Epilogue
One year later
Akyl
Rovin's son. Eight pounds, two ounces, an hour old when I held him, and already bearing the expression of a man who finds everything faintly beneath him.
He is, without question, the most unsettling thing I have ever encountered.
I have been in rooms with people who would flatten a city block if the money was right.
I have sat across tables from men whose names make governments nervous.
None of them did to me what eight pounds of silent, sleeping Mostovoi just did.
Rovin placed him in my arms with the careful deliberateness of a man handing over something that has restructured every priority he has ever held, and I took him, and the boy opened his eyes for two seconds, looked directly at me with Claudia's amber eyes in a face that's already all Rovin's angles, and then went back to sleep as though I weren't worth the energy.
My brother watched this exchange with the expression of a man who is drunk on something that has no hangover.
I've been watching Rovin for my whole life.
I know every configuration of his face. What I saw in that hospital room tonight was something new, something that looked like the word permanent finally finding a person to live inside.
He's been building permanence his entire life, the way the rest of us breathe, and tonight he finally looked like he believed in it.
My phone vibrates. I look at the screen.
How was he?
Katriona.
Small, I send back. Loud opinions for someone with no words yet. You'd like him.
The three dots appear immediately, which is its own kind of tell.
How're Claudia, and Rovin?
I consider this. Rovin, who sat in a plastic chair beside Claudia's bed with his forearm across his knees and his eyes on a face he clearly couldn't stop looking at.
Rovin, who said almost nothing for the entire hour because he didn't need to.
Who looked up once, briefly, and met my eyes across the room with an expression that needed no translation.
Different, I send. Then, after a moment: Good different.
The dots again. Then: Come home.
I'm already counting the turns until I pull into the drive.
I find her in the kitchen.
She's wearing the grey cashmere robe I bought her last month, the one she claimed she didn't need and has worn every evening since. Her dark hair is down, spilling loose around her shoulders, and she's sitting at the island with a mug of something hot.
She looks at me when I walk in.
"Well," she says.
I set my keys down. I cross to where she's sitting and I stand in front of her, close, and she tips her head back to look at me properly and her expression goes through something complicated that she doesn't quite finish before she schools it.
"That bad?" she asks.
"No." I take the mug gently from her hands and set it aside, and then I take her face in both of mine, the way I do when I need her full attention, when the only geography that matters is the three inches between us. "Not bad. The opposite."
She reads me. She's been reading me for a year now. Her eyes move across my face and she finds whatever I'm not saying, the small catch in her breath tells me she's understood.
"Akyl."
"I held him," I say. "This child who has never met me, who has no basis for forming an opinion about anything… I held him, and he opened his eyes and looked at me, and I felt…"
"What did you feel?"
I've been asking myself this for the past forty minutes, through three red lights and a stretch of road where I stared out the window at the dark and tried to put language around something that keeps resisting it.
I know the word for what I want. I've known it since the first family dinner at Rovin's, maybe before that, maybe since the first time I watched Volody pull Liv into his chest and felt something in me note the movement with more attention than it warranted.
I know what I want. I've just been waiting to want it at the right time, which Katriona spent six months telling me didn't exist.
"I want it," I say. "With you. I want it all."
She holds very still in my hands. Her pulse is quick against my palms. She isn't afraid of the words, I can see that, she was never someone who flinched at direct things, it was one of the first reasons I couldn't look away.
But she's doing the thing she does when something matters enough to slow down, turning it carefully, making sure she's understood it right.
"You want a baby," she says. Not a question, but a test of the sentence in the air.
"I want the life that's sitting in that hospital room wrapped in white cotton," I say.
"I want to sit beside you the way Rovin was sitting beside Claudia, like everything I've built has found its reason.
And I want someone to hand me something I made with you, and for it to look at me the way that boy looked at me tonight, like I'm already old news. "
The corner of her mouth twitches in a way that tells me she is holding back a laugh.
