Chapter Thirty-One
Mirabel
Time can change everything.
Or maybe it doesn’t change anything at all, just peels the cover off what was already there, waiting.
Dad is still in the hospital. Stable, according to Dr. Klein, which is the medical equivalent of hanging on by his fingernails but doing it politely.
We’ve visited as often as we could since that first trip with Debra.
Dad’s stronger each time we’re there. I can see it in the way his color lifts, the way his sentences come out whole instead of in fragments.
He’s met Arkady once, briefly—a twenty-minute window where my fiancé sat in a hospital chair that was far too small for him and shook my father’s hand and said, “I’ll take care of your daughter, Mr. McLeod.
” And Dad, bless him, said, “She doesn’t need taking care of. She needs someone who can keep up.”
Arkady actually laughed. A real one, the kind that ambushes him, where his mouth opens before his brain can stop it. I nearly fell off the bed.
We talk to Dad on the phone most evenings now. Short calls—his energy is rationed, portioned out carefully—but they matter.
And Arkady—my strange, controlled, devastating man—has been different these past two weeks.
Not a different person. More like the same person with a door left ajar.
Since the night he told me about Mishka, since he cracked himself open and let me see what he’d been carrying all his life, something in him has loosened.
Not all at once. Not in some dramatic cinematic transformation where the hero tears off his armor and weeps.
It’s smaller than that, and more real. He’ll say something about his day without me having to drag it out of him.
He’ll touch the small of my back when we’re standing in the kitchen and keep his hand there, like he’s reminding himself I’m solid. Last Tuesday, he told me he was afraid.
Not of anything specific. Just… afraid. The word came out of him like a stone being pulled from a wall, and I could see what it cost him. A man who has killed people, who commands men with weapons and manages criminal empires and doesn’t flinch when rooms go sideways… telling me he’s afraid.
I held his hand. I didn’t try to fix it. I just let the word exist between us.
He’s still struggling with it. Openness doesn’t sit well with him; he keeps reaching for the old armor, catching himself, adjusting.
Some mornings, I can see him retreating behind the ice, the responses going monosyllabic, his face closing up like a shopfront at the end of the day.
And then he’ll look at me, and something gives, some invisible lock turning, and he’ll say, “I’m trying, zaychik. ”
That’s all that matters. The trying.
Yanis has been around the house constantly.
He and Debra have this gravitational thing happening…
quiet, careful, nothing rushed. He sits with her in the garden while she reads.
He brings her tea without asking whether she wants it, and she accepts without questioning why he made it.
I’ve watched them from the upstairs window sometimes, the two of them on the stone bench, close enough that their shoulders touch but not so close that she feels cornered.
He never reaches for her first. Always waits until she bridges the gap.
My sister is getting better. Day by day, in increments so small you’d miss them if you weren’t paying attention.
But I am. I always am. The way she walks into rooms now without looking for threats.
The way she’s started laughing at things…
not the guarded, careful laugh of someone testing whether it’s safe to be happy, but actual laughter that comes up from her belly.
Being loved has a lot to do with it. Being safe has more.
And today is a special day.
Our engagement party.
I’m standing in the bedroom in my underwear, trying to decide between the sage green dress and the cream one, when Arkady walks in.
He’s already dressed: charcoal suit, white shirt open at the collar, the blackwork ink climbing his throat visible above the fabric.
He looks like the reason insurance premiums exist.
“The green one,” he says, without being asked.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were thinking it.” He crosses to where I’m standing by the wardrobe, picks up the sage dress, and holds it against me with one hand.
His other hand goes to my belly—high, where the curve starts, his palm spread wide over the place where our daughter is building herself one day at a time.
“This color. You wear it, and I can’t look anywhere else. ”
“You can’t look anywhere else, regardless.”
“True.” He drops the dress over my arm and leans down to press his mouth against my temple.
Brief. Warm. The gesture of a man who is learning to give tenderness without flinching away from it.
“The caterers are downstairs arguing about something. Canapés, I think. Stefan has already told them twice that if they don’t stop shouting, he’ll escort them off the premises. ”
I laugh. “Stefan threatening to remove catering staff from an engagement party. Very on brand.”
