Epilogue
KATERINA
The house is finally quiet.
That still feels new enough to notice every time it happens.
Sofia has stopped asking for one more story, one more song, one more drink of water.
Nikolai has stopped pretending He isn’t tired enough to fall asleep sitting up.
Their doors are shut. The hallway lights are low.
Somewhere outside, the night insects are loud in the garden.
I’m standing at the kitchen counter slicing peaches badly while Roman pours wine like this is a perfectly normal life and not something we stole out of the wreckage of everything that came before it.
He glances at the cutting board and says, “That’s murder, not slicing.”
I look down at the uneven pieces. “You should be grateful I’m not doing this with one of your expensive knives.”
“They’re all expensive.”
“That sounds like a design flaw.”
It’s been six months since we left the old life behind. When the dust settled, when the children were safe and the city in the States had begun to feel too close to too many ghosts, Roman looked at me one quiet morning and said, “Come with me.”
Not as an order. Not even as a plea.
Just as if he had already understood that there was no version of his life left that did not have us in it.
So, we came here.
To a house outside Moscow where the mornings smell like pine and damp earth, where Sofia insists the garden is large enough for a pony and Nikolai has already mapped every room twice and decided he approves of the library but not the wallpaper in the upstairs hall.
Mikhail survived.
The bullet missed what mattered by an inch and left him with a scar and a worse temper, which is saying something.
He pretends he disapproves of all domestic happiness on principle, but he comes to dinner more often than he means to and has already let Sofia braid ribbons into his sleeve twice, which means he’s finished as a serious man and simply hasn’t accepted it yet.
My father accepted our marriage the way he accepts storms and taxes and funerals: with resentment, silence, and the understanding that refusal would change nothing.
He sent one letter. Short. Formal. Bitter between the lines.
Mama wrote separately, much longer, much softer. I cried over hers and burned his.
Andrei Morozov vanished.
One day he was still a force people spoke of in lowered voices. The next, the man himself had disappeared never to be seen again. Roman is convinced that his father will never come knocking our doors again.
“He had the chance to kill me, but he didn’t,” he says. “He and I were both going down the same path, the path of revenge. And the irony is that if he hadn’t overpowered me at first, I would have killed him. And I don’t think he would have cared.”
He left that life behind as much as a man like him can.
Not entirely. Never entirely. I’m old enough now to know there are some worlds you do not walk out of untouched.
But he came back to us each time. That’s what matters.
He put his hands to building instead of only destroying.
He chose this house, this table, these children, this life with me, again and again, until even I could no longer doubt it.
I see it clearly now, two men seeking the same revenge, but the twist of fate brought them retribution instead.
In the present, he laughs under his breath and comes up behind me, reaching around for the knife.
His chest presses lightly against my back, one arm braced on either side of me, and the simple domestic intimacy of it almost gets me more than anything else could.
The first year we were here, moments like this used to catch me off guard so badly I barely knew how to breathe through them.
Now they settle into me in a different way.
Deeper. More dangerous because they feel natural.
“Move,” he says quietly.
“Rude.”
“You’re destroying the fruit.”
I hand the knife over, but I don’t move far. I lean against the counter and watch him take over, his hands sure and efficient, sleeves rolled to the elbows, shirt open at the throat.
He catches me staring and lifts one brow.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
I smile. “You’re very comfortable lately.”
He finishes the last slice, sets the knife down, and turns to face me. “That bothers you?”
“No.”
It doesn’t. That’s the problem.
He studies me for a second too long, then reaches past me for the plate. His hand brushes my waist on the way back, casual, familiar, and my whole body reacts to it in that embarrassing instant way it always has with him.
He notices, of course.
“Still this easy?” he murmurs.
“You’re insufferable.”
“Yes,” he says. “And yet.”
And yet.
That’s us in two words. All the reasons we shouldn’t have worked, all the blood and fear and history, and yet here we are, in Russia, in his kitchen, with our children asleep upstairs and the old life so far behind us it almost feels fictional some nights.
