Chapter 20
NIKITA
At seven in the morning, I find her in the guest room she first slept in the night we caught her. She chose it again last night. Now she’s zipping a bag that holds one change of clothes and nothing else, and I understand this is the test I don’t get to fail.
She slept here. She made the bed behind her with square corners, though the sheets barely look disturbed.
She’s dressed already, hair pulled back, and she has the look she wears when she’s decided something and is bracing for me to argue with it.
The bag is small. That matters. If she meant to leave for good, she’d pack more than one shirt.
One change of clothes means she needs air, not an exit, and the difference is the only reason I can breathe.
“I’m going to Maren’s for a few hours,” she says. “I need a room you’re not standing in while I think. That’s all it is. I’ll be back by afternoon.”
“I know.” I stay in the doorway instead of crossing to her, because crowding her now would prove every word she said last night. “Before you go, I need to say the thing I should have said in the office, and I need you to hear it before you leave. I won’t follow you.”
She sets down the bag. She doesn’t sit, but she sets the bag down, and I take that as the only permission I’m going to get.
“You asked me last night whether my world would always come first.” I keep my voice calm, which is almost impossible.
“The honest answer is that for four years, it was the only thing that came at all. There was no first or second. There was survival, and there was everyone I couldn’t protect while I managed it.
When you asked, I almost gave you the old answer, because the old answer kept me alive.
That half-second you saw wasn’t me choosing the war over you.
It was me finding out the answer had already changed and not having said it out loud yet. ”
“Words.” She glances at the bag but doesn’t pick it up.
“I made you believe the war would always come before you,” I say. “You were right about what I do when I’m afraid. I pull everything in close, I decide alone, and I did it to you with your own brother. I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t reach for the bag either, so I keep going.
“I know you don’t accept just words. Neither do I.
” I step into the room, one step, and stop.
“I’ve already acted. This week, I authorized the dissolution of Tessendorf, Ostrova, and Hesston.
I closed their operations, and the nominee directors filed the first documents.
The entities will be gone before the quarter ends.
Together, they represent eight figures of infrastructure I spent a decade building.
Norov, Voronin, and the Adler brothers got severance letters and clean exits, because I don’t need inherited muscle for the life I’m building.
I authorized the foundation’s reorganization as an independent restitution nonprofit.
Its board will oversee it, auditors will review the accounts, and my mother’s name will finally belong to something honest. I did all of it quietly, because I wanted the action behind the words before I said any of them.
The work has started, and I can’t reverse it now without leaving a record. ”
She’s very still now, but she no longer looks braced to run. She lowers her shoulders and looks at the bag instead of the door.
“I’m not asking you to survive my world, Piper.
I started dismantling it before we flew south the second time, one holding at a time, because I would rather live than only keep surviving, and a life isn’t a thing you can build around a war you’re still fighting.
” I make myself say the last of it, the part I’ve never said to anyone because there was never anyone to say it to.
“I was doing it whether you stayed or not. I’d rather do it with you in the house.
That’s the whole of it. That’s what I should have said instead of building a file on your brother. ”
For a moment, she doesn’t move at all. She stands there with the small bag at her feet, the strap still looped over one finger, and the whole argument from last night still in the air between us, clearly deciding.
I’ve watched her make a hundred smaller choices.
This is the first one that settles whether I still have a future with her.
She crosses the room, presses both palms over my heart, and turns her face into my shoulder, and she exhales against my collar like she’s been holding that breath since the office.
“I’ve been so scared this wasn’t possible,” she says into my shirt.
“That I wanted a future you couldn’t actually give me, and I’d figure it out too late to leave. ”
“I’ve been scared of the same thing from the other side.” I put my hand on the back of her head and hold it there. “That I’d get all the way to a life worth having and lose the person I wanted beside me in it.”
She looks up at that, and whatever she was going to say to Maren, she doesn’t need to think about in another room anymore.
She doesn’t go to Maren’s. She texts something one-handed and puts the phone away, and then we do the strangest thing either of us has done in weeks. We walk through the house.
We aren’t checking security or sightlines.
For years, I walked these halls counting weaknesses, regarding every window as a liability and every door a thing that could open the wrong way.
This morning, I walk them with her hand in mine and notice, as if I never had before, that my mother chose good light for the morning rooms.
We open every door and argue about what belongs behind each one, and Piper walks into rooms this place has kept shut for four years. “What’s this one?” she asks in the doorway of a corner room with north light and nothing in it but dust and a single chair under a film of grime.
“My father meant it to be a study, but he was too busy to ever use it.”
“It should be a library.” She walks the perimeter, and I watch her measure it with the same eye she uses on a forgery, seeing what it should be instead of what it is.
“You have four boxes of books in the cellar that someone packed and forgot, and I read auction paperwork at the kitchen island every night because this house doesn’t own a single comfortable chair to read in.
Put the shelves on that wall. The light’s right for it. ”
She keeps moving through the house, and I follow her because I want to see it as she sees it.
She stops in the doorway of the big empty room over the garden, the one with the good southern light my mother would have loved, and she rests a hand on the frame and looks at it a moment longer than the others.
I don’t ask what she sees. Whatever it is, it belongs to her until she decides to tell me.
“You’ve thought about this.”
“I’ve thought about this since the second week, and I hated myself for it every time.” She rubs a smear of dust off her thumb, keeping her tone easy even as she avoids my gaze, and we both let it stand. “What about your office, the one that looks like a room where men get told bad news?”
“It’s a command center.”
“It’s a bunker with a desk.” She turns to face me. “When this is over, you’re going to need a room where you do ordinary work, and it can’t be that one. That one has a map of your enemies on the wall. You can’t answer a foundation’s email under a map of your enemies.”
