Chapter Twelve
Lauren
I kiss Hannah goodnight and ease her bedroom door shut behind me.
The penthouse feels too small suddenly, the silence pressing in from all sides. I slip out onto the balcony and let the night air hit me—Chicago wind, colder than Atlanta, carrying the smell of the lake somewhere in the distance. I close my eyes and breathe.
The door slides open behind me.
I don’t have to turn around to know it’s him. I’ve always been able to sense him in a room. Four years didn’t change that, apparently.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks.
“I needed air.” I keep my eyes on the skyline.
He comes to stand beside me, not too close, resting his forearms on the railing. For a moment, neither of us says anything. The city hums below us, indifferent to our complicated history.
“You seem tense,” he says.
“I tend to be, lately.”
“You can talk to me, Lauren.”
Something about the quiet certainty in his voice makes my chest ache. Can I? I want to ask. Or will you disappear again the moment things get complicated? I hold the thought behind my teeth.
But it comes out anyway—quieter than I intended, with less edge and more exhaustion.
“If Aslanov had never found out you were alive—” I start carefully. “Were you planning to stay in the shadows forever?”
Nikolai’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t answer right away, and the silence is its own kind of answer.
“Hannah needed a father.” My voice is steady, but only just. “And you weren’t there. Do you understand what that was like? Watching her grow and not being able to give her that?”
“I can only imagine—”
“You can’t.” I turn to look at him then, and I’m not angry—I’m just tired, and honest, and the words come out raw. “You weren’t there to imagine it. You were somewhere else, being dead.”
The hurt that crosses his face is immediate and unguarded. He looks down. The guilt hits me almost before I finish speaking.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That was—”
“No.” He raises a hand, not dismissing me—dismissing the apology. “Don’t. You needed to say it.”
I turn back to the railing, gripping the edge to keep myself anchored.
In my peripheral vision I can see the tension in his shoulders, the weight he carries in his silence.
Four years ago, I would have read him as unfeeling.
I know better now. He hides everything, but he can’t hide it from me. He never could.
This has cost him too. I know it did.
I exhale and let the wind pull at my hair. Above us, the blinking lights of a plane arc slowly across the dark sky, the low drone of the engine fading in and out. I watch it until it disappears behind a building.
After this is over, I think. We could go somewhere.
The thought dissolves almost immediately. Because after this is over—if Nikolai has his way—he won’t be here. He’ll have put himself between us and Ronan Aslanov and whatever comes after that will come without him.
He’s already decided.
I’ve known it without him saying it directly. It’s in the way he watches Hannah when he thinks no one’s looking. The way he talks about Aslanov like it’s a problem he intends to close permanently, regardless of the cost.
How am I supposed to go back to normal after that?
The answer is that I won’t be able to. I know how I’m built—how my mind works against me in grief.
I survived his death once by half-convincing myself it wasn’t real, that somewhere, somehow, he’d survived.
And I was right. So, if it happens again—if he dies for real this time—some part of me will never believe it.
I’ll spend the rest of my life waiting for a door to open.
I can’t do that again.
I can’t let him die again.
My breath catches. Hannah has his eyes—the same devastating blue that used to look at me like I was the only person in any room.
Every time I looked at her in those first months, I saw him.
The resemblance used to hollow me out. I’d get her to sleep and then sit with the grief in the dark, going through the same memories on a loop until exhaustion shut me down.
And now he’s here, standing two feet away from me, real and solid and impossible.
I grip the railing harder.
This is a nightmare. Has to be.
But underneath that—buried somewhere I don’t have the energy to excavate right now—it’s also the only thing I’ve wanted for four years.
I turn to look at him, and the question I can’t stop asking surfaces again—was it this hard for him too?
It’s there in his face. He’s not a man who shows it; he never has been. But I know what to look for. The slight tension around his eyes. The way he goes very still when something costs him. For just a moment, before he blinks it away, his eyes are glassy.
Four years.
The same four years, carrying the same weight, just from opposite sides of a lie neither of us chose.
The wind picks up between us. I feel it in my chest—a physical ache, like something pulled too tight.
He’s standing close enough that I could reach out and touch him, and the distance feels absurd.
Unnecessary. We are grieving the same thing.
We are the only two people in the world who understand exactly what was lost.
Something gives way.
I’m not sure which of us moves first. I think it’s me. And then his arm comes around me, exactly the way it always did, and I stop thinking entirely.
He cups my face. Kisses me back.
It’s tender at first—careful, almost disbelieving—and then the familiarity of it overwhelms me.
Four years collapse into nothing.
I remember this. The particular warmth of him, the way he holds me like I’m both precious and completely his.
My fingers curl into the front of his shirt and I press closer, chasing the feeling before I can talk myself out of it.
Every nerve ending I have comes alive.
The memories surface without permission—the stolen moments in my office, the urgency of our first night together, the way he used to look at me after.
Heat floods through me, a hunger I’ve kept buried so long I’d half-convinced myself it was gone.
It isn’t gone.
The kiss deepens, and I feel myself losing ground fast. His mouth is too familiar. My body remembers too much.
And that’s exactly what stops me.
I pull back.
He lets me. He always let me.
I press my fingers briefly to my lips, steadying myself. My heart is hammering. Every instinct I have is telling me to close the distance again, and I have to override each one deliberately, consciously, like talking myself down from a ledge.
I can’t do this.
Not because I don’t want to—God, I want to—but because I know exactly where this leads.
I’ve already lost him once. I rebuilt myself from nothing after that, and it nearly broke me.
If I let myself fall back into this and then lose him again, I won’t come back from it the same way.
I’m not sure I’d come back from it at all.
And I’m a mother now. What I want doesn’t get to be the first question anymore.
I look at him—really look, for just a moment—and then I slip past him and go inside.
I don’t let myself turn around until I’m through the door. When I do, he’s moved to the edge of the balcony, forearms on the railing, facing the city. The wind moves through his hair. He’s let it grow longer than he used to wear it.
He looks like a man who has learned how to carry loss quietly.
I look away and go upstairs, wondering how much longer can I keep doing this.