He carries the plate to the table. I bring the wine. We don’t really sit. We hover, talking in that loose, unimportant way people do when they know they are putting off bed because they like the shape of the evening too much to end it.
Sofia danced with him twice before bed tonight. Three times if the clumsy spinning in the hallway counts.
“She’s getting better,” I say.
“At dancing?”
“At ordering people around.”
“She was born good at that.”
I laugh and take a sip of wine. “You encourage her.”
“I respect talent.”
“And Nikolai?”
Roman’s face shifts in that small, private way it always does when he talks about the children. Softer. Fuller. Less guarded.
“He watches everything,” he says. “You can almost hear him thinking.”
“He gets that from you.”
“No,” Roman says. “He gets that from you. I was much more reckless at his age.”
“Were you?”
He gives me a look over the rim of his glass. “You’ve heard the stories.”
I smile, but it doesn’t last long. I’m watching him too closely now.
The line of his mouth, the tiredness around his eyes, the quiet steadiness that took so long to arrive in him.
There are nights when I still catch flashes of the man he used to be, all sharp edges and forward motion, as if standing still long enough to feel anything might kill him.
Then there are moments like this, and I think maybe love didn’t soften him so much as teach him where to rest.
The thought catches me so hard I go still around it.
He notices immediately. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s twice.”
I look down at my glass, then back at him, and now I’m smiling in a way I can’t quite control. “I was just thinking,” I say.
“That’s always dangerous.”
“Yes.”
He sets his glass down and comes closer, one slow step at a time, like he already knows something in the room has changed and doesn’t want to break it by moving too fast. His hand settles on my waist. “What were you thinking?”
I should say something easy. Something dry. A joke. I have spent years getting out of tenderness by taking the side door into sarcasm.
Tonight, it doesn’t come.
Instead, I say, “That I’m happy.”
His face changes a little.
Not surprise exactly. Something quieter than that.
He strokes his thumb once over the side of my waist. “Good.”
I let out a breath. “That wasn’t the whole thought.”
“No?”
I shake my head. For one second, I think I’m going to say it first.
Then he looks at me the way he does when all the walls are down without either of us meaning them to be, and something in him gives before I can make myself brave.
“I love you,” he says.
I stare at him.
He keeps looking at me, calm on the surface, but I know him too well now not to feel the tension under it. He may look steady, but this cost him. Roman has always carried love like something dangerous, something that could be used against him if it ever took full shape in the open.
Now it has.
I put my glass down before I drop it.
“You can’t say things like that while I’m holding wine.”
That gets the smallest flicker of a smile out of him. “Why not?”
“Because now I’m emotional and unbalanced.”
“You were already emotional and unbalanced.”
“Roman.”
He laughs softly, but his eyes stay on mine. “I love you,” he says again, quieter this time. “I’ve loved you for so long I can’t even separate the feeling from the rest of my life anymore. It’s just there. In everything.”
My throat tightens so suddenly I have to look away.
All these years, all the pain it took to get here, and he says it like that. Plainly. No ornament. No defense.
He touches my chin and brings my face back toward him. “You don’t have to say it because I did.”
I let out a shaky laugh. “That’s good, because I’m still trying to recover from your timing.”
His mouth curves.
Then I say, because now there’s no point keeping any of it hidden, “I think I’ve loved you in every wrong way for years.”
Something hot and bright moves through his face at that. Relief, maybe. Or recognition. “You think?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “I’m being modest.”
That breaks the last of the tension.
He kisses me then, and it starts soft. Not because He isn’t hungry.
Because he is. Because we both are. But there’s too much feeling in the room now for either of us to rush past it.
His mouth moves slowly over mine, one hand at my waist, the other sliding up into my hair, and I melt into him in a way I never could have in the beginning, back when wanting him still felt too much like falling with nothing under me.
Now there is something under me.
Him. The children. This house. The life we built with bruised hands and stubbornness and an unreasonable amount of luck.
