Chapter Fifteen
Nikolai
I shoulder the bedroom door open and we cross the threshold still tangled together, her hands in my hair, my arms around her.
When the backs of her knees hit the bed, we go down onto it and I catch my weight on my forearms.
I stop.
Just for a moment.
She’s beneath me, chest rising and falling, lips parted, eyes searching my face. I look at her the way I haven’t let myself look at her since I came back—without the guard, without the distance I’ve been keeping between wanting and taking.
Blyad.
Four years.
“Niko.” My name in her mouth, barely above a breath.
I lower my head to her neck and feel her shiver before my lips even make contact. Her skin is warm, faintly perfumed, heartbeat quick against my mouth. She exhales—that particular sound I’d filed away and carried with me, the one I’d convinced myself I’d half-imagined.
I hadn’t imagined it.
Her hands move to the hem of her sweatshirt and I help her out of it, unhurried, taking in what four years have made of her. She starts to reach for me and I catch her wrists gently, holding them above her head.
“Let me,” I say quietly.
She stills.
I take my time. Relearning. The curve of her throat, the soft weight of her, the way her breath catches when I find the right place. She’s more sensitive than I remember—or maybe I’d forgotten how attuned to each other we were, how little it took when we knew each other this well.
She arches into me.
“Nikolai—”
“I have you.” I bring my mouth back up to hers. “I have you, lapochka moya.”
The kiss slows. Deepens. And for the first time since I came back from the dead, the urgency drops away—not because the wanting is less, but because I’m finally, actually here.
I slide my hand down the plane of her stomach and feel her muscles tighten in anticipation. She exhales my name again, and this time it sounds like relief.
Like something she’s been holding in for four years, finally let go.
“Oh God.” Her breath breaks. “I missed you. I missed you so much.”
Something cracks open in my chest.
I pull her up and into my lap, her legs wrapping around me, and I hold her there for a moment—just hold her, forehead against her shoulder, breathing her in. Four years of distance compressed into this. The realness of her. The warmth.
“Lapochka moya.”
She pulls back enough to look at me, and her eyes are bright—not quite tears, but close. I brush her hair back from her face.
“Niko.” She nods toward the window. “The curtains.”
I glance over. She’s right—the room is exposed, city lights cutting through the gap.
I cross to the window and close them, checking the street below out of habit before I let the fabric fall.
Old instincts. When I turn back, she’s watching me from the bed, and the sight of her stops me for a half-second the way it has every time since I came back.
Like my eyes need a moment to confirm it’s real.
I come back to her.
She reaches for my belt, fingers working at the buckle, and I cover her hands with mine—not stopping her, just slowing her down. She looks up at me.
“Four years,” I say quietly. It’s not an explanation. It’s everything I don’t have words for.
She understands.
She always understood me better than I deserved.
She finishes with the belt, and I help her with the rest, and then there’s nothing between us.
Her eyes move over me—unhurried, unguarded—and I let her look.
I have nothing to perform here. No distance to maintain.
This is just her, and me, and what was always true between us even when everything else fell apart.
I lower myself over her slowly.
Her hands come up to my face, thumbs tracing my jaw like she’s still making sure I’m real.
“You’re here,” she whispers.
“I’m here.” I turn my face into her palm. “Ya zdes’.”
I feel her exhale—deep, full, the last of something releasing—and then her arms come around me, and we stop talking entirely.
She gasps into the pillow, and I run my palm over the curve of her, watching the color rise in her skin.
When she turns back to face me, her eyes are dark and her composure is entirely gone.
Four years of careful distance, and this is what remains underneath it.
This has always been what remained underneath it.
I take my time.
I want to know her again—the particular way she responds, what makes her breath catch, what makes her say my name like that. I’ve carried an approximation of this for four years. The real thing is better than I remembered, and I remembered it clearly.
When I finally push inside her, we both go still.
The sound she makes—and the sound I make—say everything neither of us has been able to say out loud.