"He wasn’t impressed with you," she says.
"Not even slightly."
"Good. Someone should keep you humble."
"Katriona."
"I know." She lifts her hands and covers mine where they cup her face, pressing them closer.
Her fingers are warm from the mug. "I know what you're saying.
I understood you." She holds my gaze and what's in her eyes is the thing she spent the first six months here learning how to leave unguarded. "I've been thinking about it too."
"For how long."
"Since Claudia told me she was pregnant.
" She says it plainly, without the defensiveness she used to carry around anything that felt like wanting.
She's allowed herself to want things for a year now, steadily, and every time she does, I feel it in my own chest like a door opening.
"I was scared to say it. I'm still a little scared.
Marsh says the surgery improved the odds significantly and the hormonal treatment helps and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to carry a pregnancy, but 'no reason you shouldn't be able to' is a long way from 'it will definitely happen,' and I spent years being disappointed by my own body and I—"
"Katriona."
"I'm working up to something."
"I know. I'll wait."
She exhales. Her thumbs move over my knuckles, a small, unconscious stroke.
"I want to try. I want to try and I want to not be terrified while we do it, and I need you to promise me that if it doesn't work the first time or the fifth time or ever, that what we are right now is already enough.
That you won't look at me like I'm failing you.
Because I don't think I could survive that, and I know my own limits. "
I lean down and press my forehead to hers. I let the closeness do the thing that words can't quite reach.
"If it doesn't work," I say, "we will have tried together.
Which is already something I didn't have before you.
And what we are right now is more than enough.
You are more than enough. You were more than enough before you ever set foot in that auction, and you will be more than enough regardless of what happens next.
" I pull back just far enough to see her face.
"And I will never look at you like you're failing me, because you don't know how to fail.
You only know how to adapt, which is a different thing entirely, and frankly more impressive. "
She blinks. Her eyes are bright and she's doing the thing where she presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth to hold herself together.
"You're going to be a disaster as a father," she says. "You're going to terrify every other parent at every school event."
"Without question."
"The teachers will be afraid of you."
"Reasonably."
"Our child is going to grow up thinking it's normal to have five large men appear out of nowhere whenever anything goes wrong."
"That is normal in this family."
She laughs, and it breaks through whatever she was holding back, open and genuine and filling the kitchen the way her laugh has been filling this house for a year, in increments, room by room, until there isn't a corner of it that doesn't sound like her.
I pull her off the stool and into my arms, lifting her with the ease that she rolled her eyes at for the first three weeks and now permits without comment.
Her legs wrap around me. Her arms go around my neck.
I hold her there in the warm kitchen, her face tucked against my throat, and I breathe the scent of her hair and I think about Rovin's face in that hospital room.
The look of a man who finally believes in the thing he spent his whole life building.
I understand it now, from the inside, which is the only place it was ever going to make sense.
"Come to bed," she says against my neck.
Katriona
I follow Akyl up the stairs, my hand in his, heart pounding with a mix of nerves and pure need.
The house feels quieter than usual, like it knows what is about to happen.
When we reach the bedroom, he closes the door behind us and turns to face me.
His eyes are dark and hungry in a way that makes heat pool low in my belly.
He pulls me close and kisses me hard, his hands sliding under my robe to cup my ass. I moan into his mouth as he lifts me effortlessly and carries me to the bed. He lays me down gently, but there is nothing gentle in the way he looks at me now.
"I’ve been waiting for this," he says, voice rough as he strips off his shirt. "Waiting to fill you up properly. To breed you like you deserve."
My breath catches. The word sends a fresh wave of arousal through me. I watch him push his pants down, his cock already hard and thick, and I feel myself getting wetter just looking at him.
I reach for him.
He climbs over me, pushing the robe open so I am completely bare beneath him. His mouth finds my neck, then my breasts, sucking hard on one nipple while his hand slides between my legs.