Epilogue
ZATANNA
Two years later, my son thinks shoes are optional, boundaries are a joke, and every serious conversation in this house should be interrupted by a plastic dinosaur.
So, naturally, he is exactly like his father.
“Ari,” I say, watching him sprint barefoot across the rug with one sock on and a wooden spoon in his hand, “why do you have that?”
He looks at me with complete innocence. Then he yells, “Sword!”
And runs faster.
From the kitchen, Aleksei says, “That is my fault.”
“It is absolutely your fault.”
He steps into the living room in rolled-up sleeves, coffee in one hand, looking deeply unfair for a man who spent half the night up with a toddler who decided sleep was for the weak. He watches our son dart behind the couch and shakes his head once. “He has my instincts.”
“He has your refusal to listen.”
“That, too.”
Ari pops up from behind the couch, points the spoon at his father, and says, with great seriousness, “Fight.”
Aleksei takes a slow sip of coffee. “Not before breakfast.”
This is my life now. And most days, it still feels a little unreal.
Not the hard parts. Those were very real.
The easy parts took longer to trust.
Ari is two now. Busy, loud, stubborn, and somehow always sticky. He has dark hair, serious eyes, and a habit of studying people before deciding whether they deserve one of his smiles. When he does smile, the whole room changes.
He also adores Aleksei in a way that would be embarrassing if it weren’t so sweet.
Everything is “Papa.”
Everything is “mine.”
Everything is also, somehow, “no.”
He follows Aleksei around the house like a very judgmental bodyguard. If Aleksei takes a call, Ari takes his toy phone and paces too. If Aleksei is reading a report, Ari brings over a picture book and sits beside him like they are both managing an empire.
In fairness, one of them probably is.
A lot happened after the hospital.
Enough that it took a while for life to stop feeling like something we were surviving and start feeling like something we were living.
Aleksei’s mother never came back to the house.
There was no dramatic public scandal. No headline screaming what she had done. He kept it contained, because of the family name, because of the business, because some parts of his life still require that kind of control.
She lives now in a private estate upstate under permanent medical supervision and permanent watch. Comfortable, guarded, alone. She does not speak to us. She has never met Ari. She never will.
The first time I asked Aleksei if he felt guilty, he said, “No.”
Then, after a long pause, he said, “Only that I didn’t stop her sooner.”
That was the truth. His father did not fare much better.
Once the truth about the poisoning started to come out, some of his leverage disappeared.
Not publicly, not in a neat courtroom way.
But enough. Enough old allies pulled back.
Enough of the quiet pressure shifted. Enough men decided they didn’t want to stand too close to someone whose own wife had turned on his son’s child.
He still has money. He still has pride. He still has that same awful talent for survival.
But he no longer has the city the way he thought he did.
Aleksei took most of it.
Not because of revenge. Though, there was some of that.
Because once everything came into the light, he stopped hesitating.
The war ended the way these things usually do in his world: quietly from the outside, brutally underneath. Warehouses came back. Accounts stabilized. Men chose the stronger side. Alena testified where she needed to, protected herself well, and then disappeared to Europe.
I do think about her sometimes, though. Mostly with irritation. Sometimes with pity. Almost never with sympathy.
As for me, I never went back to the office.
That part of my life was over. I finished the book instead.
Then another one.
The first sold better than I expected, mostly online at first, then in print, then suddenly in places I hadn’t imagined. Apparently, there is a market for morally difficult men and women making bad decisions under pressure. Shocking.
I publish under a pen name.
Aleksei knows it. Jake knows it. Frankie knows it. Very few other people do.
Jake still calls me twice a week and acts like he discovered literature personally. Frankie treats Ari like a tiny emperor and me like I still need supervision, which is probably fair.
I still write late at night sometimes after Ari sleeps. I still drink too much coffee. I still have moments where I look at this life and think, how did I end up here?
The answer is never simple.
Some mornings it looks like this:
Me in leggings and one of Aleksei’s shirts, trying to answer emails while Ari feeds blueberries to the dog under the table and Aleksei reads financial updates like a man born to solve problems before 8 a.m.
Some evenings it looks like the three of us in the garden behind the house, Ari chasing bubbles, me pretending not to notice the security at the gate, Aleksei pretending not to notice me pretending.
And sometimes it looks like fear still.
Because I would be lying if I said that part disappeared.
It didn’t.
I still have moments where I remember the hospital room. The poison. The office. The old shame. The feeling of being judged before anyone asked me who I was.
But I was right about one thing.
I did not let his mother’s words get inside me.