I rest my forehead against her temple. Her walls are tight around me, her hands gripping my shoulders, and for a moment neither of us moves. I’m aware of every point of contact between us. The heat of her skin against mine. Her heartbeat, fast and close.
“Lapochka moya.”
“Don’t stop,” she breathes.
I begin to move—slow at first, deliberate, watching her face. Her head tips back. I feel the restraint is costing me but I don’t care. I have four years to make up for and I intend to take my time.
“Faster,” she manages.
“Not yet.”
She makes a sound of frustration that almost undoes me entirely. I press my mouth to her jaw, her throat, feeling her pulse against my lips.
This is what I held onto. Not the empire, not the power, not any of it.
This—her—the specific gravity of her, the way the world reorganizes itself around her presence.
I understood it for four years, sitting in an empty apartment across from her lit window.
I understand it differently now, with her arms around me and nothing between us.
I go deeper and feel her gasp.
It occurs to me, somewhere in the heat of it, that surviving what’s coming isn’t just an obligation anymore.
It’s something I want with the full weight of myself.
I want to be here tomorrow. I want to still be here when Hannah is old enough to understand who I am.
I want to lie next to this woman when we are both old and have nothing left to prove to anyone.
That’s new.
For a long time, staying alive was instrumental—a means to protect them from a distance. Now it’s personal.
Lauren’s hands pull me closer as I go, the thought dissolves into sensation, and there is nothing left but this room, this woman, and everything we are finally, after four long years, letting ourselves have.
I feel her getting close before she says anything. The change in her breathing, the way she holds onto me tighter, like she’s afraid of what’s coming and wants it at the same time.
I slow down deliberately.
“Niko—”
“I know.” I press my mouth to her temple. “I have you.”
I’ve been patient for four years. I can be patient for this.
She makes a sound against my shoulder—frustration and want and passion at the same time—and I keep my rhythm steady, watching her face, learning her again. This is what I held onto. Not an idea of her. Her. Specific and real and finally here.
When she breaks, she turns her face into my neck, and I feel everything at once—her whole body shuddering against mine, her hands gripping me like an anchor.
I follow her over the edge and the world goes white at the edges, my pulse hammering in my throat, every muscle locking and releasing in a wave I feel down to my bones.
Little stars burst at the corners of my vision.
Four years of distance, four years of absence, four years of surviving on memory alone—all of it collapses into this single suspended moment, her arms around me, my name breaking apart on her lips and the profound, unraveling relief of being exactly where I was always supposed to be.
We stay tangled together, neither of us moving. Her heartbeat slows against mine. I press my lips to her hair and close my eyes and simply exist here, in this room, with her.
Eventually she shifts, tilting her face up to look at me. Her expression is open in a way I haven’t seen since I came back—no walls, no calculations, just Lauren. Looking at me like she used to.
Neither of us speaks.
There’s nothing that needs saying yet—nothing that wouldn’t shrink what just happened by trying to put words around it. I push her hair back from her face and she lets me, watching me with those green eyes that have undone me since the first time I looked into them.
“Come on,” I say finally. “Poshli.”
I take her hand and lead her into the ensuite. Steam rises around us as I get the water running. She steps in first, tilting her face up into the stream with her eyes closed, and I watch the tension leave her shoulders in real time.
After a moment she turns to me, tracing one of the tattoos on my forearm with her fingertip, following the line of it with quiet focus.
“The past four years,” she says, not quite finishing the sentence.
“I know.”
She looks up. Something moves across her face—complicated, layered, not yet resolved. I don’t try to name it. We have time, or we will, once this is over.
She reaches up and brushes the wet hair back from my forehead. A small gesture. The kind that costs more than the large ones.
“Don’t die,” she says. Plainly, looking straight at me.
“I’ll do my best,” I say.
Her eyes narrow slightly. “That’s not the answer I was looking for.”
“It’s the honest one.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she leans her forehead against my chest, and I put my arms around her, and we stand there under the water until it starts to run cold.