She’s right, and the ease with which she says it, the assumption folded into it that there will be a foundation, an after, and ordinary work, gets to me more than anything she said in the guest room.
We end up in the kitchen, where I make coffee too strong for her and she adds hot water then drinks only a few sips.
“I want to see the Amalfi house before it gets too hot,” she says, hooking one bare foot over the rung of the stool.
“You’ve described it four times and I still don’t believe the lemon trees. ”
“The lemon trees are real. The heat in July is also real.” I set the pot down. “October. Istanbul instead. You’d have the water and the markets and none of the tourists.”
“You keep trying to move me to Istanbul.”
“I keep trying to show you the good version of my life instead of the one with the guns in it.”
She considers that, then lets it go. “Fine, but the north room here needs a rug before it needs anything else. You’ve got shelves on a list somewhere. I’ve seen the list, and there’s no rug on it.”
“The room needs shelves. It’s an empty room.”
“It’s a cold empty room. A rug first, then you can stack your dead men’s ledgers on whatever you want.”
“I don’t know how to buy a rug,” I say.
“That is obvious from the entire house.” She says it without looking up from her cup, deadpan, and it catches me sideways.
I laugh. Actually laugh, out loud, in my own kitchen, and the sound of it is so unfamiliar I nearly stop to examine it. I can’t remember the last time. Years, maybe. Before the water, before the four years of being a name on a headstone.
She grins at the sound like she’s won something. “There it is.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m framing that. First laugh. I was here.”
We argue about it after that, rugs and shelves and whether October belongs in Istanbul or on the coast, and neither of us is trying to win. She says the coast, I say the city, she says I have no taste, I say I have excellent taste and simply no rug, and she laughs at me this time.
The coffee goes cold between us, and I don’t reheat it, because reheating it would mean moving, and moving would mean this ends. I want every morning after this one to start exactly here.
She sets down her cup and watches me until I stop talking too.
“I need you over here,” she says.
She kisses me in the kitchen, and we don’t make it past the hallway.
We’ve been gentle before. This morning, she kisses me after seeing exactly what fear makes me do and choosing to stay through it, and that’s the difference, the only one that matters.
I back her against the hallway wall, and she pulls my shirt up and over before I take her mouth slow, and neither of us is rushing toward anything or away from anything.
I get her out of her clothes against the wall, and she gets me out of mine, and then I lift her and carry her through the nearest doorway and lower us both onto the rug.
Neither of us hurries. I put my mouth on her throat, her collarbone, then the soft rise of her breast, and she groans.
She traces the scars across my back, the ones she knows by now, without flinching, and we’re in no rush.
I take my time with her because she almost left last night, and every second she stays now is hers to choose.
I kiss my way down her body until I settle between her thighs, and she’s already wet when I put my mouth on her pussy.
She arches up off the floor and says my name like a warning she doesn’t mean.
I work her clit with my tongue and slide my fingers into her while holding down her hips and stay there until she’s shaking, until she fists both hands in my hair and a broken sound escapes her.
Only when she’s right at the edge do I move back up her body and press my cock against her opening.
I tip her chin up when I push into her, one slow stroke until I’m buried to the hilt and she clenches around me. “You look at me,” I say, and she does, and I hold there, all the way in, both of us still. Her breath catches. Mine does too.
She saw the worst version of my fear last night and walked out the door, and this morning, she walked back through it. She holds my gaze now like she means to stay through whatever comes next.
I move, and she moves with me. It builds slowly, deep and certain, the two of us finding a rhythm that has no rush to it because nothing is chasing us.
She says my name again, then a string of things that aren’t words, her nails at my shoulders, her heels pressing me closer, as she raises her hips to meet each stroke.
I brace on one forearm and watch her face the whole time, the flush climbing her throat, her gaze on mine and refusing to leave.
She clenches around my cock and I hold her through it, my mouth at her ear.
“You’re mine because you chose me,” I say, and she pulls me closer with her heels locked behind me.
“I chose you,” she says, and then she comes apart saying yes into my neck.
I follow her a few strokes later, buried deep, her name the only thing in my mouth, and I press my forehead to hers when I come.
Afterward, I don’t move off her right away, and she doesn’t let me. We stay tangled on the floor of a room we chose at random, her fingers tracing idle lines across my chest, and for a long while neither of us says anything because nothing needs saying.
We make it to a bed eventually. She lies against my side with her head on my chest until her muscles loosen. Then she tenses and lifts her head. She lowers one hand to her stomach and opens her mouth.
I wait. I don’t fill the silence, because I’ve learned that when Piper is deciding whether to hand me something, the worst thing I can do is reach for it before she’s ready.
I can tell it’s large, whatever it is. She holds herself still and searches for the words.
I want it, all of it, every last thing she’s keeping.
I make myself lie still and let her come to it.
She searches my face a moment longer, then closes her mouth and moves her hand from her stomach to my chest, and whatever it was, she decides to keep it a while longer.
I have a guess. I’ve had it for a week and refused to hold it up to the light, because a guess like that changes every calculation I make about her safety, and because it isn’t mine to confirm.
She stopped drinking weeks ago and blamed her stomach.
She turns gray in the mornings and calls it the schedule.
I’m the most observant man I know, and I have chosen, against every instinct I own, not to finish a pattern I can see forming, because the one time it matters most, she gets to be the one who says it out loud.
“You can tell me when you’re ready,” I say, because I want her to know I saw it but I’m not chasing it. “Whenever that is.”
She doesn’t answer but laces our fingers together, holding on like the grip itself is the thing she couldn’t say, and I close my hand around hers to let it be enough for now.
For four years I handled every unknown by reaching for it first, taking it apart before it could take me apart. She presses her forehead to my chest and keeps our joined hands between us, and I leave the unknown where it is. I pull her closer and don’t ask again.