43. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
Four days. That was how long I had spent trying and failing to plan a single conversation, after building a career out of planning far more dangerous ones without losing sleep over any of them.
I had once mapped an extraction route through three floors of an occupied building in under six minutes.
I had once talked a man down from a ledge by inventing a version of his own future he still wanted to live.
I had planned the deaths of men who deserved it and the survival of people who did not always deserve saving, and none of it had cost me as much as trying to figure out how to ask one woman a single question.
Matvei found me at the kitchen table on the fourth morning, staring at a small velvet box like it might detonate if I opened it wrong.
"You have been sitting there for twenty minutes," he said, setting two cups of coffee down without being asked. "I timed it."
"I am thinking."
"You do not think. You decide. This is new territory for you, and I confess I am enjoying it."
I did not appreciate being enjoyed.
"I need it to be right," I said. "I have exactly one attempt at this."
"You have survived four assassination attempts and a burning warehouse. You will survive asking a woman to marry you."
"This is different."
"Everything is different when it matters to you. That is the entire problem with caring about things." He sat down across from me, unbothered by the box between us, and studied it the way he studied most threats, carefully and without sentiment.
"I have an idea."
"I am afraid to hear it."
"You should be. Take her to the range."
"Propose after she outshoots you. Women respect competence."
"I am not proposing at a shooting range, Matvei."
"Why not? It is meaningful to both of you."
"It is meaningful to exactly one of us, and it involves firearms."
"Firearms have never bothered her."
"That is not the point."
He shrugged, unbothered by the rejection, and drank his coffee like the conversation had gone precisely as he expected it to.
Miles arrived that afternoon uninvited, the way he usually did, and found the ring box sitting on the counter before I had a chance to hide it.
"No way." He picked it up before I could stop him, turning it over like evidence. "You are actually doing it."
"Put that down."
"This is huge. This is, like, the biggest thing that has happened to this family since Isla stopped almost dying every other month."
He set it down carefully, reverently, then immediately ruined the moment. "Okay, so, hear me out."
"I already regret this."
"You need to do it at a hockey game. Get on the jumbotron. I know a guy."
"Absolutely not."
"It's romantic. Fifteen thousand people cheering, her face on a screen the size of a building."
"Isla would set the building on fire before she agreed to that, and I would help her do it."
"Okay, fair. Too public." He thought about it for another second.
"What about his firehouse guys? Surprise party, ring at the end, everybody cheering?"
"No."
"You didn't even hear the whole idea."
"I did not need to. I have known you for eight weeks, and every idea you have had in that time has ended with property damage or a formal apology to someone."
Miles considered that, visibly wounded, then visibly recovered. "That's not entirely inaccurate."
I told him about the fire extinguisher out of nothing more than exhaustion, the way a man confesses things at odd hours that he would never say in better light.
"She hit me with one," I said. "The night we met. I have thought, more than once, about bringing one to the proposal."
"Some kind of joke. A callback."
Miles went very still, the particular stillness of a man recalculating everything he thought he knew about a person.
"That's either the worst idea I've ever heard, or the best one, and I genuinely can't decide which."
"It is the worst one. I have already discarded it."
"You should tell Matvei about that idea. He'd lose his mind."
"I already told Matvei."
"And?"
"He offered to source one that matched her kitchen decor."
Miles laughed until he had to sit down, and I regretted, immediately and completely, ever telling either of them anything at all.
I found Basin in his office two days later, ostensibly to discuss a supply route, though we both understood within the first minute that the meeting had nothing to do with supply routes at all.
"You are here about the ring," he said, not looking up from his desk.
"How did you know?"
"Matvei cannot keep anything to himself when he is proud of something. He has told three different people about a fire extinguisher joke I did not fully understand."
I set the box on his desk anyway, feeling more exposed by that single motion than I had felt walking into most rooms with a gun pointed at me.
"I wanted your opinion before I did this."
"You did not need it." He studied the ring for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes.
"You have had it a long time. I remember the year you told me you would never open that drawer again."
"I remember saying that too."
"People change their minds about drawers. It is usually a good sign." He closed the box and slid it back across the desk.
"She is good for you. I was not certain anyone would be, and I am glad to have been wrong."
That was the closest thing to a blessing I was ever going to get out of Yuri Basin, and it was more than enough.
The jeweler's shop sat on a quiet street I had walked past a hundred times without once going inside, a narrow storefront with a bell over the door that rang too brightly for how heavy the box in my coat felt.
The ring had belonged to my mother, one of the only things I had carried out of St. Petersburg that was not a weapon or a debt. I had kept it wrapped in a handkerchief in the bottom of a drawer for six years, unable to look at it directly and unable to throw it away.