Not permanently. I belong where I am because I chose to stay. That matters.
Also, because Ari has found his father’s car keys and is now sprinting toward the back staircase, and only a woman with full legal authority and strong hamstrings can catch him in time.
“Ari!”
He squeals and runs faster.
Aleksei catches him first, lifting him clean off the ground with one arm. Ari laughs like this is the best game ever invented. “Criminal,” Aleksei says.
“Mine,” Ari replies proudly, and pats his own chest.
I laugh.
Then Ari points at me. “Mama.”
“Yes?”
He looks at me very seriously and says, “Pretty.”
For one second, I just stare at him. Then at Aleksei. Because that is not random. That is absolutely something he has heard before.
Aleksei gives me a look so innocent it would fool nobody.
“You taught him that,” I say.
“No.”
“Yes.”
Ari leans toward me from his father’s arms and repeats, louder this time, “Mama pretty.”
“Well,” I say, taking him from Aleksei because I deserve one reward in this house, “at least someone here has taste.”
Aleksei’s mouth twitches. “He does.”
That should have warned me. It doesn’t.
The rest of the day is normal in the way our days are normal now. Breakfast. Calls. Writing. Ari refusing his nap, then passing out face-first on Aleksei’s chest like he wasn’t fighting sleep with his whole soul five minutes earlier.
By evening, I think the day is done.
That is my mistake.
After dinner, one of the staff tells me Ari has “something to show me” in the garden.
I immediately suspect Aleksei, because Ari has many talents but independent event planning is not one of them.
Still, I go.
The back garden is lit softly. Nothing huge. Nothing ridiculous. No orchestra. No rose petals. Thank God.
Just the fountain, the lights in the trees, and Aleksei standing near the terrace steps with our son on his hip.
Ari sees me first and starts bouncing.
“Papa!” he says, then points at me. “Mama!”
“Yes,” I say slowly. “That is generally how family works.”
Aleksei actually looks nervous. That gets my full attention immediately. He sets Ari down.
Our son wobbles toward me with the confidence of a very short drunk king, holding something in both hands. A small box.
My whole body stills. No. No way.
He reaches me, nearly trips, recovers, and thrusts the box at my knees. “Mama.”
I crouch slowly. “What is this?”
He whispers, very loudly, “Papa says ask.”
I look up.
Aleksei is standing there with his hands in his pockets and that look on his face. The one he gets when he’s more exposed than he wants to be and forcing himself to stay still anyway.
I open the box. The ring. Not the first one.
This one is different. Simpler. Beautiful, but not heavy with history. Chosen, not inherited.
That detail hits me harder than it should.
I look back up at him.
He steps closer, then stops in front of us. “I thought,” he says, “it would be better to ask when neither of us was sleep-deprived, poisoned, bleeding, or holding a newborn.”
“That does narrow the field.”
Ari nods solemnly like he agrees.
Aleksei glances down at him, then back at me. “He insisted on helping.”
“Did he?”
“No,” he says. “I insisted. He liked the box.”
That makes me laugh, which is probably good because otherwise I might cry too early and ruin the pacing.
He takes a breath. “Zatanna.”
There is no audience. No performance. Just us, and the little boy now trying to pry the ring box back out of my hand.
“I was not wrong the first time,” he says. “I was early.”
“I love you,” he says. “I love this life with you. I love our son. I love that you fight me when I deserve it and sometimes when I don’t. I love that you stayed by my side after every reason not to.” His voice is steady now. “Marry me.”
Ari, sensing his cue in the worst possible way, yells, “Marry!”
I laugh through the tears already starting.
Aleksei looks briefly betrayed. “That was not the line.”
Ari points at me and says, “Say yes.”
I cover my face for one second because apparently even my child has joined forces with this man.
When I look up again, Aleksei is watching me carefully. Not assuming. Not pressing. Just waiting.
This time, I know exactly what I feel.
“Yes,” I say.
He exhales once. “Yeah?” he asks, because apparently this terrifying man still needs confirmation.
“Yes.”
Ari claps because he has no idea what’s happening but senses approval and likes to be involved.
Aleksei takes the ring from the box with hands that are just slightly less steady than usual and slides it onto my finger.
Then he kisses me.
Slow. Warm. Certain.
When he pulls back, Ari wedges himself between us immediately and demands, “Me, too.”
So Aleksei picks him up, and the three of us stand there in the garden laughing like idiots while my ring catches the light and my son tries to bite his father’s shoulder out of excitement.
This is not the happily ever after I would have imagined when I was younger.
But it’s exactly what I needed.
The End.