12. Night Out With Him #2
“When I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. I was obsessed with seeing Earth from orbit. I even convinced myself I’d be the first Russian to build a house on the moon.”
A low chuckle escaped him. “What changed?”
“I grew up. Then I decided I wanted to be a prosecutor.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s a sharp pivot.”
“Not really.” I kept my eyes on the sky, the warmth fading from my voice. “I wanted to make sure my father spent the rest of his life behind bars. He deserved the maximum sentence for what he did to my mother.”
A heavy silence descended between us.
After a long moment, Zhenya shifted onto one elbow, looking down at me. “Nikolai.”
I looked away from the stars. “…What?”
“Tell me.”
There was no demand in his voice, just a quiet willingness to listen for as long as it took.
“My mother was the kindest person I knew,” I began softly.
“The type who absorbed every blow without complaint. She was so beautiful… but after years with him, I forgot what her face looked like without marks. One bruise would fade, another would replace it. He never needed a reason. Sometimes dinner was cold. Sometimes she looked at him the wrong way. Sometimes he was just angry.”
Tears welled up, but I wiped them away quickly.
“I begged her to leave. We could have found a tiny place, anything to get away from him. But she always gave me the same answer: ‘He’ll change, Nikolai.’ He never did.”
I took a shaky breath, staring at my hands.
“He hated me—I don’t even know why. Whenever he came after me, my mother would step in between us and tell him to hit her instead. By the time I started high school, I dreaded going home. I’d stay after class until dark, just to delay facing that apartment for an extra hour.”
The tears spilled over, and I let out a weak, bitter laugh. “…This was supposed to be a good night, Zhenya. Let’s drop it.”
The blanket shifted as he moved closer. His thumb brushed softly beneath my eye, catching a tear before it hit my jaw.
“Niko,” he murmured. “You don’t have to hide it. I’m right here.”
I swallowed hard, looking down. “You know what used to tear me apart? My mother was a devout Christian. My father knew it, and whenever she begged him to stop, he’d quote Scripture back at her—telling her wives must submit, that respecting him was respecting God. And she believed him. So she stayed.”
The wind rustled through the trees along the ridge.
“Eventually, she sent me to stay with Babushka. It was only supposed to be temporary. On Mother’s Day, I saved every ruble of my allowance for a month to buy her a pair of earrings. When I finally went back to the apartment to give them to her…”
My throat closed up, my breathing growing jagged.
“…she was on the floor. There was so much blood. It was everywhere. I don’t even remember what happened next.”
The words dissolved into quiet gasps. Before I could process anything else, Zhenya pulled me into his chest. One hand held the back of my head, his fingers threading through my hair, while the other rubbed slow, grounding circles across my back.
“Enough,” he murmured, his voice steady against my hair. “You don’t have to force yourself through the rest.”
I tried to speak, but he tightened his hold.
“No. It’s okay. You don’t have to carry it all tonight. I’m here, Niko. You’ll never have to survive anything like that again.”
For a long while, neither of us said a word.
I stayed pressed against his chest, listening to the steady, grounding rhythm of his heartbeat under my ear.
It felt surreal. Before Zhenya, silence had always terrified me. Silence was the tense beat before a shout, a slap, or a door slamming open. Now, silence was just this—a heavy blanket, crisp night air, and the warmth of a man who had once intimidated me.
I hadn’t realized how exhausting it was to go through life constantly bracing for impact until I met someone who never gave me a reason to flinch. Around him, my shoulders dropped. I didn’t tense up when someone walked into the room or overthink every sentence before I spoke.
Without either of us making a show of it, Zhenya had become the safest place I’d ever known.
Somewhere down the slope, the music shifted. The slow Russian ballad faded out, replaced by the muffled, distant chords of an old English song drifting up the hill.
Zhenya looked up toward the stars. “You know… when I was sixteen, I wanted to play in the NBA.”
I blinked, raising my head slightly. “…Seriously?”
“Hm.”
“You?”
“I was decent.”
“Decent?”
He shot me a look. “I was very good.”
A quiet laugh escaped me. “I would’ve paid good money to see that.”
“My father said he’d rather die.”
I laughed harder this time. “He actually said that?”
“He told me basketball was for people with too much free time.” Zhenya’s lips twitched slightly. “So… I went to business school instead.”
There wasn’t any bitterness in his voice anymore—just the quiet acceptance of an old memory.
“I used to think everyone hated me,” he added smoothly.
I watched his face. “Used to?”
“Well, they still do,” he said with a faint smile. “They’re just far more polite about it now.”
“Why?”
“Because of the name.” He picked at a loose thread on the edge of the blanket. “When my mother married him, he wasn’t the Dmitry Romanov everyone sees today. He was ambitious, brilliant, and broke by Romanov standards. They built the foundation together.”
I stayed quiet, letting him talk.
“Then the money rolled in, and with it, the attention,” he gave a dry, quiet laugh. “A few hundred million rubles later, my father decided fidelity was purely optional. The affairs started. One after another.”
I remembered the family history Alexei had mentioned once. “Anka’s mother…”
He nodded. “She was one of them. And eventually, Irina. He married her.”
The cool wind rustled the leaves around the car.
“What about your mother?” I asked softly.
Zhenya stared out over the glittering city below. “She never begged him to stay. Never raised her voice, never made a scene. One morning, she packed her bags and left.”
A soft, genuine smile touched his face. “I’ve always respected that about her. She knew her limit, and the second he crossed it, she walked away.”
“Wait…” I turned to face him fully. “They’re divorced?”
“They are.”
“I always thought they were still together. Everyone at the hospital still refers to her as Dmitry’s wife.”
“She was his first,” Zhenya said. “The press never got wind of it. Only the family knows they split.”
I nodded slowly as the pieces clicked into place. “…That explains a lot.”
The conversation drifted after that. Sometimes it hit heavy notes, sometimes it didn’t.
We laughed over childhood memories that felt half-invented by now, argued over whose music taste was more irredeemable, and let long stretches of easy silence fill the space between us as we watched the city lights flicker below.
Without really noticing, I’d worked my way through almost every single snack we’d bought at the store. The pile of empty wrappers beside me was slightly humiliating evidence.
Zhenya, on the other hand, had barely touched a thing beyond a small bag of chips and his bottle of water.
“For someone your size,” I muttered, throwing a suspicious glance his way, “you eat like a bird.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I nudged my shoulder against his.
Far in the distance, tiny pinpricks of headlights were already multiplying along the arterial roads leading back into central Moscow.
Zhenya checked his watch before shifting up onto his elbows. “We should probably head back.”
I took one last look at the sky before nodding. Neither of us had caught a second of sleep, but strangely enough, I didn’t feel tired at all.
An hour later, the SUV was back on the highway, tracing the quiet roads toward the penthouse.