Chapter 17
ELENA
The apartment is dark when I get home.
I knew it would be. I knew Mara was at Danny’s and I knew I was coming back to an empty apartment, and I was fine with that on the car ride home because I needed the quiet.
I needed to not have to arrange my face for anyone or answer any questions or be anything other than a woman who just told her billionaire boss she is pregnant with his child and is now standing in her own kitchen at half past midnight in her coat trying to remember if she ate anything since lunch.
She did not eat anything since lunch.
I find crackers in the cupboard and eat them standing at the counter, and I look at the dark window over the sink, and think about Roman’s face when I said it.
The way he went completely still. The way he said say that again, not because he did not hear me, but because his brain needed the seconds.
The way he stood at the window with his back to me while he processed it, and I sat in the chair in my coat and waited, and the room was so quiet I could hear the city sixty-two floors below.
Come back tomorrow evening. I’ll have a proposal for you.
I put the crackers away, and I go to bed.
I wake up to the sound of the front door, Mara’s bag hitting the floor, and Mara’s voice saying, “Oh, good, you’re up,” in the tone of someone who has been composing questions on the subway ride home and is ready to ask all of them.
The clock on my phone says eight forty-two.
I sit up.
Mara appears in my doorway in yesterday’s clothes with her coat still on, hair down, and the cheerfulness of someone who had a genuinely good night and is trying to be considerate about it.
“You went,” she says.
“I went.”
She comes in and sits on the end of my bed, pulls her knees up, and looks at me with the full quality of her attention. “Tell me everything.”
I tell her about the car, the penthouse, and Roman opening the door himself. About how I stood in the entrance, still in my coat, and said it before I had fully decided I was ready.
His face when I did, that stillness, the way he said say that again not because he didn’t hear me, but because he needed a second to catch up to what he had just heard.
What I said after. The seven weeks, the confirmation, you are the only man. The silence that came after all of that was long enough that I stopped trying to predict what it would produce.
Mara listens without interrupting, which is how I know she understands the weight of it.
“And then,” she says.
“And then he said come back tomorrow evening. That he would have a proposal for me.”
Mara is quiet for a moment. “A proposal.”
“That is the word he used.”
“What kind of proposal?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask because the way he said it made it clear that asking was not going to produce an answer until he was ready to give one.”
She looks at me steadily. “How did he seem? When you told him.”
I think about it honestly. Not the stillness, not the questions, not the window. The thing underneath all of that, the thing I caught in the two seconds before the processing took over. “Shocked,” I say. “Genuinely shocked. But not angry. I kept waiting for anger, and it didn’t come.”
“That’s something.”
“I don’t know what it is yet.”
Mara unfolds herself from the end of the bed and stands up, holding out her hand. “Come have coffee,” she says. “You look like you need coffee more than you need to sit here thinking about it.”
She is not wrong.
The day moves slowly in the way days move when you are waiting for an evening that feels significant. I shower, dress, and eat properly for the first time in what feels like days. Mara stays home, and we do not talk about Roman again.
At six, I go to my room, and I stand in front of my wardrobe, and I look at my clothes for longer than the situation requires.
I am not dressing for a date. I know I am not dressing for a date because Roman Petrov doesn’t do dates, and whatever this evening is, it is not that.
But I am also not dressing for the office.
I am dressing for a conversation that is going to determine the shape of the next significant portion of my life, and I would like to look like someone who understood that when she got dressed.
I choose a dark navy dress, simple and well-fitted, and my good coat, and I pin my hair up because my hair up is the version of me that can hold a conversation with this man without losing the thread of it.
Mara is on the couch when I come out. She looks at me and says, “You look good.”
I say, “Thank you.”
She tells me to call her after and I say I will and I leave.
Viktor is at the curb at seven forty-five, which means Roman told him to be there at seven forty-five, which means Roman has been thinking about the timing of this evening the way he thinks about the timing of everything, with deliberate attention.
I get in the car.
The ride is twenty minutes. I spend them looking out the window, not thinking about anything useful. By the time Viktor pulls up to the building on 57th, I am exactly as prepared as I was when I left the apartment, which is to say not at all.
The door staff sends me up without a word.
Roman opens the door before I knock.
He is in dark trousers and a white shirt, no jacket.
He looks like a man who has spent the day thinking something through completely and has arrived at the end of it.
He steps back. I go inside. He closes the door.
No drink offered this time. He gestures toward the seating area.
We sit. Outside the windows, the city does its thing. The room is quiet.
He looks at me.
“I’ll keep this straightforward,” he says.
“Please.”
“We get married. Quietly, quickly, with my most trusted people present.” He holds my gaze.
“Your father’s medical debt is cleared before the week is out.
Aleksei Morozov stops being a name anyone in your life mentions again the moment you are under Petrov protection.
The council gets the heir they have been directing me toward, and the Volkov alliance becomes irrelevant overnight.
” He pauses. “You get security. A position inside my world that no one can challenge or remove. And the child grows up with everything I have built behind it.”
“You are not offering romance,” I say.
“I am offering a solution. A real one. The kind that doesn’t fall apart when circumstances change because it is not built on circumstances. It’s built on terms.”
I sit with that.
I sit with the full weight of it, what he is offering and what he is not offering, and I think about my father’s tired hands and Carla’s folded dish towel and Aleksei’s controlled smile and two pink lines on a bathroom floor and two years of sitting outside this man’s office with feelings I filed away every single day because there was nowhere else to put them.
He is not offering romance.
He is also the only man I have wanted for two years, and the father of the child I am carrying.
He is sitting across from me in his penthouse at eight o’clock on a Friday evening offering me a solution that solves every problem I have been unable to solve on my own.
Underneath the practicality of all of it I know exactly why I am going to say yes and it has very little to do with the terms.
“Yes,” I say.
Roman looks at me for a moment. Something moves in his expression, brief and controlled, and then it is gone, and he nods once, the way he nods when something has been decided and the next thing can begin.
“I’ll have my lawyer draw up the preliminary paperwork tomorrow,” he says.
“Alright.”
“And, Elena.” He holds my gaze. “Your father’s bills. I meant what I said. Before the week is out.”
I look at him, and I think about my father in his chair by the window, the tired set of his shoulders, and the way his hands have been sitting still lately when they never used to sit still.
“Thank you,” I say.
Roman says nothing.