The jeweler, an older man with steady hands and no interest in small talk, turned it under the light for a long moment before he spoke.
"The setting is worn," he said. "The stone is not. Whoever chose this understood what mattered."
"She did."
"Your mother?"
"Yes."
He did not ask anything further. I did not offer anything further. The silence between us felt like the correct amount of respect for a question neither of us needed answered out loud.
"I want to keep the stone exactly as it is," I said. "New setting. Nothing else changed."
"That is usually how the best ones go." He wrapped it with care and gave me a date to return, three days out, and I walked out of that shop feeling lighter than I had any right to feel over a piece of metal.
I thought about my mother the entire walk home, the version of her I remembered best, humming over a stove in an apartment too small for the four of us, telling me once that love was not a thing you found ready-made.
It was a thing you kept choosing on purpose, every single day, long after the choosing stopped being difficult.
I had spent six years certain I had lost my right to that kind of choosing. Somewhere in the last several months, without ever deciding to, I had started wanting it again anyway.
Getting Isla back to that same hallway required more planning than the extraction route through three floors of an occupied building, mostly because she would notice anything even slightly out of place before I did.
Cruz answered on the second ring, mid-shift by the sound of it, radio chatter bleeding through the line behind her voice.
"I need a favor," I said. "Nothing dangerous."
"That is somehow more concerning than the usual favors you ask me for."
"I need Reyes's follow-up moved to a specific time, and I need the west hallway kept relatively empty for about ten minutes that afternoon."
A long pause followed, long enough that I could hear her working out what I was actually asking her for.
"Nikolai Stepanov. Are you asking me to help you clear a hospital corridor so you can propose in it?"
"I am asking you to help me schedule an appointment."
"You are the worst liar I have ever met, and I have interrogated professional liars for a living." She was laughing by the end of it, unable to fully hide it.
"Fine. I will make some calls. You owe me for this one."
"I already owe you for several things."
"Add it to the list."
"Reyes has a follow-up coming up," she told me over breakfast, scrolling through her schedule with the particular focus she gave every patient she still checked on months after officially discharging them. "I already have it blocked off."
"I could come with you," I said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere closer to a man reciting a rehearsed line. "I have not seen him since he was released."
She looked up, surprised, pleased, entirely unsuspicious. "He would like that. He still talks about the guy who carried him four flights without complaining once."
"I complained internally the entire time."
"You didn't show it."
"I have had a great deal of practice not showing things."
She smiled at that, small and unaware of everything happening beneath it, and went back to her schedule while I sat there memorizing the shape of her hands around her coffee cup.
The hallway looked smaller than I remembered it, the way places from significant nights so often did once a person finally returned to them steady instead of bleeding.
Reyes's appointment ran long, the way appointments always seemed to, full of small talk I only half followed because I was too busy watching the clock and trying to remember how to breathe normally.
Isla laughed at something Reyes said, easy and unguarded, and I stood in the doorway committing it to memory, filing it away with everything else about her I had already decided I never wanted to forget.
We walked out together afterward, back down the same hallway, past the same nurses' station, past the exact spot where a fire extinguisher had once ended a very bad week in the single best way possible.
"You're quiet," Isla said, glancing at me sideways. "Even for you."
"I am thinking."
"About what?"
"This hallway. It looks smaller than it did the first time I stood in it."
"Everything looks smaller once you survive it." She said it lightly, unaware of how much weight I was about to put on those exact words.
I stopped walking. She took two more steps before she noticed, then turned back, confused, already scanning me the way she scanned every patient who stopped moving without an obvious reason.
"Nikolai?"
I reached into my coat instead of answering, and found the box precisely where I had checked for it eleven times already that morning.
Her hand went to her mouth.
"Nikolai," she said again, quieter this time, like she already suspected what came next and did not fully trust herself to believe it yet.
I did not look away from her face, not even to check that my knee had actually found the floor beneath me, because nothing in that hallway mattered more than watching her understand what was happening in real time.
"I have planned things far more dangerous than this," I said, my voice steadier than I expected it to be, steadier than four days of failing to find the right words had any right to leave it. "None of them frightened me the way this does."
"Nikolai, what are you doing?"
"I do not have a speech prepared. I wrote four of them and threw away every single one, because none of them said it as plainly as I actually feel it."
I opened the box. The ring caught the hallway light just the way the jeweler promised it would.
"You made an ordinary life feel possible for a man who stopped believing he was allowed to want one."
Her eyes had gone bright, her hand still pressed over her mouth like she was afraid of what would happen if she let it fall.
"Isla." I held her gaze, held the box steady despite everything in me that wanted to shake. "Marry me."