Epilogue
Anya
The first time I saw Connor Orlov, I felt safe.
I knew that when he filled that doorway, broad and scarred and daring me to flinch, something inside me that had been clenched tight for years exhaled.
I said yes because of that feeling. Because safety doesn't come from locked doors and guarded houses. It comes from a man who looks at you like he'd burn the world down before he let it touch you.
Six months later, I still feel it every time he walks into a room.
I'm standing in our kitchen. Our kitchen.
Not Saoirse's, not the guest room, not the borrowed spaces I've been living in since I drove up that long gravel drive in my white Audi with nothing but my coat and my car keys and a prayer.
This kitchen is ours. The converted barn at the edge of the Orlov estate, tucked behind a row of ancient oaks, close enough to the main house that Saoirse can walk over with leftovers but far enough that we have something that feels like our own.
I did most of the conversion myself. Not the building, Liam handled the contractors, but the rest. The choosing.
The making of it. I picked the wide plank floors because they remind me of the house I grew up in.
The deep farmhouse sink, because I'd seen one in Grace's kitchen and loved the way it looked.
The exposed beams overhead because Connor looked up at them during the first walk-through and said, "These are good," and I realized it was the first time he'd expressed an opinion about anything domestic, and I wanted to build a whole house around that single moment of preference.
The living room has a fireplace that Connor can actually stand in front of without hitting his head.
Bookshelves line one wall, half full already, mine on the left and his on the right, and I love that his side is heavier than people would expect.
History. Poetry. A battered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo that he's read so many times the spine is held together with tape.
The bedroom is upstairs, under the sloped ceiling, with windows that look out over the estate grounds.
I chose the bed, a king, because anything smaller and Connor's feet hang off the end, and the sheets, white, soft, the kind that feel like being held.
He chose the blackout curtains because he sleeps better in total darkness, and I chose the small lamp on my nightstand because I like to read while he falls asleep with his arm across my waist and his face pressed into my hair.
We built this together. That's the part that still catches me off guard.
Not the house itself, but the way we built the life inside it, piece by piece, choice by choice, compromise by compromise.
He wanted the kitchen island closer to the window.
I wanted it centered. We argued about it for three days until Iris told us we were both wrong and moved it herself, and now it's in a spot neither of us chose and both of us love.
That's marriage. It's learning how someone takes their coffee and making it that way without being asked.
It's the way Connor leaves his gym clothes on the bathroom floor and I leave my books on every flat surface and neither of us has killed the other yet, which I consider a significant achievement.
It's the way he reaches for me in the dark. Every night. Even in his sleep. His hand finds my hip or my waist or my thigh, and he pulls me closer, and I go, and we settle into each other like two pieces of something that was always meant to be whole.
I'm not naive about what we are. We're a Bratva marriage.
We were born from desperation and politics and a deal struck in a conservatory over cold tea.
The Baron is still out there, still making noise, though Rafferty and Killian have made it increasingly expensive for him to do so.
The Council is still watching. Diomid is still adjusting to life under the Orlov umbrella, though Elizabeth tells me he's happier than he's been in years, even if he'd rather die than admit it.
But the bones of us are good. The bones of us were always good. I knew it the moment I said yes, and I know it now, standing in our kitchen on our first morning in our home, waiting for my husband to come through the door.
He's been at the main house since dawn, helping Liam with something he won't tell me about because he thinks I worry too much, which I do, but that's beside the point.
Saoirse is hosting a housewarming dinner tonight.
The whole family. Katya and Killian and their baby girl, born four months ago, a tiny, furious creature with Katya's blonde hair and Killian's jaw who screams like she's negotiating terms. Aidan and Tanya.
Grace and Liam and Lorcan, who is crawling now and terrorizing every room he enters.
Iris, who has appointed herself the unofficial interior critic of the barn and has opinions about our curtains.
Elizabeth and Diomid and Yelena, who has decided that Connor is her favorite person on the planet and demands to be picked up every time she sees him, and Connor, this enormous, scarred, terrifying man, lifts her onto his shoulders every single time without hesitation.
