36. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
She goes back upstairs after breakfast, and I remain at the table.
A father.
I’ve run operations across three countries. I’ve made decisions that ended things and started things, and I’ve never once sat in a room and not known what to do next. I’m sitting in my own kitchen at nine in the morning, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.
I have no reference for this. None. Every version of my life I have ever planned or prepared for or moved toward has been built around control, around knowing the variables, around never being in a room where I’m not the most prepared person present.
There is no preparation for this.
I look at the doorway she just walked through.
A child. My child. In this house, in this life, with everything this life is and everything it costs. I think about what it means to bring something that small into something this large, and I sit with that for a long time.
I’m not afraid of many things.
I find, sitting here, that I’m afraid of this. Not of the child. I have no template for being the kind of father I want to be, because the template I was given was not something I would wish on anyone.
I go to find Rico.
He’s in the hall with his jacket on, ready to leave.
I tell him to push everything to tomorrow.
He nods without asking why, puts his jacket on the hook by the door, and goes to make calls.
I go back to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and stand at the counter while it heats and look at the grounds through the window.
The garden is bare at this time of year, the rose beds cut back, the lower path empty. I have watched Nina run that path more times than I can count, watched her move through this estate as if she were learning it for a purpose that kept changing shape under her.
She learned it as a prison first. Then, as a story. Then, as something she stopped having a clean name for, and I watched all of those things happen from windows and doorways and across dinner tables, and I didn’t rush any of them.
I make the tea and wait for her to come down.
She appears at ten with her laptop under her arm and stops in the doorway when she sees the mug on the counter. She looks at it. She looks at me sitting at the table with the closed brief and the cold coffee.
“You pushed your day,” she says.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“No,” I say. “I didn’t.”
She crosses to the counter, picks up the mug, sits across from me, and opens the laptop. I open the brief.
It’s noon and I close the brief and tell Marta to take the rest of the afternoon.
Nina looks up from her laptop when Marta unties her apron and goes. She watches me cross to the refrigerator and open it and stand there for a moment. Eggs, cherry tomatoes, parmesan, half a block of butter. Simple enough.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says.
“I know.”
She closes the laptop.
She comes to the counter and leans against it with her arms folded and watches me crack eggs into a bowl and whisk them. After a few minutes she reaches past me and adds a pinch of salt and a little black pepper, considers it, adds more pepper, and steps back.
“What?” she says, because I’m looking at her.
“Nothing.”
She stays at the counter while I cook the tomatoes down in butter and fold the eggs in slowly the way I was shown once a long time ago by someone who was very serious about eggs. Nina watches this with the expression of a person taking notes.
We eat at the table. She takes the first bite and looks at the plate.
“This is okay,” she says.
“High praise.”
“I mean it. It’s genuinely okay.” She takes another bite. “The eggs are good. I was prepared for them not to be.”
“That’s generous of you.”
“I’m a generous person.”
I look at her across the table. She’s eating with the focused attention she gives everything, not performing enjoyment, not being polite, actually eating, and something about that is more satisfying than anything I could have ordered from any kitchen in this city.
Her phone rings at three.
She looks at the screen, and the warmth that comes into her face is the warmth she reserves for one person in the world.
“Sofiya,” she says, already reaching to answer.
“Take it.”
She curls her feet under her and answers, and I go back to the document on my screen and let the conversation run in the background. They talk the way they always talk, fast and easy, the shorthand of two people who have spent their whole lives translating each other without effort.
I catch nothing specific. Then Nina laughs, the real one, full and unguarded, the one I have heard maybe five times since the church, and I sit with the laptop on my knee, and I listen to it, and I think, without examining it, that I would rearrange most things to make sure I keep hearing that.
She hangs up twenty minutes later and looks at me. “Sofiya says congratulations.”
“You told her.”
“She guessed. She said she knew something was different the last time she visited. That I looked settled.” Nina’s mouth curves slightly. “I told her she was projecting.”
“Was she?”
“No.” She picks up her laptop. “She wasn’t.”
