Epilogue – Aleksandr #2
Power is having something worth protecting.
Having someone who protects you in return, not because they’re required to, not because they’re afraid not to, but because somewhere along the way you became necessary to each other in ways that aren’t strategic.
Can’t be reduced to strategy, no matter how many times I’ve tried.
She was never the weakness I feared she’d become. My father’s voice, still occasionally audible in my skull when I’m tired: “…sentiment is liability… attachment is leverage you hand your enemies… love is the thing that gets men killed.”
He wasn’t entirely wrong. I’ve seen it happen. Watched powerful men become predictable because something soft got into the machinery and jammed it.
What he got wrong—what I now understand he was too broken to comprehend—is that it depends entirely on what you build around the softness.
Whether you let it make you careless or let it make you precise.
Whether it becomes the thing you’re afraid to lose or the thing you’re most capable of defending.
I think about the warehouse. Artyom’s gun and my blood on the floor and Elena’s hands pressing down with authority she didn’t know she had yet.
I think about the alliance meeting. The shot that found the gap in my armor and Sergei’s expression when he realized the counter-team had him surrounded.
Elena in surgical scrubs I hadn’t asked her to wear, already issuing orders to men who outranked her, her voice carrying the kind of certainty that stops rooms.
I think about five years of her making herself indispensable in ways I don’t bother pretending were my design. She did that. Built that. Claimed that power so thoroughly that removing her from operations now would cost this organization more than it would cost her.
She was never my weakness.
She was my future, and I was simply slow to understand it.
Mikhail appears at the balcony doors. The frog isn’t with him, which means either Elena’s staff has better negotiating skill than I’ve given them credit for, or the animal has been relocated somewhere it will be someone else’s problem.
He looks between us with the focused evaluation of a child who has learned to read the room—another inheritance from his mother, that capacity for reading what isn’t being said. Then he apparently decides we are not currently in the middle of anything that outranks his priority.
He crosses to me, holds his arms up.
I lift him without thinking, settle him against my shoulder. He’s heavier than he used to be. He’ll be taller than Elena within a few years, taller than me eventually, which she finds inexplicably satisfying and I find faintly threatening.
He smells like garden soil and something inexplicably sweet, and he folds himself against my chest with the absolute confidence of someone who has never once doubted he belongs there.
I made sure of that. It was the one thing I knew with certainty from the beginning, before I’d worked out any of the rest of it: this child would never doubt that he was chosen.
Would never perform for acknowledgment that should have come freely.
Would never learn to make himself smaller in the hope that smallness would finally be enough.
Whatever else I’ve done wrong, I kept that promise.
Elena leans into my other side, her shoulder against my arm, her hand resting on Mikhail’s back beside mine.
We stand like that, the three of us, watching the last of the light fade over the grounds.
Guards patrol the perimeter. The gates hold.
The empire continues, as empires do, demanding and merciless, indifferent to personal history.
Inside these walls, something else holds.
Not peace, exactly. I was never made for peace, and she was never the kind of woman who wanted it.
We argue with the same intensity we do everything else.
She challenges decisions I’ve already made, and occasionally she’s right and I have to find a way to adjust without making it look like capitulation to the two dozen men who are watching for signs of weakness.
She keeps information from me sometimes, not for deception but because she’s still learning when she’s allowed to.
I keep information from her sometimes, not for deception but because there are burdens I won’t let touch her if I can help it.
We’re still figuring out the shape of what we are. Probably we’ll be figuring it out for the rest of our lives.
I come home to her. I have always come home to her, even in the months when home meant something contested and uneasy, even when coming home meant another argument that would last until we were both too exhausted for words and had to find other ways to resolve it.
She is here. She stays.
Every day, she chooses.
So do I.
*****
THE END
[1]If Marcus is on speaker phone, how does she know he looks up when she enters? He’s not in the room. He’s on speaker phone, correct?
[2]Edited to arms because they’re not close to the same height and brushing shoulders would be impossible.
[3]One word per Merriam-Webster
[4]She’s repeating what she said on page 52.
[5]Edited because the specific time is mentioned when he checks it below.
[6]Changed because Aleksandr’s brother’s name is Lev, and he appears later in the story.
[7]But everything else provided was properly fitted. They got her sizes. Why is this robe too big?
[8]Similar to page 56: “You’re the bastard daughter,” I finish for her. “The unwanted one. The one who has to fight for every scrap of acknowledgment.”
Her eyes flash with something raw and painful. “How do you—”
“I know everything about you, Elena. Your education, your lack of role in family operations, your desperate attempts to prove yourself worthy of a name that barely claims you.”
[9]This seems to directly contradict her being protected by marrying him.
[10]Plot outline says she’s a virgin.
[11]According to the plot outline, she was a virgin, so that should be referenced somewhere in chapter eighteen or nineteen.
[12]I changed the doctor’s last name to Kuzmin to avoid any connection to the Volkov family that wanted Elena dead.
[13]There was a Lev Volkov (cousin to Marcus) mentioned earlier in the story, when he called urging that Elena be eliminated.
[14]Edited because he said this to her when they went to confirm the pregnancy.
[15]Repetition.
page 146: About keeping her permanently within reach because the alternative—her existing somewhere beyond my control—was unacceptable.
Page 182: “I can’t function without you.” The admission is raw. Brutal. “The thought of you existing somewhere beyond my reach is unbearable. Justified or not, real or not, I need you here.”
[16]When during the battle did this happen? He saw her enter through the side, shouting at him to get down. There’s nothing about him stepping in front of her.
[17]How is this shorter by just not saying the last name? It would be something like Mik, right?
[18]I think this is a victim of a bad find/replace.