Chapter 30 Roman
ROMAN
Cover-ups are often more trouble than they’re worth. Not this time, though.
The man from the crematory spoke in the tone people use for weather. He did not know my son. He did not need to. The ash would not be buried. It would not be scattered in some place with a name that meant anything to me.
Vitaly Ekimov would not receive a place of honor simply because he was my son. Instead, I scattered his ashes where his mother’s family buries their dead. He was her creature in life. She can deal with him in death.
At Rope, the story we gave was simple. A structural failure behind the throne wall. A hidden service cavity that collapsed. Dust. Concussion. A freak acoustic echo that made it sound like more. Security repeated the lines because I wrote them short and plain.
No one argued. No one wants to win an argument that would cost them their membership to my club.
All evidence of that night has been processed or destroyed. Nothing will connect us to his death. Those who know what happened are relieved. No one mourns the wicked.
My only regret is I cannot give peace of mind to his victims’ families.
But I have reached out to them, financially speaking.
Anonymous donations have been made to those my people were able to track down.
It doesn’t make up for what he did, for the lives lost, none of it. But at least it’s something.
When I think back on the past month, it’s hard to put into words how I feel about him and what he did to my family and anyone fool enough to get in his way.
To this day, I don’t know why he didn’t kill Jennifer, Yuri, Xander, or the guards I’d given them.
Such things go against what I know of him. Or rather, what I thought I knew.
Was it mercy? Leverage? What drove him to keep them alive?
Perhaps he saw a little of himself in his half brothers.
But that would have required him to still hold a shred of humanity in his bones, and the night I executed him, I saw no humanity in his eyes.
I’m not sure if I ever did, even when he was a child.
Some questions never get answered.
Regardless, Mina has begun to sleep again, and I am grateful for it.
She has had too many sleepless nights in her young life.
My wife—it still boggles me that I can call her that—doesn’t twist and turn in her sleep anymore either.
A miracle. These days, she curls up on her side, usually with me behind her, and sleeps through the night.
I know this, because I do not sleep much. When the hour will not be argued with, I let it do what it came to do. I get up. I walk the hall. I stand in the nursery door. The need to watch them is like the need to watch Mina. Unending and undeniable.
Every conscious moment, I need to know they’re safe.
The twins sleep like boys who already decided the world is theirs. Xander sprawls. Yuri tucks. They trade positions without waking. It is a language they speak to each other without words.
I hope whatever kept Mina alive is in them. Not just her stubbornness. Her mercy. Her ability to be afraid without being stolen by fear. She doesn’t freeze. I want that for my sons. I want them to have her steadiness.
I used to worry that what was wrong in Vitaly came from both sides.
Bridgette’s rage knew no bounds. My father’s callousness was wielded against friend and foe alike.
Blood isn’t everything—I know that. I scrub my hands at the sink some nights and think about the men I have been and the men I refuse to be.
I am not my father. I never will be. But it’s hard not to believe his cruelty and Bridgette’s rage are what made Vitaly into the man he was.
So, I worry for Yuri and Xander. But they are half Mina’s, and that may be their saving grace, if blood has an impact.
The monitor on the dresser clicks and whispers. Not a cry. Just the small sound a body makes when it remembers it is alive. I stand and lean over the crib. Yuri’s mouth works and settles. Xander kicks once and surrenders.
“They won’t be like him,” Mina says softly from the doorway.
I turn and she stands in the pool of hall light, hair loose, one hand on the frame. The shirt she sleeps in hits her mid-thigh. Bare legs. Bare feet. A goddess.
“How did you know?”
Her smile is wan. “Because I know you.”
“It’s two in the morning. Why are you up?”
“You left the bed, and I want you back in it.”
My sigh is heavier than I’d like it. She doesn’t need to know I don’t sleep much these days. “I’m not sure I will sleep.”
She smiles again. It starts slow and changes the temperature of the room. “Who said anything about sleep?”
I know that tone. I like that tone. But I haven’t heard it in over a month out of her. Odd to hear it now.
When I cross the room, she does not step back. I set my hand on the small of her back as we travel the hall together. She leans into my touch, and it feels like unearned trust.
I don’t deserve the life I am building. But I will cling to it all the same.
In our room she draws the curtain a little and lets the moon take a step inside.
The lamp is off. We do not need it. I set the monitor on the nightstand and turn the volume up a notch.
The green light answers. There’s a stillness to the early morning hours that settles something deep inside my chest.