“He’s efficient.”
“He’s terrifying.”
“Also true.” Arkady pauses. Studies me with that particular attention he gives when he’s working out whether to say something or keep it sealed. “Are you happy?”
The question is so simple it almost breaks me. Are you happy? Asked by a man who spent most of his adult life believing he didn’t deserve the answer.
“Yes,” I say. “Are you?”
He considers this. Deeply, the way he considers everything: thoroughly, from every possible angle.
“I don’t have a word for what I am,” he says. “In Russian or in English. But whatever it is, you did it.”
“Smooth.”
“I’m not being smooth.”
“You’re always being smooth. It’s pathological.
” I step into the dress, pulling it over my bump.
It’s a wrap style—forgiving, elegant, the fabric draping over my belly in a way that doesn’t hide it but doesn’t scream it either.
Six months. My daughter is the size of a mango, according to the app, and she makes her presence known with kicks that come at three in the morning and whenever Arkady puts his hand on my stomach, as if she already knows who he is and wants to fight him.
“Zip me?”
He comes behind me. Finds the zipper at my back. Pulls it up slowly—too slowly—his knuckles dragging along my skin.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“That. We have sixty guests arriving in forty-five minutes.”
“Forty-three. Stefan just confirmed the final time.” He finishes the zip and turns me around by the shoulders.
Looks at me. Takes his time doing it, not in a creepy way but in the way a man looks at something he built and can’t quite believe is real.
“Krasivaya,” he says. “Go downstairs. I’ll follow. ”
“What are you doing?”
“Checking the security feed. Making sure Leo’s team is in position.”
Right. Because even our engagement party has an armed security detail. Snipers with champagne.
“Don’t be long,” I say.
“Five minutes.”
I kiss the corner of his jaw—the place where the ink feathers up toward his ear, where his skin is warm and carries the remnants of his aftershave and the heat underneath it that no cologne can replicate.
“Five minutes,” I repeat, and leave him to his cameras and his checkpoints and the rituals of a man who protects with the same intensity he loves.
The garden at Ashwater Heights looks like a page from a magazine I can’t afford.
Which is ironic, because I suppose I can afford it now.
Or Arkady can, which amounts to the same thing, even though I still feel a small jolt of impostor syndrome every time I walk across the manicured lawn in shoes that the old me would have stared at through a shop window and walked away from.
White marquees are pitched along the south terrace.
Strings of warm light are threaded through the hedgerows, even though it’s midafternoon, and they won’t be needed for hours.
But the effect is there, a promise of the evening ahead.
Round tables dressed in linen and greenery, the flowers wild rather than fussy—peonies and eucalyptus and something trailing with tiny white blooms that the florist called astilbe, which sounds like a medical condition but looks beautiful.
A small stage has been set up near the fountain, a sound system tucked discreetly to one side, and there’s a bar along the west wall of the garden that appears to stock every spirit known to man.
Somebody has spent a lot of time on this. And by somebody, I mean Stefan, because Arkady told me he delegated the planning, and Stefan, apparently, approaches party logistics the same way he approaches mob operations: with terrifying precision and no tolerance for error.
I tug the wrap tighter at my hip and check my reflection in the glass of the terrace doors.
My bump is visible. Undeniably, unmistakably there, rounding the line of the dress, shifting my center of gravity, making me walk with that slight backward lean pregnant women develop to compensate for the new weight they’re carrying at their front. I press a hand to it.
Hello, baby girl. Your mom’s about to become officially engaged to a man with a gun cabinet and a team of killers on call. Welcome to the family.
The first car rolls up the drive at two o’clock sharp.
Stefan steps out, dressed in a dark suit that somehow makes his full-body ink look even more dramatic—the neo-Japanese motifs crawling up his neck, the tattooed temple and cheek catching the afternoon light.
Behind him comes a woman I haven’t met—tall, dark-haired, dressed in a navy shift dress, her smile warm and slightly nervous in the way of people arriving at a billionaire’s estate when they’re not used to it.
Stefan’s wife. I know almost nothing about her, which tells me everything about how fiercely Stefan guards his private life.
And behind her—Julia.