Chapter 20 - Mikhail
The ding of the elevator comes through before the security feed even shows her.
Her shoulders are curved inward, carrying too much weight for many hours over too many time zones. Her bag is over one shoulder, jacket in her hand, brown hair frizzy.
Around her neck is a blue headscarf I’ve never seen on her before, which alone ticks me off slightly more than I already am.
Brown eyes land on me, bags heavy beneath them. She simply stands in the doorway for a moment. The distance between us feels wider than ever.
Then she steps inside towards me, and I wrap my arms around her before I even decide to do so. Her face smushes against my chest, an aching cry leaving her throat, like something held under enormous pressure for a very long time finally exploding.
My arms curl tighter around her, and I press my nose against the top of her head, breathing her scent in.
The same scent that has haunted my nights and my days since she left me.
Her tears wet my shirt and her sobs grow louder. Through it all, her nails pierce through my back, not letting me go. We curl on the floor together, and I wrap her up in my arms the best I can.
Once she’s able to put together words, they spill from her like water does from a leaky faucet: Greece, the photographs and the sixteen hours of analysis, the stone and the roofline, all nothing but a fake match.
“I can’t believe—I can’t believe it was all a fucking lie,” is what rips out of her throat, heart-shattering and wet.
Then she tells me about the men on the coastal road, the market, and the scarf from that woman, and the taxi to the airport.
“On the plane,” she mumbles, “is when it all finally hit me; I was being used as bait. An experiment done for someone else’s benefit.
Someone used my parents as bait to move me where I needed to be moved.
The shit that truly gets to me is that I can’t even tell anymore what’s a real lead and what’s not.
That’s the only thing I had as a journalist, as Zara Khan. ”
“I am sorry,” I sigh truthfully. “For my part in what happened to your family. For knowing and waiting. I am sorry.”
She breathes quietly against my chest for a minute, not saying anything in return to placate me.
“I’m no longer staying on that. I have been so focused on finding them,” she says, low and exhausted, “so focused on whether they were alive, whether they were reachable, whether I could get to them, that I haven’t let myself ask the other thing.”
Her hands close around the fabric of my shirt again, her voice vibrating against my sternum as she speaks.
“How could they leave me?” She blabbers, raw and broken, the breaking of something that has been sealed for fifteen years.
“They had a daughter. They had an eight-year-old daughter and they chose—whatever it was, whatever the danger—they chose to not come back. They chose to let me grow up believing they were dead, to let me go through everything alone, every year of not belonging anywhere, and they were alive. They were alive, Mikhail. They were alive, living in Greece or wherever the fuck they actually are, and I was eight years old and they never came back.”
There is nothing I can offer her. No condolences that would work, no placation or false lies. I don’t have pieces of the answer.
In her vulnerable voice, I hear the eight-year-old who asked this same question to herself every night before she slept and every morning after she woke up.
Running my fingers through her tangled strands, I press my hand against the back of her head to bring her head closer.
How.
I don’t have the answer.
So I stay.
In my arms, the grip on my shirt does not loosen, and her breathing against my chest is erratic, after years of holding herself through the worst of it.
She reaches for me, her fingers trembling when they touch my face. She holds it with the same care as she held the earrings on the boat, cradling me like she’s afraid she’d never get to hold me after this.
I don’t move. The floor is hard beneath my knees, the air still thick with everything she screamed into my chest ten minutes ago—the grief, the exhaustion, everything she’s been hiding behind those mysterious eyes for weeks.
My shirt is still damp from her tears. The tattooed vines curling up my throat feel tight, like they’re constricting around the breath I haven’t taken since she pulled back and looked at me with those brown eyes, red-rimmed and raw.
Zara’s fingertips trace the ridge of my jaw slowly, as if she’s memorizing bone.
“Mikhail,” she whispers, and my name in her mouth sounds like an apology and a question wrapped into one syllable.
The blue scarf around her neck has come loose—one end trailing over her collarbone, the knot barely holding. I want to fix it—no, I want to pull it off entirely.
My hands stay at her back, supporting her, because I don’t trust myself yet. Not so soon after watching her unravel. Not after catching her when she finally fell.
Her thumb brushes the corner of my mouth.
I exhale through my nose—sharp, unsteady. She hasn’t touched me like this since—
There’s been distance between us that I couldn’t name, couldn’t cross, couldn’t muscle through the way I muscle through every other problem in my life.
But this isn’t a problem I can intimidate into submission.
This is Zara. All curves and guarded silences and a mind that runs faster than either of us can keep up with.
“I’m here,” I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I meant it to.
She nods. A tear slips down her cheek, tracking through the faint smudge of mascara, and I catch it before it reaches her jaw. My thumb lingers at the corner of her mouth, mirroring where hers had just been on mine.
The moment stretches.
Then she leans forward and captures my lips.
It’s not desperate. That’s what surprises me. After everything—the shouting, the sobbing, the way she’d clutched at my shoulders like I was the only solid thing left in a world that had turned to water—I expected clawing hunger. The frantic need to feel something other than pain.
But her mouth on mine is soft and intentional. She kisses me like she’s relearning the shape of me, and I let her.
God help me.
My hands find her waist. The fabric of her blouse is thin, still warm from the heat of her body, and beneath it I feel the slight tremor that runs through her.
Her curves press against my palms—that generous swell of hip, the narrowing of waist—and I’ve memorized it all before, but tonight it feels new and uncharted.