The evening comes on gray and quiet and we have dinner at the table, the two of us, the food good and the conversation easy, and she eats well tonight, better than she has in days, and the color is back in her face.
She talks about the piece she’s working on and I ask her about the sourcing structure and she explains it with her hands moving the way they do when she’s inside something she is genuinely interested in.
I pour water for her. She picks it up without a word.
After dinner, she takes the sofa in the library with her book, and I take the chair with my files. We sit across from each other, and at some point, she puts the book face down on her knee.
“The reason you stopped the wedding,” she says. “The real one.”
I look up.
“Press circles. Intelligence pipelines. A journalist inside your house with a contact network inside three governments.” She holds my gaze. “That was the calculation.”
“Yes.”
“Did you get what you planned for?”
I look at her in the lamplight. Feet tucked under her, book in her lap, asking me a direct question without softening it first, the way she has asked me everything since the day she walked into my study and demanded her passport. I take my time with the answer.
“Yes,” I say. “And then it stopped mattering.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Something crosses her face that I haven’t seen before, not surprise, something closer to relief, like she has been carrying a question she didn’t want to ask and has finally put it down. She nods once and opens her book, and the room settles.
That night, she comes to bed, and the room is dark and still, the city outside quieter than usual, and we lie side by side, and neither of us reaches for anything immediately.
The day sits between us, the breakfast table and the kitchen, and the library, and the small ordinary accumulation of hours that are different from every hour that came before them.
She turns toward me first in the dark.
I feel the shift of the sheets, the warmth of her body moving closer, and then her hand is on my chest. No words. Just her fingers sliding slowly over my skin like she’s reminding herself that I’m real. I turn toward her, and our bodies meet in the middle of the bed.
Our mouths find each other without urgency. The kiss is slow, deep, and quiet. Her lips are soft and warm. I taste the faint trace of toothpaste and the sweetness that is only her. She sighs into my mouth when my tongue brushes hers, a small, breathy sound that goes straight to my cock.
I slide my hand up her side, under the thin silk of her slip, feeling the warmth of her bare skin.
She presses closer, one leg sliding over mine.
We kiss like that for a long time—slow, lazy, savoring.
There is no performance tonight. No fight.
No strategy. Just the two of us in the dark, breathing each other in.
I pull the slip up and over her head. She lifts her arms to help me. When she’s bare, I run my hands over her slowly, learning every curve again. My palm moves over her breasts, feeling how full they have become. I brush my thumb across her nipple, and she arches into my touch with a soft moan.
I kiss her neck, then lower, trailing my mouth down her throat to her collarbone. She threads her fingers through my hair as I kiss across the swell of her breasts. I take one nipple into my mouth, sucking gently, then harder, and she lets out a low, sweet sound that makes my cock throb.
My hand slides down her stomach. I pause there for a moment, palm resting gently over the place where our child is growing. The reality of it hits me again, heavy and warm in my chest. I kiss the skin just below her navel, slow and reverent, before continuing lower.
I settle between her thighs and spread them wider.
She’s already wet. I drag my tongue slowly up her pussy, savoring her taste, and she moans softly, hips lifting toward my mouth.
I lick her with long, unhurried strokes, exploring every fold, circling her clit, then sucking it gently between my lips.
“Nikolai…” she breathes, her voice husky in the dark.
I slide two fingers inside her, curling them slowly while my tongue works her clit. She’s so warm, so wet, so responsive.
I take my time, licking and sucking and stroking until her breathing becomes ragged and her thighs start to tremble around my head.
When she comes, it’s quiet and deep. Her back arches, her fingers tighten in my hair, and she lets out a long, trembling moan as her pussy pulses against my tongue. I stay with her through every wave, licking her gently until she relaxes back into the sheets.
I kiss my way back up her body slowly, savoring every inch of her skin. When I reach her mouth again, she pulls me down into a deep, hungry kiss, tasting herself on my tongue. Her legs wrap around my waist, trying to pull me closer.