15. Viktor
VIKTOR
I wake before she does, which isn’t unusual, except this time I don’t get up.
Harper’s curled toward me, one hand resting flat against my chest, hair loose across the pillow in a way I’ve only seen in the photographs Dimitri handed me months ago. The real thing is better than the photograph. It usually is.
Sunlight’s just starting to cut through the curtains, early enough that the house is still quiet, no sounds yet from Ginger’s room down the hall.
I should be doing a dozen things right now. Checking messages, running through whatever Dimitri’s turned up overnight, starting the day the way I start every day, moving before I’ve had time to think too hard about anything.
Instead I lie here, watching her breathe, and let myself do absolutely nothing for the first time in longer than I can remember.
It unsettles me, how easy this is. For fifteen years, I’ve built a life on not letting anything get close enough to matter this much, on treating comfort like a weakness waiting to be exploited by someone smarter than me.
And here I am, perfectly still, unwilling to move an inch and risk waking her before I have to, doing the exact thing I’ve spent a career training myself never to do around another person.
This isn’t the arrangement. The arrangement had an end date, terms, a clean exit built into the paperwork from day one. Nothing about lying in bed at dawn studying the specific way she breathes was ever part of that.
Harper stirs, blinking awake, and for a second she looks disoriented, somewhere between sleep and place, before her eyes focus on me and the tension in her face eases. “Morning,” she says, voice rough with sleep.
“Morning.”
“This is strange.”
“Which part?”
“Waking up here. Like this.” She props herself up on one elbow, studying me with an openness I’m not sure she’d allow herself in daylight if she’d had more than thirty seconds to think about it. “I keep waiting for it to feel like I did something wrong.”
“You didn’t.”
“I know. It still surprises me that I believe that.” She traces a lazy line along my forearm, not quite purposeful, more like she’s testing whether she’s allowed to. “Is this weird for you too, or are you just better at hiding it?”
“I’ve had fifteen years of practice at hiding things. This isn’t one of them.”
“That’s not an answer either.”
“Fine. No, it isn’t weird.” I catch her hand, still tracing patterns, and hold it still against my chest instead. “Technically, Harper, we’re already married. Whatever this is, it isn’t an affair, it isn’t a mistake, it isn’t something either of us needs to feel strange about.”
“That’s a very practical way to look at waking up in your bed.”
“I contain multitudes.”
She laughs, real and warm, and the sound warms my chest in a way I don’t have a clear explanation for, the same warmth that’s been building since a courthouse hallway months ago.
“For what it’s worth,” I add, “I’ve never actually done this before. Woken up next to someone and wanted them to stay instead of wanting them gone.”
Her expression sobers, quieter, more serious than the teasing a moment ago. “That’s nothing to admit.”
“No. It isn’t.”
She settles back against my chest instead of pulling away, and we lie there a while longer, not talking, just existing in a version of morning I’ve never once allowed myself before her.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, breaking it.
I consider ignoring it. I don’t, because fifteen years of habit doesn’t disappear over one good morning, and Dimitri doesn’t text before eight unless it matters.
Got a lead on Pavel. Need you at the club when you can.
Harper watches my face change. “That doesn’t look like a happy text.”
“It’s not bad news. Just business.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s usually true.” I sit up, already thinking through the morning ahead. “I need to shower and get into the club this morning.”
“Everything okay?”
I hesitate, weighing how much to give her, still not ready to hand her the full weight of Pavel Ivanov before I understand what we’re actually dealing with. “We’re making progress on something I’ve been tracking. I’ll tell you more once there’s something worth telling.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“No. It’s not.” I lean down and kiss her once, unhurried, before pulling back. “But it’s honest, and I promise you’ll have the whole thing the second I do.”
She studies me a moment longer, and whatever she decides, she doesn’t push, the same restraint she showed at the courthouse weeks ago, trusting me with the gap even when it clearly costs her something to do it.
“Go,” she says finally. “I’ll get Ginger up for school.”
I shower fast, dress in a fresh shirt from the closet, and at the door I turn back to find her still in bed, sheet pulled up, watching me with a look caught somewhere between amusement and a tenderness I’m not used to being on the receiving end of.
“For the record,” I say, “I meant what I said. I don’t want you gone.”
“Good,” she says. “Because I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”
She says it easily, like it costs her nothing, though I know better by now, know how much it costs her to say something like that out loud to anyone after everything she’s already lost. I file the sentence away, the way I file everything that matters.
I leave with that sitting warm in my chest the entire drive to the club, an unfamiliar feeling I don’t examine too closely, not yet, not until I’ve dealt with the considerably less warm feeling waiting for me in Dimitri’s office.
He’s already there when I arrive, tablet out, expression tighter than it was last night.
“What have you got?”
“A name. Someone who used to run logistics for Pavel back before he disappeared. Still alive, still local, doing legitimate work now under a name that isn’t his own either.” Dimitri slides the tablet across the desk. “If anyone knows what he’s been doing the last eleven years, it’s this man.”
“How’d you find him?”
“Old contact of mine remembered a face at a funeral last spring. Didn’t think much of it at the time, mentioned it in passing when I started asking around.
Took some digging to confirm it, but it’s him.
” Dimitri taps the screen. “He’s been keeping his head down.
No criminal activity we can find, nothing that would draw attention.
Just a quiet life under a borrowed name. ”
“That fits. Pavel wouldn’t have trusted anyone who couldn’t disappear as cleanly as he did.”
“Can we get to him?”
“Carefully, and quietly. He’s spent over a decade making sure nobody finds him either. I don’t want to spook him into disappearing again before we get anything useful.”
“What’s our approach?”
“Money first. If that doesn’t work, we remind him what happens to men who protect people like Pavel when the wrong side comes asking.
” Dimitri’s voice stays level, but there’s an edge underneath it I recognize from years of watching him handle exactly this pressure. “I’d rather not need the second part.”
I look at the photograph on the screen, an older man, unremarkable, a face built to disappear into a crowd on purpose.
“Set it up,” I say. “However long it takes. I need to know what Pavel wants before he decides to take it.”
“And if he already knows what he wants, and he’s just been waiting for the right moment?”
I don’t have an answer for that one.