Chapter Fourteen
Lauren
Almost a week.
That’s how long it’s been since the attack, since my life fell apart.
I wander through the penthouse in the early morning quiet, coffee warm between my hands.
My sleep has been getting better—incrementally, reluctantly—and I think I know why.
Something about knowing Nikolai is on the other side of the door, running his circuits, checking his cameras.
My nervous system has apparently decided that’s enough to stand down from full alert. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
The stress hasn’t left my shoulders, though. It’s just taken up permanent residence there.
What I can’t stop turning over is Hannah.
We’re coming up on a week of no school, no friends, no routine.
She’s been remarkably adaptable—better than me, honestly—but children need consistency.
Structure. Other four-year-olds. The longer we’re here, the more I feel the weight of what she’s missing, and the guilt that comes with not being able to fix it.
I pin my hair back and head downstairs.
I stop halfway.
Hannah is at the kitchen table with Claire, a workbook open between them and a pencil in her hand. Her brow is furrowed in that particular way—the look she gets when she’s thinking hard and doesn’t want anyone to know she’s thinking hard.
“That’s the one, sweetheart,” Claire says. “One more. Can you do one more?”
Hannah is already reading the next question.
The worry loosens, just slightly. I finish coming down the stairs.
“I didn’t know you tutored,” I say.
Claire glances up. “I was a nanny for years. Tutored my niece too—she’s nearly ten now.” She looks back at Hannah with something warm in her expression. “Sharp as a tack, this one. I can already tell.”
I smile as I watch them. Hannah never had a grandmother.
No extended family, no one who looked at her the way Claire is looking at her right now—with patience, with investment, with the particular tenderness of someone older who has chosen to show up for her.
It squeezes something in my chest I wasn’t prepared for.
I become aware of Nikolai behind me.
He’s watching Hannah too. I’ve learned to read the way his face changes around her—the way that perpetual guardedness softens into something unguarded and almost pained. A fierce, helpless love that he doesn’t know what to do with yet.
I nod my head toward the kitchen. He follows.
He leans against the counter, arms folded, sleeves pushed to his elbows. I make a point of keeping my eyes on his face.
“How much longer?” I ask.
“Until Aslanov is dealt with.”
“Dealt with? Meaning dead?”
He holds my gaze and doesn’t answer, which is its own answer.
“Right. And then what?” I press. “What does your life look like, Niko? What does…?” The words catch in my throat, but he understands the answers I’m looking for.
Something shifts in his expression. He’s quiet for a moment—the kind of quiet that means he’s choosing words carefully, not avoiding the question.
“I want Hannah to know her father,” he says. “If you let me. If… I make it out.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I keep my voice low. “The Bratva. Your empire. What happens to all of it?”
He looks at me steadily. “There is no Bratva, Lauren.”
I wait.
“The Rogov syndicate died four years ago when I signed it over to Aslanov. When he’s gone, it goes with him. There’s nothing left for me to step back into.” A pause. “I’m not sure I’d want to, even if there were.”
I search his face. “What does that mean?”
His gaze moves briefly to the doorway—toward Hannah, still at the table, pencil in hand. When he looks back at me, his jaw is tight.
“I spent twenty years building something I thought mattered.” He says it carefully, like each word is weighted. “And when I lost it, the only thing I actually grieved was you and Hannah.” A beat. “I want to be in her life. I want her to know who I am.”
The words land somewhere I wasn’t defending.
I’ve watched him watching her all week. The careful distance he keeps.
The way he registered every small moment—the morning cereal, the bedtime, the tutoring just now—like a man cataloguing things he was afraid would be taken away.
I’d told myself it was complicated, that wanting something didn’t make it safe, that a man like Nikolai Rogov couldn’t simply step out of the world he came from and into a normal life.
But standing here, looking at him, I’m not sure what I actually believe anymore.
“Do you mean that?” It comes out as a whisper.
He doesn’t say anything. Just continues looking at me, like he’s staring into my soul.
“What if… what if you don’t make it, Niko?” The question comes out quietly. “What if… he wins?”
“I have help.”
“From who? Timur?”
He doesn’t answer that directly. Instead he steps forward, and I find myself pulling back until the counter stops me—cool edge against my lower back, nowhere left to go.
He doesn’t close the remaining distance.
He just exists in it, close enough that I’d have to make a deliberate choice to put more space between us.
I don’t.
“For Hannah—for all three of us—I will do everything in my power to come back from this. That’s the only promise I can make right now. But when it’s over, I’d like the chance to be more than just the man who kept you safe.”
Something inside me goes very still.
He’s not asking for forgiveness. He’s not negotiating. He’s just standing there, telling me the truth the way he always told me the truth—plainly, without softening it into something easier to hold.
And the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I can’t argue my way out of, is that Nikolai Rogov has never lied to me. Not once. Every damage he ever caused came from choices I could trace back to reasons, however devastating. Never from a lie.
He’s still watching me. There’s heat in it, undisguised, but underneath that something more gentle, more careful. Like he’s waiting for a door I haven’t decided to open yet.
I’m aware of exactly how close he is. The warmth radiating off him. The particular way the air changes when he’s this near, like my body remembers before my mind catches up.
I should step back.
I don’t.
“Want to do something about it?” he asks. Quiet. Not a challenge—a question.
“About what?”
“This.” His eyes drop briefly to my mouth, then back up. “Whatever’s been sitting between us since the balcony.”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out.
Four years of grief. Four years of rebuilding. Four years of telling myself I was done with this man, that I was stronger than whatever we were to each other.
And here I am, backed against a kitchen counter, not moving.
“Yes.” It comes out barely above a whisper. But he hears it.
For the first time in four years, I stop fighting.
I let him in.