24. Isla
ISLA
We had agreed, without either of us actually saying it out loud, that today did not exist.
No case files on the table. No phone calls from Cruz, no calls to Basin, no laptop open anywhere in the apartment with a spreadsheet still glowing on the screen.
Just the two of us, a couch that had seen better decades, and a movie so bad neither of us had managed to follow the plot past the first twenty minutes.
Cruz had filed with the judge three days ago.
Doubled security stood outside now, two more of Basin's men than the week before, close enough that I had stopped counting them out the window by the second day.
Whatever came next because of that filing was going to come whether we spent today bracing for it or not, and for once we had both decided, without a single argument about it, that bracing for it could wait until tomorrow.
It had started that morning with an argument about breakfast, which Nikolai had lost badly enough that he still would not admit it counted as losing.
"Eggs again," he said, watching me crack a third one into the pan like it had personally wronged him.
"Eggs are efficient. You said it yourself, weeks ago, about your own cooking. I am simply applying your own philosophy back at you."
"I do not remember phrasing it quite that way."
"You absolutely phrased it that way. I have an excellent memory for the things you say when you think I am not paying attention."
"That is a deeply unfair advantage to hold over someone."
"You could always learn to make something that is not eggs. I would not stop you."
He had tried anyway, an hour later, attempting something with the flour and cinnamon still sitting in the cabinet from the night he first learned to cook to impress me, and the results had been edible in the same way a dare is edible, which was to say technically, and only once.
By the time we settled onto the couch with the popcorn, we had both agreed, without either of us saying so directly, that whatever this day turned into, it did not need to involve either of us near a stove again.
"Wait, is he the brother or the guy from the bank?" I asked, squinting at the television like it owed me an explanation.
"I do not believe this film knows the answer to that question either."
"That's not comforting."
"It was not meant to be comforting. It was meant to be honest."
I threw a piece of popcorn at him, which he caught out of the air without even looking, the same easy reflex he used for everything that came flying at him, and popped it into his mouth like I had handed it to him on purpose.
"Show off."
"You threw it. I simply declined to be hit by it."
The popcorn itself was a disaster, most of it burnt black on one side because I had gotten distracted arguing with him about the movie instead of watching the microwave, and the whole apartment smelled faintly like a kitchen fire that had given up halfway through.
"This tastes like punishment," I said, eating a handful of it anyway.
"You made it."
"I'm aware. That's what makes it so devastating."
He almost smiled at that, the small private one he still rationed like it cost him something, and reached over to steal a piece straight out of the bowl in my lap without asking, which felt like the most married thing either of us had done since he moved me into this apartment.
We played cards after the movie finally, mercifully, ended, sprawled on the floor with the coffee table between us and a deck so old the corners had gone soft.
"You are cheating," he said, watching me lay down a hand that had no business being that good.
"I am winning. Those are different things."
"They are, actually, exactly the same thing."
"You're just upset because you're bad at this."
"I am not remotely bad at this."
"You have lost four hands in a row."
"The deck is compromised."
"The deck is fine, Nikolai. You are simply bad at cards, and it is deeply satisfying to watch."
He gave me a look that would have made most people reconsider their life choices, and I laughed so hard I had to set my cards down, because after everything the last few weeks had been, a bad card game with a man who could apparently survive gunfire but not a losing streak felt like the funniest thing in the entire world.
"Fine," he said finally, gathering the cards with more dignity than the moment strictly deserved. "I concede that today, in this specific game, you have won."
"I have won every game today."
"I am choosing not to dwell on that part."
"You could ask me to teach you. Properly, I mean. Not whatever you have been doing this whole time, which I can only describe as guessing with confidence."
"I do not guess. I calculate."
"You calculate incorrectly, four times in a row, with total confidence. That is somehow worse."
"It is a valid strategy in certain contexts."
"Card games are not one of them."
He reached over and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, unhurried, the quiet habit he only ever fell back on when he had run out of anything clever left to say.
"Perhaps you could teach me. Properly."
"I'd like that."
We ended up back on the couch eventually, my legs across his lap, his hand resting on my ankle like it had simply always lived there, and for a long stretch neither of us said anything at all.
It was the kind of quiet that used to make me nervous with other people, the kind that meant somebody was building up to something difficult.
With him it had started to mean something else entirely.
"Can I ask you something?" I said eventually, watching the ceiling instead of him, because some questions were easier to send out into a room than straight at a person.
"Always."
"When this is over. All of it, Kovalenko, the trial, everything. Where do you actually see us living?"
