44. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
Six months of relative peace had done something I had not expected. It had made me forget, for entire stretches of a day, that I used to count exits before I counted anything else in a room.
Isla had said yes before I had even finished getting back up off one knee, the word arriving so fast it nearly cut off the end of my own sentence, and six months later I still had not tired of hearing her tell that story to anyone who would listen.
Today I was counting swatches instead, sage green, or something the label insisted was sage green and looked, to my eye, indistinguishable from three other greens spread across the kitchen table.
"This one." Isla held up a square of fabric like she expected me to have an opinion I did not actually possess. "Or this one."
"They are the same color."
"They are not the same color. This one has more yellow in it."
"I concede the yellow." I did not, in fact, see any difference at all, and I had learned six months into this that saying so accomplished nothing except extending the conversation.
Renee walked in without knocking, a habit she had settled into completely by now, and dropped a binder on the table with the brisk authority of a woman who had appointed herself general of an operation nobody asked her to command.
"I have opinions about the seating chart," she announced.
"You always have opinions about the seating chart."
"I have new opinions. Better ones." She flipped the binder open to a page covered in arrows and crossed-out names.
"Your uncle Pavel cannot sit anywhere near Cruz. I do not know what happened between them at the engagement dinner, and I do not want to know. But I watched it happen, and I am not doing it twice."
"Pavel does not discuss what happened."
"Pavel discussed it plenty with his eyebrows."
I looked at Isla, who offered no help whatsoever, clearly enjoying this far more than the situation warranted.
"Fine," I said. "Move him."
"Already moved. I also moved Miles away from the open bar, which he is going to complain about, and I do not care."
"I heard that," Miles called from the couch, where he had been pretending not to listen for the last several minutes.
"You were meant to."
The cake tasting went sideways almost immediately, mostly because Renee had brought opinions to that too.
"Four flavors," the baker said, setting down small plates with the solemnity of a man presenting evidence in a trial. "Take your time."
Renee took a bite of the first one and made a sound like she had been personally wronged.
"This tastes like a candle."
"It is lavender."
"It tastes like a candle that is also lavender scented, which is not a compliment."
Isla tried the second one, considering it with the same careful focus she gave everything, and passed it to me without a word.
"That is good," I said.
"That is the one, then." She said it simply, like the decision required nothing further, and reached for the third plate.
The third plate turned out to contain something the baker called a deconstructed tiramisu, which appeared to be several separate components arranged to look accidental. Renee took one look at it and set down her fork entirely.
"I do not trust dessert that requires an explanation."
"It is meant to be experienced as a whole."
"I am experiencing it as three things on a plate that do not want to be near each other."
The fourth plate, mercifully, redeemed the entire tasting, a plain vanilla cake with a raspberry filling that made Isla close her eyes for a full second before she said anything at all.
"That one."
"You already picked the second one."
"I am allowed to change my mind. That is the entire point of tasting four cakes instead of one."
I did not have an opinion strong enough to argue with, mostly because I was still recovering from the lavender, and said as much.
"You are useless at this."
"I am extremely useful at other things. Cake selection was never advertised as one of my strengths."
Renee snorted into her water glass, and the baker, who had clearly seen every version of this argument before, simply nodded and made a note.
Isla's mother arrived the following week, a compact, quick-moving woman named Grace who hugged her daughter for a full ten seconds before she so much as looked in my direction.
When she finally did look at me, it was with the plain thoroughness of a woman deciding something important and not caring who noticed her doing it.
"So you are the one."
"I am."
"Isla says you carried a man down four flights of stairs and complained about it the entire way."
"I complained internally. He did not hear any of it."
"That is somehow worse." She said it approvingly, which I had not expected, and crossed the kitchen toward me with none of the caution most people brought into a room with me for the first time.
I had braced for something, though I was not entirely certain what. Some version of the careful, assessing look I had gotten used to from strangers who had heard some diluted version of what I used to do for a living.
Grace did not give me that look. She reached for the cuff of my shirt instead, businesslike, and rolled it back before I fully understood what she was doing.
"Hold still. I want to see how the jacket sits at your wrist." She turned my forearm over in her hands, checking the length of my sleeve against the scarring beneath it with the same brisk, unbothered efficiency her daughter brought to everything.
"This needs to be taken in another half inch or it will bunch when you lift your arm for the vows."
I stood there, arm extended, watching a woman I had known for exactly four minutes handle six years of scar tissue like it was nothing more remarkable than a tailoring problem.
"You are not going to ask."
"Ask what?"
"About this." I nodded at my own forearm, at the raised, uneven skin under her fingers.
"Isla told me what I needed to know a long time ago. The rest is between you and her." She let go of my wrist and patted it once, decisively, like a woman closing the book on a piece of business she considered settled.
