Chapter 2 #2
The words leave my mouth and detonate silently.
I watch the shrapnel of them hit her face in real time.
Shock first, her lips parting, her eyes widening.
Then something else, something that cycles through disbelief and confusion and anger before settling on a fourth thing that I can't name but that makes her hand tighten around mine instead of letting go.
"You want," she says slowly, "to get me pregnant."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Because a child would root you to me in a way that no lock or keypad or alarmed stairwell ever could.
Because biology is the one cage I could build around you that you would choose to stay inside.
Because I have spent eight days watching you exist in my space and wear my clothes and eat my food and come apart under my mouth, and the idea of something that is half you and half me, something that carries my blood and yours and lives inside you where I put it, is the only thought that has ever come close to making me feel something like peace.
That's the truth. But I can't say that, because it sounds insane even inside my own head, and Wren Calloway is too smart to respond well to insanity.
"Because I want you tied to me," I say instead. "Permanently. In a way that can't be undone with a keypad code or a court order."
"So it's about control."
"It's about permanence."
"Those feel like the same thing."
"No. Control is what I have now. The locks.
The codes. The men outside the door. That's control, and it's fragile, and tonight proved how fragile it is.
Permanence is different. Permanence is something you carry with you when you walk out the door.
Something that brings you back not because you have to but because part of you lives inside the reason to. "
She stares at me. I watch her process it, watch the gears turn behind those dark eyes that I dream about now, which is something I would never admit to another living human but is true nonetheless.
"You want to put a baby in me," she says, "so that I'll have a reason to come back to you."
"Yes."
"That's the most insane thing anyone has ever said to me. And my father sold me to the Russian mafia to cover a gambling debt, so the bar is high."
"I know."
"You've known me for eight days."
"I knew what you were to me in eight seconds."
"That's not… Dominik, that's not how it works. You can't just decide someone is yours and then restructure their entire biology to ensure they can't leave."
"I'm not restructuring your biology. I'm asking you to let me be part of it."
"You're not asking. You don't ask. You never ask."
She's right. I don't ask. I tell, I command, I direct, I establish. Asking implies the possibility of refusal, and I have never been interested in possibilities I can't control.
But I look at this woman, this impossible woman is cleaning my torn knuckles with a washcloth after I killed three men in the room next to her, and I realize that what I want from her can't be taken.
Not this. A child isn't a conquest. It's a collaboration, and collaboration requires something I've never offered another human being in my life.
Consent.
"I'm asking," I say, and the word feels foreign in my mouth, clumsy and unfamiliar. "I'm asking you, Wren."
She looks at me for a long time. Long enough that the silence becomes its own kind of conversation, full of things neither of us is saying.
"Not now," she says finally, dropping her hand from mine, the washcloth now cold and stained.
Not now is not no .
Relief washes through me, surprising me as much as anything else.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?" She blinks. "I expected more of an argument."
"I told you I could be patient."
"Patient has conditions, you said. There's a cost."
"There is." I stand. She's still holding my hand, the washcloth forgotten, her fingers laced through mine in a grip that she initiated and hasn't released.
"The cost is the same as before. Every night, I will remind you what I can make your body feel.
And eventually, you'll decide that what I'm asking for isn't a cage. It's a home."
I lift our joined hands and press my mouth to her knuckles. Gently. Not the raw, devouring hunger I bring to her body every night but something else. Something that my father would have called weakness and my mother, if she'd lived long enough to have an opinion, might have called love.
"I know everything about you, Wren Calloway.
I know your mother's name and your father's debts and your high school GPA.
I know you worked two jobs at fourteen and graduated with honors and never once complained, not that you had anyone to complain to.
I know you read books with your knees pulled up to your chest and you bite your lower lip when you're concentrating and you hum songs from the eighties in the shower. "
Her eyes widen and she tries to shake off the surprise. I lift my hand to her arm, lightly touching where I want to hold on.
"I know you reached for my hand in the hallway tonight and pulled back because you're still deciding what wanting me makes you.
I know you asked if I was hurt while you were still shaking from the gunshots.
I know you're wearing my sweater right now not because you have nothing else but because it smells like me and that smell has become the thing your nervous system associates with safety. "
Her eyes are searching mine now, her bottom lip pulled into her mouth, little dimples dotting her chin.
"I know you," I say. "And I know you will choose me in time. Not because I forced you, but because I will be the first person in your entire life who chose you first."