Chapter 13
Volody
She's curled into the corner of the sofa when I find her, knees drawn up, hands pressed against her eyes, shoulders shaking with the silent violence of someone trying very hard not to fall apart and losing.
I cross the room without a word and sit beside her, pulling her into my chest. She comes apart properly then, the silence breaking into something audible, messy, real.
Her whole body shudders against me while I hold on and say nothing at all, because some things don't need narration.
They just need someone steady to fall into.
"I told him everything," she says eventually, voice thick and raw against my shirt. "Six years of it. All at once. I don't think I even paused for breath."
"Good."
"It didn't feel good. It felt like cutting something out of myself with a blunt knife."
"That's usually how it feels right before it starts healing properly." I press a kiss to the top of her head, breathing her in, steadying myself as much as her. "You don't have to feel triumphant yet. You're allowed to just feel however this actually feels."
"Hollow," she says. "And light. Both at once, which doesn't make any sense."
"It makes perfect sense. You've been carrying something heavy for six years. Setting it down doesn't feel like winning a fight. It just feels like finally noticing how tired your arms were."
She goes quiet for a while, her breathing slowing gradually against my chest, and I hold her through it, watching the city stretch out through the windows.
"You left," she says finally, pulling back enough to look at me. "You could have stayed. Stood beside me. Backed me up if he tried anything."
"You didn't need backup."
"You didn't know that for certain."
"I knew it enough." I brush a strand of hair off her damp cheek, tuck it behind her ear.
"Liv, I've spent my whole life around men who think protecting someone means standing over them, making every decision before they're forced to make a harder one themselves.
My father ran our house like that. My brothers grew up watching it and some of them haven't fully shaken the habit.
" Something old and tired moves through my chest, a wound I don't examine often.
"I decided a long time ago I didn't want to be that way. Today I finally understood why."
"Why?"
"Because of you. Specifically you discovering you didn't need me, or anyone else, at all.
" She pulls away from me enough so I can see her face.
"That's not me being passive, Liv. That's the hardest thing I've ever done, sitting in that bedroom while you found your voice.
Every instinct in me wanted to walk back in there and finish the job for you.
I didn't, because finishing it for you would have meant taking the one thing today that was actually only yours to take. "
She stares at me for a long moment, turning my words over to find their meaning.
"Nobody's ever done that for me," she says quietly.
"Handed me the room and actually meant it.
People either take over completely, the way Cole always has, deciding what's best for me before I get a vote.
Or they disappear entirely, leave me to handle everything alone because it's easier than staying close to the mess.
" Her voice wavers. "You keep doing this third thing...
Staying close enough that I know you'd catch me if I fell, and far enough that falling never happens in the first place. "
"I think the word you're looking for is love," I say, and the word comes out easier than I expect, simple and unguarded, no joke trailing behind it to quickly hide behind.
"Though I'm aware I haven't actually said that word to you yet, and I'd like to point out, for the record, that I'm choosing to demonstrate it instead of just announcing it, which I think is considerably harder and much more honest."
Her breath catches audibly. "Volody."
"I'm not finished." I take her hand, turn it over, and press my lips to her palm.
"I watched you walk back into that dining room three weeks ago with your chin up after finding out the worst thing your own family had ever done to you.
I watched you survive a dinner table full of strangers calculating your worth in numbers.
I watched you face your own brother today and refuse to fold the way you've apparently folded for six straight years, and every single time, Liv, every single time, I have fallen further into something I have never once felt before in my entire life.
" My voice roughens around the edges. "I don't need to say the actual word for you to understand what's happening to me. I think you already know."
"I know," she whispers, eyes shining. "I think I've known for a while. I just didn't trust myself to be right about it."
"Well, you are right about it." I pull her back against my chest, tuck her head under my chin, feel her exhale slowly, fully, like something in her has finally been given permission to stop bracing.
"For what it's worth, I think I fell that first night.
Everything since has just been me catching up to a decision some part of me already made at a dinner table surrounded by men writing numbers on cards. "
She laughs, wet and surprised, against my shirt. "That's a very specific moment to fall in love."
"I'm a specific man." I press another kiss to her hair, content in a way I don't think I've ever fully let myself be before, not with any of the noise and women and easy charm I used to fill the silence with before Liv.
We sit there a long while, tangled together on the sofa, the city slowly shifting from morning into the brighter light of midday, and I let my mind wander somewhere I haven't let it go before, not with anyone, not even close.
I picture her in a kitchen that isn't this glass and concrete bachelor pad anymore, somewhere warmer, somewhere with actual photographs on the walls instead of art chosen by a designer who never met me. I picture a child with Liv’s red hair and my size, already loud at four years old, already incapable of sitting still through a family dinner, terrorizing Rovin's careful house the way Serik joked about at dinner last week.
I picture teaching that child to throw a punch properly and watching Liv pretend to be horrified while secretly being delighted, the way she gets when I do something she finds simultaneously alarming and irresistible.
I picture growing old, gray-haired and slower, still finding her across some crowded room decades from now and still feeling that same gut-punch of wanting to know what's behind her eyes.
It unnerves me slightly, how easily the picture forms, how little resistance I find in myself to wanting all of it immediately and completely.
I've spent thirty years believing I was built for exactly two things, ending men and entertaining women, and somewhere in the last three weeks that entire picture quietly rebuilt itself around a redhead who didn’t know what she was walking into and walked into it anyway.
"You're doing the staring thing again," she says, voice soft, muffled against my chest.
"I'm doing the imagining thing, actually. Different category entirely."
"Imagining what?"
I consider lying, making it light, turning the moment into a joke the way I usually would, but I find I don't want to.
"You. A few kids running around being far too loud, probably my fault entirely, genetics being what they are.
" I feel her go very still against me. "I've never wanted that before, Liv.
Not once. Not with anyone. I've spent my whole life being the brother who shows up for everyone else's milestones and quietly assumes he'll skip his own.
And now I can't seem to stop picturing mine, and they all seem to involve you specifically, which I find both alarming and the least alarming thing that's happened to me in years. "
She lifts her head, eyes wet and wide, searching my face for the joke that isn't there.
"You mean that," she says, not quite a question.
"I have never meant anything more in my entire life."
"That's a lot to put on a Wednesday morning."
I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, thumb brushing her cheekbone, memorizing this exact moment, certain already that I'll want to come back to it for years.
"You don't have to say anything back. I'm not asking for matching declarations on a schedule.
I just wanted you to know what's actually happening over here, on my side of this, while you're busy rebuilding your own life one brutally brave conversation at a time. "
She presses her face back against my chest, and I feel her smile against the fabric, feel the tension finally draining fully out of her shoulders, replaced by something looser, something that looks, from where I'm sitting, dangerously close to hope settling somewhere permanent.
"Okay," she says, the same small word she gave me the night of the auction, except this time it doesn't sound like surrender at all.
It sounds like the beginning of something neither of us is in any hurry to rush past.