Epilogue
SONG: NOTHING’S GONNA HURT YOU BABY BY CIGARETTES AFTER SEX
Sofiya
The morning light spills through our bedroom window like honey, golden and slow and impossibly sweet.
I wake to the sound of birds. Actual birds, not car alarms or distant sirens or the bass-heavy thump of music bleeding through thin walls.
Just birds, singing their hearts out in the pine trees that ring our property like protective sentinels.
The sound still surprises me, even after three months of waking to it.
It still feels like something borrowed from a life that was never supposed to be mine.
Daniil's arm rests heavy across my waist, his breath slow and even against the back of my neck, warm and steady, the rhythm of a man who sleeps deeply now. Who doesn't jerk awake at every sound anymore. Who has finally, finally learned to let his guard down in the hours between midnight and dawn.
I turn carefully, not wanting to wake him, just wanting to look.
The morning light softens the hard angles of his face, catching the silver threading through his dark hair, the faint lines around his eyes that crinkle when he laughs.
The X tattoo stands stark against his cheekbone, a reminder of everything we survived to get here.
I trace it with my gaze the way I've traced it with my fingers a hundred times before.
It doesn't make me flinch anymore. Doesn't summon ghosts or guilt or the echoing screams of a fifteen-year-old girl dying in the desert.
Now it just looks like what it is. A scar.
A memory. Proof that we both made it through the fire.
His eyes flutter open and find mine immediately like some internal compass that always knows exactly where I am. "You're staring." His voice is rough with sleep, the Russian accent thicker in the mornings before he's fully awake.
"You're worth staring at."
He smiles, the expression transforming his whole face, turning the fearsome wolf into something gentle and warm and entirely mine. "Flatterer."
"Truth-teller." I lean forward, pressing a kiss to his jaw, feeling the scratch of stubble against my lips. "Good morning."
"The best morning." His arm tightens around me, pulling me closer until there's no space between us. "Every morning with you is the best morning."
We stay like that for a while. Tangled together in sheets that smell like lavender, because I've discovered I like lavender, and soft things, like the small domestic pleasures I never knew existed when my whole world was vengeance and survival.
The cabin settles around us, wood creaking softly as it warms in the rising sun.
Through the window I can see mountains stretching toward a sky so blue it hurts.
Montana turned out to be everything Daniil promised and more.
The cabin sits on forty acres of wilderness, remote enough that we can go days without seeing another person if we want.
There's a lake nearby where we swim in the summer evenings, the water cold enough to steal breath, the silence broken only by loons calling across the surface.
A garden struggles valiantly behind the house despite my best efforts to kill it.
I've managed to keep the tomatoes alive so far. Small victories.
I've healed here. Not just the physical wounds, though those have faded to silvery scars that map my body, a history I'm learning to read without flinching.
The other healing, the deeper kind, happened slowly.
Quietly. In moments I didn't recognize as significant until I looked back and realized I'd changed.
The first time I laughed, really laughed, at something stupid Daniil said while we were painting the kitchen.
The first time I woke from a nightmare and fell back asleep within minutes instead of lying rigid until dawn.
The first time I looked in the mirror and saw someone other than a weapon staring back.
Someone who might actually deserve the happiness she's found.
"What are you thinking about?" Daniil asks, his fingers tracing lazy patterns on my shoulder blade, right over the scar. The X that matches his tattoo, carved into my skin by men who are all dead now.
"How much I love you."
"That's a good thought." He kisses my forehead. "Have it more often."
I laugh. It still surprises me how easily it comes now. How natural it feels.
We eventually extract ourselves from bed.
Daniil makes coffee while I start breakfast, a routine we've fallen into without discussion.
He moves around me in the small kitchen like we've been doing this for years instead of months.
Like we were always meant to share this space, this life, this quiet brand of happiness.
The security consulting business has taken off faster than either of us expected.
Turns out there's significant demand for someone who can think like a criminal without actually being one anymore.
Daniil works remotely mostly, video calls with clients who have no idea the calm professional advising them on their vulnerabilities used to be the most feared enforcer in the Bratva.
I've started teaching self-defense classes at the community center in town.
Women mostly, though a few teenage girls have started showing up too.
I don't tell them about my past. Don't explain where I learned to fight or why my reflexes are better than any other instructor they've ever met.
I just teach them how to protect themselves. How to be dangerous if they need to be.
It feels like atonement sometimes. Like I'm putting something back into a world I spent so long taking from.
The morning stretches into the afternoon, and we hike one of the trails behind the property, following the creek that winds through aspens just starting to turn gold. Daniil holds my hand like he's afraid I'll disappear if he lets go. I let him hold it because I feel the same way.
By evening we're on the porch, wrapped in blankets against the autumn chill, watching the sun sink behind mountains painted in shades of purple and rose. Daniil's body is warm against mine, and his heartbeat drums steady beneath my palm where my hand rests on his chest.
"I never imagined this," I say softly. "Never let myself imagine anything beyond the end."
"And now?"
"Now I can't imagine anything else." I tilt my head back, finding his eyes. "You're my whole world, Daniil Volkov. My terrifying, gentle, ridiculous, beautiful world."
"Ridiculous?"
"You sang to the tomato plants this morning. In Russian. I heard you."
He has the grace to look embarrassed. "I read somewhere that plants respond to sound vibrations."
"You sang them a lullaby."
"A traditional folk song about harvest. Completely different."
I kiss him because I can. Because he's here, and he's mine, and every day I get to keep him feels like a gift I haven't earned but refuse to give back.
The phone rings, and for a moment neither of us moves.
Our phones ring very rarely in our new life.
We've been careful about who has our number, careful about maintaining the barrier between this life and the one we left behind.
The sound feels intrusive. Wrong. Like a door opening that should have stayed locked. I reach for it anyway.
The screen shows a number I recognize. One I haven't seen in a while, since the day we said goodbye outside that restaurant and drove away toward a future we were only beginning to imagine.
Dimitri.
"Answer it," Daniil says quietly, looking over my shoulder. His body has tensed beside me, old instincts surfacing despite the peace we've built.
I swipe to accept and hold the phone to my ear.
"Sofiya." Dimitri's voice is strained. Exhausted in ways I've never heard from him before. "I know I promised to leave you alone. But I need help."
"What's wrong?"
A pause. Long enough I can hear his breathing, hear the silence that means he's choosing his words carefully.
"Things are not going…as well as I had hoped." The words land like stones in still water. "But I’m working on an alliance, something to help me go the final step to solidify power."
I look at Daniil. His eyes meet mine, and I see everything we are reflected there. The peace. The quiet. The life we've fought so hard to build. But I also see curiosity. The knowledge that some calls cannot go unanswered, no matter the cost.
"What do you need from us," I say.
“I need you to come to my wedding.”