"Besides, I have looked at worse on television. You are still standing here. That tells me everything else."
Something in my chest loosened that I had not fully realized was still braced.
"Mom." Isla appeared in the doorway, somewhere between exasperated and delighted. "You cannot just grab his arm."
"I asked."
"You said hold still. That is not asking."
"It worked, did it not?" Grace turned back to me, entirely unbothered.
"I like her. You should keep her."
"That is the plan."
Matvei stopped by that evening under the pretense of dropping off paperwork, though the paperwork could easily have waited until morning and we both understood it.
He surveyed the wreckage of fabric swatches, cake notes, and Renee's abandoned binder with the flat expression of a man cataloguing a crime scene.
"This is what happens to a man who used to plan extractions for a living," he said. "Seating charts."
"It is more complicated than it looks."
"It is a piece of paper with names on it."
"Pavel cannot sit near Cruz. There is history."
"There is always history with Pavel." Matvei picked up one of the fabric swatches, studied it with obvious confusion, and set it back down exactly where he found it. "I liked you better when your biggest decision was which building to burn down."
"I never burned down a building."
"Figuratively." He looked around the apartment once more, something almost fond behind his usual dry delivery.
"You look happy. It is deeply strange to witness."
"I am adjusting."
"Adjust faster. I do not enjoy watching you pick out ribbon colors." He let himself out with the same brusque economy of motion he brought to everything, gone as abruptly as he had arrived.
The apartment settled back into the hush it kept for itself once the noise of other people cleared out of it. Isla was rinsing plates at the sink, humming something I did not recognize, when my phone rang.
Cruz's name on the screen still produced a small, automatic tightening in my chest, six years of conditioning that had not fully unlearned itself even now.
"Stepanov."
"You are going to want to sit down for this, though I suspect you will not." Cruz sounded pleased with herself, the unmistakable tone she used when she had been sitting on good news and was finally allowed to deliver it.
"Say it."
"We picked up Sorokin in Miami this morning. He has been running a fake export business under a name so obvious I am almost insulted on his behalf."
I set down the dish towel I had been holding, my whole attention narrowing to the same sharp point it used to find before a raid.
"Sorokin was the last one."
"That is exactly what I am telling you. That's all of them. Every name on the list is accounted for."
I did not say anything for a moment, turning the sentence over, giving it the same wary scrutiny I gave anything I badly wanted to be true before I allowed myself to believe it.
"You are certain?"
"Positive. I double-checked it myself before I called, because I know exactly how you are about this particular list." A pause, warmer than her usual clipped delivery.
"It is over, Nikolai. All of it. Every single one of them is either dead or in a cell."
"Thank you."
"You do not have to thank me. Go tell your fiancée the good news. I imagine she has been waiting nearly as long as you have."
The call ended, and I stood there a moment longer with the phone still in my hand, feeling the unfamiliar stillness of a man who had spent six years bracing for a door that had just, finally, stopped needing to be watched.
Isla looked up from the sink, drying her hands on a towel, something in my face apparently telling her everything before I managed a single word.
"Nikolai?"
"That was Cruz." I set the phone down on the counter, deliberate, laying it aside like something I did not intend to carry any further.
"Sorokin was picked up this morning. In Miami."
"Sorokin was the last one." She said it slowly, like she was doing the same arithmetic I had just finished doing myself.
"He was."
"So that is truly all of them."
"It means there is no one left. No one still out there with a reason to look for either of us." I crossed the kitchen toward her, needing to be closer for what I was about to say even though nothing about the distance between us had actually changed.
"For six years I stood in rooms and counted every door before I let myself relax in them. I do not know how to explain what it feels like to realize, all at once, that I no longer have a reason to."
Isla set the towel down and closed the last of the distance herself, her hands finding my chest the way they always did when she wanted to feel something underneath her palms instead of just hearing it out loud.
"Then do not explain it," she said. "Just stand here with me and let it be true for a minute."
I did exactly that. I stood in my own kitchen, wedding swatches scattered across the table behind us, a cake decision still technically unmade, a woman in my arms who had spent six months planning a life with a man who used to plan for exactly the opposite, and understood, for the first time since a warehouse fire took everything else from me, that I was no longer watching the door.
Six years I had spent cataloguing threats before I let myself notice anything softer standing next to them.
Six months I had spent slowly learning how to notice the soft things first instead, seating charts and swatches and a woman humming badly at a sink, and somewhere in that quiet, unremarkable stretch of time the habit had finally, fully broken.
There was, finally, nothing left behind that door to watch for. Only this, ordinary and loud and entirely mine, for as long as either of us wanted to keep it.