I kiss him back and feel him smile into it, just once, before the kiss deepens and turns warmer and heavier. My hands slide up his chest under the open collar of his shirt, and when I touch bare skin, he lets out that low sound that always goes straight between my legs.
“That’s unfair,” I murmur.
“What is?”
“Saying you love me and then kissing me like that.”
He brushes his mouth along my jaw. “I can do worse.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
His hand moves lower over my hip, drawing me closer, and now the softness is burning into something else.
Something familiar and beloved and still powerful enough to make my breath catch.
I can feel his body changing against mine, the hardening heat of him, and I smile against his throat because some things, thankfully, never become ordinary.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. “I should take you upstairs.”
“Yes,” I say.
He lifts one brow.
I slide my hands down to his belt. “Or you could stay right here and stop pretending you’re more disciplined than you are.”
That gets him.
He laughs once, low and rough, and then the laughter is gone because I’ve opened his trousers and wrapped my hand around him and he’s suddenly breathing much harder than he was a second ago.
“That’s not fair either,” he says.
“I learned from you.”
He kisses me again, harder now, and walks me backward until the edge of the kitchen table presses against my thighs.
I sit without either of us really deciding that’s what’s happening, and his hands are everywhere at once after that, pushing my dress up, thumbs grazing the inside of my knees, parting me before he’s even fully looking.
He breaks the kiss and glances down.
“No panties?”
I touch his face, smiling despite the heat climbing through me. “You sound shocked.”
“I’m delighted. That’s different.”
“Mm. Love has made you sentimental.”
“Don’t insult me.”
He drops to his knees between mine before I can answer, and whatever else I meant to say leaves me the second his mouth touches me.
The confession sits between us still, alive and glowing, but now it has become part of this too.
Part of the way he holds my thighs open like something precious.
Part of the slow, devastating way he licks into me until I’m gripping the edge of the table and saying his name like I can’t help it.
Part of the look in his eyes when he glances up and sees exactly how undone I already am.
“Roman,” I whisper.
He hums against me.
The vibration nearly finishes me on the spot.
I come with one hand in his hair and the other over my mouth, laughing helplessly through the last of it because there is something almost unbearable about being loved by him and desired by him at the same time, as if one has sharpened the other instead of easing it.
When he rises, I pull him into a kiss before he can say anything smug, because I know him too well and I do not have the strength tonight.
“I love you,” I say against his mouth this time.
He stills.
Then he kisses me harder and slides one hand behind my neck, the other gripping my hip as if the words have gone straight into him and settled somewhere vital.
“Say it again.”
I smile against his lips. “Demanding.”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
His forehead drops to mine for one brief second, and in that second I feel more from him than I could survive if I looked at it directly.
Then he says, voice rough, “Good.”
He turns me on the table after that, lifts my hips, and pushes into me with one hand braced beside mine. I gasp, not just from the stretch of him, though that’s enough, but because of the way he does it—careful at first, almost reverent, as if love has made him more dangerous instead of less.
He moves slowly for all of ten seconds.
Then I say his name in the tone that means more, and that’s the end of patience for both of us.
He fucks me on the kitchen table while the night air moves softly through the open windows and our children sleep upstairs and the whole house holds around us, strong enough at last to contain joy without breaking under it.
Afterward, when we’re both laughing too much and trying to straighten clothes that were clearly not meant to survive us, the music from the sitting room is still playing low.
Roman holds out his hand.
I look at it and smile. “Now?”
“Now.”
So I take it.
And he pulls me into him, right there in the middle of the kitchen, and we dance.
The End.
Dear precious reader, thank you for reading Mile High Ex's Brother!
When I finished writing the book, I couldn’t put down my pen yet… not until I wrote a little something extra special just for you. If you want more of Katerina and Roman, click here to get your bonus epilogue.
P.S. If you enjoyed Mile High Ex's Brother, then I think you’ll enjoy Sexting His Son’s Ex! Swipe to the next page for a sneak peek…