He was quiet for a moment, and I felt him go still under my legs the particular way he did when a question mattered more than he wanted to let on.
"I have not allowed myself to think that far ahead in longer than I can remember."
"Humor me anyway."
"Somewhere with better locks than this apartment has."
"That's not an answer, that's a security assessment."
"It is the only honest place I know how to start from." He traced a slow, absent line along my ankle, like his hands needed something to do while the rest of him worked through the question properly.
"Somewhere quiet. A door I do not have to check twice before I trust it."
"Greenpoint has good bones. My friend Renee lived there for two years and never once shut up about it."
"I have heard worse pitches."
"Or Astoria. Better food, honestly, and the trains actually run on time, which in this city is basically a personality trait."
"You are describing this like a competition."
"It is a competition. Greenpoint versus Astoria is a very real, very serious rivalry, and I need you to take a side."
"I refuse to take a side in a rivalry I did not know existed an hour ago."
"That is exactly what someone who is secretly Team Astoria would say."
"I did not say that."
"You did not deny it either."
He laughed at that, quiet and real, the kind of sound that still caught me off guard every time it happened, like some part of me had not fully believed until each new instance that he was actually capable of it.
"Astoria, then," he said. "Purely to end the debate, and not because you have won it."
"I have absolutely won it."
"What would you want, if you actually let yourself picture it? Not the neighborhood. The rest of it."
I thought about it longer than the question probably deserved, because the honest answer had been sitting quietly in the back of my mind for longer than I had let myself admit out loud.
"A kitchen big enough for two people to actually cook in without elbowing each other. A door that locks because we chose it, not because we need it to. Maybe a dog, eventually, something enormous and badly behaved that you would pretend to hate and secretly spoil."
"I do not hate dogs."
"You would pretend to, for exactly as long as it took the dog to fall asleep on your chest, and then you would be finished pretending forever."
"That is an alarmingly specific prediction."
"I know you, Nikolai. It is not a prediction. It is just math."
Neither of us finished the thought after that, not really.
We let it hang there in the space between Greenpoint and Astoria, between a door with better locks and a life neither of us had quite let ourselves believe we were allowed to want yet.
Saying it any more plainly than we already had felt like daring something to go wrong, so we let it sit there instead, half spoken and safer for it.
"We do not have to plan the rest of it today," he said eventually, reading the hesitation in me the way he read most things, before I had fully finished feeling it myself.
"No. We don't."
"Astoria is enough for one afternoon."
"Astoria is enough for one afternoon," I agreed, and let my head fall back against his shoulder, and for a while neither of us said anything else at all.
The silence that followed was not the kind that needed filling.
It sat over the two of us like something warm, his hand still resting on my ankle, my head tucked into the space beneath his jaw, the terrible movie still murmuring away on the television that neither of us had bothered to turn off.
I could feel his heartbeat under my cheek, steady and unhurried, and I thought, not for the first time, that this was the version of him almost nobody in his life had ever been allowed to see.
I did not know how long we stayed like that, and for once I did not care to find out. Long enough that I had started to genuinely believe, for the first time in weeks, that a day like this one might eventually stop being an exception and start being simply what our life was.
My phone rang from somewhere inside the couch cushions, muffled and insistent, and I felt Nikolai go tense beneath me before I had even located it.
"It is probably nothing," I said, more to convince myself than him, digging the phone free from between two cushions.
The hospital's main line lit up the screen, which it never did unless something had gone wrong enough that somebody needed me specifically and needed me fast.
"This is Isla."
"It's Renee." Her voice had none of its usual teasing warmth in it, clipped and fast in the particular way she only got during an actual emergency. "You need to get in here."
"What happened?"
"Reyes crashed about ten minutes ago. High fever, tachycardic, his graft site looks wrong, and Dr. Okafor thinks we're looking at a serious infection, maybe systemic."
"Kovalenko? Is this Kovalenko?"
"No. God, no, nothing like that, nobody touched him."
"It's his body, Isla. It's what fire does to a person even after the fire itself is long over. We need you back on the ward in the next ten minutes."
I was already on my feet before she had even finished the sentence, phone still pressed to my ear, one hand searching blindly for my shoes.
"I'm on my way."
I hung up and looked at Nikolai, who was already standing, already understanding exactly what my face meant before I had said a single word, already reaching for his jacket without needing to be told why.
"Reyes," I said, and the word came out sounding like the end of the only quiet day we had gotten in weeks. "I have to go. Now."