Something sacred I’m being given access to again after thinking I’d lost the key.
She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her lips are parted, slightly swollen, and her chest rises and falls in shallow, uneven breaths.
“I don’t want words,” she breathes. “I can’t—I can’t do words anymore tonight.”
And I understand. Words have failed us both.
My hand slides up her spine, pressing her closer, and I lower her onto the floor—but she doesn’t complain. Her dark hair spills around her head like ink in water, and the blue scarf finally surrenders, slipping free to pool beside her shoulder.
“Zara.” Her name is a prayer I didn’t know I still believed in.
She reaches up and pulls me down.
Our mouths meet again, and this time there’s heat beneath the tenderness. Her hips rise to meet mine, and the friction draws a sound from her throat—small, broken, half-sob and half-moan.
I swallow it like I’ve swallowed everything else tonight: her rage, her fear, the ugly truth she finally let herself speak aloud.
My hand finds the hem of her blouse. Each button I slip free is an apology for every moment I spent on the wrong side of the distance between us.
Her bronze skin reveals itself inch by inch—the swell of her breasts, the softness of her belly, the rise and fall of each breath as she watches me watch her.
“You’re beautiful,” I whisper, and I need her to believe it, need her to understand that this body—every curve, every scar, every stretch mark that silver-lines her hips—is the only altar I’ve ever wanted to kneel at.
She shakes her head, a tiny motion, and that’s worse than anything else tonight. That small denial. That reflex of self-doubt.
I lower my mouth to her collarbone. “You are.”
My lips trace the hollow of her throat. The place where her pulse hammers against the skin, frantic and alive.
“You’re beautiful,” I repeat against her sternum, “and you’re exhausted,”—a kiss to the rise of her left breast—“and you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met,”—my tongue tracing the edge of her bra—“and I am so fucking sorry I let you forget that.”
Her fingers thread into my hair and grip tight, not pulling me away but anchoring me here.
We shed the rest of our clothes slowly. There’s no tearing, no frantic yanking of fabric. Each piece removed is deliberate—her blouse sliding from her shoulders, her pants eased over the generous curve of her hips, my shirt joining the growing pile beside us.
When I’m finally bare above her, she runs her palms over the ink that sleeves my arms, over the vines that climb my neck, her touch reverent.
I settle between her thighs. The heat of her against my length makes us both pause, suspended in that breathless moment before everything changes.
“Look at me,” I order lowly.
Her eyes open, wet and steady.
I push inside.
The sound she makes—oh, God, the sound. The noise of coming home after being lost for longer than you wanted to admit. Her body yields around me, tight and hot and so familiar, and I have to stop for a moment just to keep from losing myself completely.
My forehead drops to hers. We breathe the same air.
“Okay?” I manage.
“Okay.” Her voice cracks on the word. “More than okay. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
I move in slow, deep strokes that grind my pelvis against hers, and she wraps her legs around my waist, pulling me closer, deeper, until there’s no space left between us at all.
The rhythm we find is tidal—a push and pull that matches the rise and fall of her chest against mine.
Each thrust is a word I couldn’t say, each gasp from her lips an answer I thought I’d never hear again.
Her nails drag down my back. The sting is grounding, sharp, a counterpoint to the velvet heat that grips me with every stroke.
“Mikhail,” she whimpers, salvation and complain alike.
My hand finds hers. Our fingers lace together above her head, and I press her into the floor with my body, with my hips, with everything I am. The lamp flickers once—bad wiring we keep meaning to fix—and I watch her eyes catch the stutter of light.
She’s close. I can feel it in the way she tightens around me, in the shallow pants that escape her parted lips, in the way her free hand grips my shoulder like she’s afraid I’ll disappear.
“Let go, baby,” I whisper against her ear. “I’ve got you. Let go.”
Her body arches. Her mouth opens in a silent cry, and then she shatters around me—pulsing, gripping, pulling me deeper as the pleasure rips through her.
Her eyes never leave mine. Not for a second.
She lets me see all of it—the undoing, the reconstruction, the raw vulnerability she’s been hiding behind that blue scarf and that sharp tongue.
Watching her come undone beneath me is the most intimate thing I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen this woman naked many times.
My own release builds at the base of my spine—a pressure I’ve been holding back, trying to stretch this moment into something eternal.
But she clenches around me again, a final aftershock, and I’m gone.
I bury my face in the curve of her neck, my hips stuttering, and spill into her with a groan that feels like it’s been torn from somewhere deeper than my chest.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
Our breathing gradually slows. Her legs stay locked around my waist, and my weight stays pressed against her, the floor hard beneath us.
In this single suspended breath of a moment, there’s only her heartbeat against my chest. Her fingers still tangled in my hair. Her lips brushing the ink at my throat.
“Be with me,” she whispers. “Even when this catches up to us. Don’t disappear.”
I lift my head. The vines tattooed around my neck shift as I swallow, and I hold her gaze for three full heartbeats before I speak.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She falls asleep wrapped up in me, her breathing becoming slow.
Right now her trust is simple.
I don’t know the truth about her parents. The people who followed her to Greece are still somewhere in the world. The fracture I created in what exists between us has been crossed tonight but not sealed, because sealing it is not a single evening’s work.
But she came back.
She crossed an ocean and came back anyway, and she walked through that door and she came to me.