12
Rurik
I brought her to my house for the first time three days later, a decision I'd turned over more carefully than I turned over most decisions involving organizations, money, or men who needed correcting, weighing it the way I weighed very little else in my life anymore.
I didn't bring people here. The house sat on a quiet stretch of the Intracoastal, set back from the road behind a gate Vadim had access to and almost no one else did, and I'd kept it, deliberately, as the one space in my life that had nothing to do with anyone's business but my own — no meetings conducted in its rooms, no soldiers waiting in its driveway, nothing of the organization permitted past its front door.
I wanted her to see it specifically because it was the one place I could show her the version of myself that existed before any of the rest of it, the version that still, somewhere underneath fifteen years of careful command, occasionally wanted simple things, ordinary things, the kind of evening other men took entirely for granted.
"This isn't what I expected," she said, standing in my kitchen, taking in the deliberately unshowy furniture, the bookshelves crowded with histories and biographies rather than anything that performed wealth for an audience, the single, slightly crooked photograph of my parents on the mantel that I'd never once straightened because my mother had hung it that way herself and some part of me refused to correct anything she'd touched.
"What did you expect."
"Something colder. More like a museum than a house.
" She trailed her fingers along the spine of a worn biography of Peter the Great, the kind of book that had clearly been read rather than displayed.
"This is considerably more human than the man who runs an entire criminal organization out of a leather chair. "
"I keep the leather chair for everyone else.
This is what's left over once the chair's been put away for the evening, the part of the house that's never once had to perform anything for anyone.
" I poured two glasses of wine, watching her move through my space with a certain unselfconscious curiosity she brought to everything, and felt something in my chest settle the way it had settled on the boat three days earlier — the specific, growing certainty that I had built an entire life around managing other people's perception of me, and had apparently, somewhere in the last month, stopped wanting to manage hers.
She wandered through the rest of the downstairs while I finished the wine, pausing at a row of framed photographs along the hallway — me at six, gap-toothed and unaware of anything the future held; my parents on what I assumed was their wedding day, my mother laughing at something outside the frame in a way that made me wonder, for the first time, whether laughter like that simply ran in certain families regardless of blood.
She didn't ask about any of them directly.
She simply looked, slowly, with the same careful attention she gave a column of figures at her own counter, cataloguing me the way she catalogued everything, and I found I didn't mind being read that thoroughly, not by her.
"You really do cook," she said, finding me in the kitchen with sleeves rolled and a pan already heating, genuine surprise in her voice.
"Badly, as you're about to discover. But yes. My mother insisted every Severin man know how to feed himself without staff, regardless of what else he eventually learned to do for a living. It was one of the few domestic rules my father never once overruled."
"I find that detail unreasonably endearing."
"Wait until you taste the result before you commit to that opinion."
We ate dinner I'd actually cooked myself, badly — the chicken slightly overdone, the vegetables slightly under, a combination she declared, with visible delight, to be ambitious rather than good — and talked about nothing important for the better part of an hour, the easy, unhurried conversation of two people who'd already said the difficult things on a boat and had earned, for one evening, the right to simply enjoy each other without excavating anything further.
She told me about Zarya's early years, the customers who'd doubted a twenty-two-year-old could keep her grandmother's business running, the satisfaction of proving every one of them wrong slowly, methodically, one perfectly portioned eucalyptus branch at a time.
I told her about the version of myself that had wanted, briefly, at seventeen, to study architecture, a fact I hadn't spoken aloud to anyone in over a decade and found, saying it to her, considerably less embarrassing than I'd expected.
"You'd have been good at it," she said. "Buildings that actually hold weight properly. It suits you."
"I build other things now. Considerably less stable ones, most days."
"I don't know about that." She studied me across the table, something warm and assessing in her expression. "This house feels fairly stable to me. So does the man currently apologizing for chicken that's actually perfectly edible."
It was later, clearing the dishes together, that the air between us shifted the way it had shifted in her back room weeks earlier — not dramatically, simply a gradual narrowing of distance, her hip brushing mine at the sink, my hand finding the small of her back without either of us deciding it consciously.
"There's something I need to say plainly," I said, setting down the dish towel, turning to face her fully. "I didn't bring you here tonight expecting anything beyond dinner. I want you to know that, before either of us decides what happens next."
"I know that." She studied me, something soft and amused moving across her face. "You're an extremely considerate kidnapper, Rurik. It's becoming a pattern."
"I'm aware of how it looks." I reached up, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, the same gesture from the banya, from her kitchen, the gesture that had apparently become its own kind of punctuation between us.
"I want this. I want to be entirely clear that I want this, and equally clear that I'll be perfectly content with whatever you actually want tonight, even if it's simply more wine and a long conversation about Peter the Great and his considerably questionable decisions regarding his own son. "
"I don't want to talk about Peter the Great."
"No," I agreed, my voice gone lower. "Neither do I, if I'm honest."
She kissed me first, the way she had in her back room, deciding it before I'd finished deciding whether deciding it myself would have been presumptuous, and I met her with the same unhurried care I'd promised her weeks earlier, my hands finding her waist, asking permission with my palms the way I'd apparently made a habit of doing with her specifically.
"Tell me if you want to stop, at any point," I murmured against her mouth, "and I'll stop completely. No negotiation."
"I know." She pulled back just far enough to look at me, her eyes dark and certain in the low kitchen light. "I trust you, Rurik. I wouldn't be standing in your kitchen if I didn't."
I led her toward the bedroom slowly, giving her every opportunity to change her mind, watching for any hesitation in the set of her shoulders and finding none, only a steady, deliberate certainty that matched my own.
The room was simple, the same restrained taste as the rest of the house, moonlight coming soft through the windows facing the water, and I undressed her carefully, asking with my hands and confirming with my eyes at every stage, watching her face for anything that wasn't pure, unhurried want.
"You keep checking," she said, breathless, amused, her hands working at the buttons of my shirt with considerably less patience than I was extending her.
"I intend to keep checking the entire time. You're allowed to find that tedious."
"I don't find it tedious." She pulled my shirt the rest of the way open, her palms flat against my chest, something fierce and certain moving across her face. "I find it's the first time in longer than I can remember that I've actually trusted the asking."
I kissed her again, slower this time, deliberate, learning the precise shape of every place she leaned into more than another, the small catch in her breath when my mouth found the curve of her throat, the way her fingers tightened in my hair when I took my time rather than rushing toward anything either of us could have rushed toward easily.
There was no urgency in it that wasn't matched, measure for measure, by patience — the specific, devastating combination of wanting someone completely and refusing to let that want override the care she'd told me, weeks earlier, that she required.
"Tell me what you want," I said, against her skin, meaning it as the question it was rather than the formality men sometimes made of it.
"Everything." Her voice had gone low, certain, stripped of any performance. "I want everything, Rurik. I want you to stop being careful for exactly as long as it takes to actually have you."
"I can manage that." I pulled back just far enough to look at her properly, moonlight catching the line of her collarbone, her dark hair spread loose against my pillow in a way I knew, with sudden, absolute certainty, I would remember for the rest of my life regardless of how the rest of this turned out.
"I want you to know, before anything else happens tonight, that this isn't a thing I'm doing carelessly.
I've never once brought anyone here. I don't intend to make a habit of it with anyone but you. "
"I know." She reached up, drawing me back down to her, unhurried, certain. "I wouldn't be here if I thought otherwise."