Or maybe that’s her doing.
She faces me and lifts her hands to my shirt. I do the same with hers. We undo the barriers the way you work a knot in a necklace you want to wear. Patient. Interested. No rush. Bodies remember what the brain tried to file away under “Future good times.”
We have not touched like this since the night at the club. It was not a rule. It was how grief and relief argue without words. We lived in the same bed and learned how to breathe there again. Companionable, but platonic healing.
Now her palms travel my chest and the last month steps back to let this minute through. The first contact lights a fuse that was waiting, not hiding. I kiss her and the taste is home.
I take my time. I let my mouth map the line of her jaw and the thin healed scar that is part of our history.
I trace the hollow at the base of her throat with a slow kiss.
She breathes in and I feel the breath as if it were mine.
Her hands slide to my shoulders and anchor there.
When she rises on her toes to meet my mouth again, I do not make her reach far. I bend down to her.
I’d fall to my knees for her, if she’d let me. But she’s too close for that now, and I like the press of her body against mine too much to stop. She is soft and deliberate, all yes with no rush in it.
I taste every part of her in a slow dance of mouths and skin. A shoulder. A breast. The inside of a wrist. I plant wet kisses down the length of her, then back up again, until my hips are nestled between her thighs. I drag my thumb over her bottom lip as I stare into her eyes. “Are you sure?”
Her lips slide into a faint smile as she wraps her legs around me and pulls me in. “Yes.”
We do not rush. We let it arrive. When it does, we stop talking. The rest is ours.
The wet glide of our bodies is the thing dreams are made of. Unhurried, languid. Her body stretches to take my length, and all I can think of is how fucking lucky I am to be here, now, with her. How loved I feel by her. How she is a miracle.
My body aches with less poetry and more urgency, and I speed up by a breath. When she arches beneath me in ecstasy, I drive harder, longer strokes into her body. I need to feel her come on me the way I need oxygen. Her pleasure is required for me to exist.
When she breaks, I join her, too enamored of her to even think of holding out.
We lie quiet while our heartbeats climb down.
The window breathes a thin wind. The monitor hums, steady and small.
Her hair spreads across my shoulder and tickles the skin there until I want to laugh and do.
She draws a lazy line over my arm and stops when she finds the scar on my forearm.
The pads of her fingers are gentle where the tissue still pulls if I move too fast.
Her voice is still breathless from our fun. “Does it bother you?”
“It reminds me—”
“Of him?”
“Of you. Of the knife you didn’t have to use. Of your willingness to use it, and save our family, even if that meant losing me. Of how much I love you for that.”
She pushes up on an elbow and studies me. “You have been watching the boys at night.”
“It is a comfort I allow myself. To see with my own eyes that they are safe.”
“You guaranteed that a month ago.”
“It’s not only their physical safety I worry about, Mina. I worry about what I can’t see.” A breath saws out of me as I lie back and stare at the ceiling. “What if…what if my father is in them? His malice—”
“Your father is dead. He doesn’t live in them. Those boys are yours—”
“Vitaly was mine too.”
“He was a grown man who made his own choices. Yes, you and his mother influenced him, but he was still responsible for all the bullshit he did as an adult. Don’t pretend he was your puppet who was helpless to your whims, because if he was, you and I have a problem.”
I snort a laugh at that. “Certainly not. But how much of one’s actions are due to your blood and how much are due to how you were raised?”
“I’m pretty sure people have been debating that since the dawn of history, and I don’t think we’re about to definitively answer that question at three in the morning.”
I know she’s right. She’s always right. It’s mildly infuriating, but also a comfort. “I suppose that’s true.” I kiss her hair. I taste shampoo and something addictive and sweet that belongs only to her. “They will not be like him.”
“No. They will not. We won’t allow it. His life is not their destiny, Roman.
” She settles again. The silence is a blanket laid over a day that agreed to lie down.
I listen for the truck on the far road that always passes at half after three.
Mina does not move. Her breathing deepens into that steady pattern that says her body trusts this minute. I close my eyes to listen better.
We drift. Minutes loosen their grip. So does the fear. I curl around her body and take a face full of hair for my troubles. I don’t mind it, though.
“Sorry I woke you when I got up earlier.”
“Mmflp.” A moment later, her soft snore weighs me down.
Vitaly’s life is not my sons’ destiny. They will be their own men, and with luck, they will find their soul mate easier than I found mine.