I hear his truck on the gravel before I see it. The engine cuts. The door slams. His boots on the stone path.
I press my hand against my stomach and breathe.
The front door opens and he fills the frame the way he fills every frame, shoulders nearly brushing the sides, head ducked slightly because he still hasn't adjusted to the fact that I chose doors tall enough for him.
He's in jeans and a worn gray T-shirt and his hair is messy from the wind.
He looks like everything I never knew I wanted.
"Hey," he says. His good eye finds me immediately, the way it always does, scanning for me first before he registers anything else. The tension in his shoulders loosens the moment he sees me. It does that every time. Like the sight of me standing in a room is enough to unclench something in him.
"Hey." I lean against the kitchen island, and try to keep my face neutral. "How was Liam?"
"Liam." He crosses the kitchen and his hands find my waist, automatic, pulling me into him. He drops his head and presses his mouth to my temple. "Liam is Liam. Stressed about the Council. Stressed about the Baron. Stressed about Lorcan eating something off the floor. The usual."
I laugh against his chest. He smells like fresh air and soap and underneath it, the warm, woodsy scent that is purely him, the one I've fallen asleep breathing in every night for six months.
"The house looks good," he says, pulling back to look around the kitchen. The light catches his scar and I watch the way it moves when he talks, the way it's become as familiar to me as the lines of my own hands. "You did this."
"We did this."
"You did this," he repeats. "I carried heavy things. You made it a home." He looks down at me, and the expression on his face, tender and raw and still faintly disbelieving, like he can't quite accept that this is his life now, makes my eyes sting. "Thank you."
"I have something for you," I say. "A housewarming gift."
"You don't need to get me a gift."
"Well, it’s time sensitive so you have to have it now."
He raises an eyebrow. The scarred one. He does it on purpose now, because he knows I find it attractive and it makes me blush, which he finds endlessly entertaining.
I reach behind me to the counter where I left the small white box this morning, tucked behind the coffee maker where he wouldn't see it. I press it into his hands.
He looks at it. Looks at me. Opens it.
Inside, lying on a folded piece of tissue paper, is a pregnancy test. Two pink lines. Clear and unmistakable.
Connor goes still.
It’s the absolute, total stillness of a man whose world just shifted on its axis, and he's standing in the middle of the earthquake trying to figure out which way is up.
"Anya." My name comes out cracked. Broken down the center.
"Six weeks," I say. My voice is shaking now, and I don't care. "I found out yesterday. I wanted to wait until we were here. In our home. I wanted this to be the first thing that happens in this house."
He stares at the test. Then at me. Then back at the test. His hands are trembling.
This man who won a fight at nineteen that cost him his eye, who carries Yelena on his shoulders like she rules this kingdom, whose fists I've seen leave cracks in a heavy bag, is standing in our kitchen with a pregnancy test in his shaking hand and tears welling in his eyes.
He doesn't wipe them away.
"Say something," I whisper.
He sets the box on the counter with a gentleness that makes my heart crack open. Then he drops to his knees on the kitchen floor and wraps his arms around my waist and presses his face against my stomach and holds me like I'm the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth.
I put my hands in his hair and hold him there. I can feel him shaking. I can feel the wetness of his tears through my shirt. And I can feel his mouth move against my belly, whispering something I have to strain to hear.
"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."
I tip his face up. One hand on each cheek. The smooth side and the scarred side.
"I love you," I say. "I love every single part of you. I loved you before I knew it, and I'll love you long after I've run out of ways to say it."
He stands. He towers over me, this mountain of a man with tears on his scarred face and a light in his good eye that I've never seen before. He puts his hands on my face, cradles me like I'm made of glass, and kisses me.
The kind of kiss that says everything words can't.
When he pulls back, he presses his forehead to mine.
"I'm going to be a dad," he says, and the wonder in his voice is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.
"You're going to be a dad."