platon doesn’t soften for anyone.” He refills my tea and sits across from me, with his knee against mine. “Maren’s good for him. He’s been alone a long time.”
There’s a plain white envelope with my name written across it in Mila’s blunt handwriting:
Piper—Prenatal Screening Results
Platon brought it with him.
“You’ve been looking hard at that envelope,” Nikita says.
“You have too.”
“I have.” He covers my hand with his. “We don’t have to open it today.”
“I want to.” I turn it over, and I can’t keep the envelope completely steady.
It’s almost funny that a piece of paper can do this to me, when I forged a marriage certificate once without my pulse changing.
“I’ve spent this whole pregnancy afraid to want anything real, because wanting things I can’t keep is how I grew up.
I want to know who they are. I want to start wanting the actual people instead of the idea of them. ”
He doesn’t say anything wise. He just holds my hand while I work my thumb under the flap and pull out the card Mila tucked inside, clipped to a cautious report from the maternal-fetal medicine specialist. I read it, and I read it again, and the sound that comes out of me is half a laugh and half something with no name.
“The screen is low risk for the conditions they could test,” I say. “As reassuring as they could make it.”
Nikita stills. “Low risk.”
“Low risk.” I press the card to my chest like it might get away from me. “We’re going to be outnumbered by our own children within the year.”
“We were always going to be outnumbered.” He takes the card and reads it again, then looks at me with a grin he doesn’t try to hide. “God help us. They’ll gang up on us within a month.”
“They’ll gang up on you. They’ll adore me but gang up on you because they’ll soon realize you’re a soft touch.”
“They probably will.” He’s grinning without trying to hide it now. “We’ll need three names. We can’t keep calling them One, Two, and Three.”
“We have time.” I’m laughing. “We have so much time. That’s the part I can’t get used to, that there’s time for any of this.”
He gets quiet then, like he’s deciding something, and he reaches into his pocket.
I know what it is before I see it. Some part of me has known since the pancakes.
“I’ve had this since before the island,” he says, and sets a small box on the table between the envelope and the cold tea.
“I kept waiting for a perfect moment untouched by danger, and then I understood perfection wasn’t the point.
This kitchen is enough. You’re here, and I’m here, and this is the real version of our life. ”
He opens the box. The ring inside is nothing like the jewelry I stole from his estate. It isn’t showy. A single stone catches the morning light, chosen for what the ring means rather than what the stone costs.
“You walked into my house with a certificate claiming you were my wife,” he says.
“It was the best forgery I’ve ever seen, even though it was a lie.
Somewhere in the last two months, I stopped wanting to expose it and started wanting to make it true.
I’m asking because you saw every part of me and loved me anyway.
We survived everything that tried to separate us, and I don’t want another day built around pretending you’re temporary. Will you marry me for real this time?”
I’ve spent my whole life keeping a route out of every room.
I built my life around never needing anyone, around the certainty that the second I let myself want something, it would be taken.
Now here is this man, in a kitchen that smells like burnt pancakes, offering everything I taught myself never to reach for.
There was never any question about my answer. “Yes, I’ll marry you for real. You should put it on before I forge one myself.”
He laughs and fumbles once as he slides the ring onto my finger. I cup his face in both hands and kiss him. Flour from his cuff streaks my cheek, and I laugh against his mouth while he wipes it away without letting go of my hand.