Tanya
I spend the afternoon with Grace, Katya, and Iris, and for the first time in my life, I understand what women mean when they talk about their friends.
I've never had friends. I've had allies. Strategic acquaintances. Women I sat beside at Bratva functions and exchanged pleasantries with while we both calculated what the other was worth. Friendship requires honesty, and honesty requires trust, and trust was a currency I couldn't afford to spend.
But these three make it difficult to hold the line.
Grace is feeding Lorcan in the big armchair in the main house living room while telling us, in forensic detail, about the time Liam tried to assemble a crib and ended up with three leftover screws and a structure she refused to put her child in.
Katya is on the floor with her legs bent, reaching to paint her toenails a shade of red that Killian apparently hates, which is exactly why she chose it.
And Iris is lying upside down on the sofa with her feet over the back and her hair pooling on the carpet, scrolling through her phone and providing commentary on every dating app profile she encounters.
"Absolutely not," she says, flashing the screen at me. "Beard like that, he's hiding a weak chin. It's science."
"It's not science," Katya says without looking up.
"It's my science,” Iris mutters, “and it's never wrong."
I'm sitting in the window seat with a cup of tea that Saoirse made before she left for some errands.
I'm wearing one of Aidan's sweaters because I grabbed it this morning without thinking, and it wasn't until I was already at the main house that I realized what I'd done.
The sleeves hang past my fingers. It smells like him.
I find it all too comforting, but refuse to acknowledge the way it makes me feel inside.
"Okay, Tanya," Iris says, righting herself with the boneless agility of someone half her age. "Serious question. And you have to answer honestly because you're an Orlova now and Orlovas don't dodge."
"That's not a rule," Grace says, looking at me pointedly before returning her gaze to Lorcan’s peaceful face.
"It's absolutely a rule. I just made it." Iris fixes me with those dark green eyes that are so much like her mother’s it's unsettling. "What's the most surprising thing about being married to my brother?"
I consider the question. A week ago, I would have deflected.
Given something sharp and surface-level that kept the real answer hidden.
But I'm sitting in a window seat in a house that smells like coffee and baby powder, wearing my husband's sweater, and these women have spent the last two hours treating me like I belong here.
"He's patient," I say. "I didn't expect that."
"Aidan's always been patient," Grace says, shifting Lorcan to her shoulder. "Liam says it's his most dangerous quality."
"Liam's right," Katya adds. "Killian is patient but he runs hot.
What you see is what you get, and it's usually a lot all at once.
" She smiles in a way that tells me she wouldn't have it any other way.
"But Aidan... Aidan plans. He waits. And by the time you realize he's been waiting, it's already done. "
"That tracks," I say, and the three of them laugh, and I find myself smiling in a way that doesn't feel false.
Iris launches into a story about Aidan when he was fourteen, something about a boy at school who bullied Iris and how Aidan didn't say a word to anyone about it for three weeks and then one day the boy showed up with a black eye and a sudden, permanent desire to be polite to every girl in the building.
"He never admitted it," Iris says. "To this day. But I know it was him because the boy's older brother came to our house to complain and Aidan just stood in the doorway and stared at him until he left."
"That also tracks," I say, and this time I'm the one who laughs first.
By the time I walk back to the stables, as Aidan and I both now call our home, I'm lighter than I've been in as long as I can remember.
My cheeks ache from smiling. There are photos on my phone that Iris took of all four of us, and in one of them I'm holding Lorcan and Grace is leaning over my shoulder and we're both looking down at him, and my face in that photo is someone I barely recognize. She looks happy.
I change into something comfortable. Leggings and a thin sweater. I pull the brochures out from the bedside drawer where I moved them after Aidan left this morning, and I spread them on the kitchen counter. This time I read them properly, out in the open, where the light can reach them.
The introductory psychology program at the university thirty minutes away has a part-time option.
Two years. Classes three days a week. The prospectus describes it like it's the most normal thing in the world, studying the human mind, and I read every page and I let myself imagine being someone who does this.
Who sits in a lecture hall and takes notes and learns the language for all the things she's been observing her whole life.
I'm still reading when I hear the front door open.
"Aidan?" I call, without looking up. "There's food in the oven. Your mom dropped off a..."
I stop. The man standing in the doorway of our home doesn't look like the man who kissed my forehead this morning and left me in bed.
His shirt is streaked with red. Dark and wet across the chest and one sleeve, soaked into the white cotton in uneven patches. His knuckles are split on his right hand, raw and swollen. There's a smear of blood along his jaw that he either doesn't know about or hasn't bothered to wipe away.
His eyes find mine and they're dark and flat and burning with something that makes the air in the room change pressure.
I go still. Something old and automatic surges up my spine. The instinct to assess. To calculate the threat. To determine whether the blood means danger for me.
It passes in a second. Because this is Aidan. And the way he's looking at me isn't threatening. It's protective. Furious and protective, and the fury isn't directed at me.
"It's not mine," he says. His voice is rough. Lower than usual.
"Whose is it?" I ask, my face folding into something that feels like disbelief and surprise all at once.
He closes the door behind him and stands there for a moment. I watch him decide how much to tell me. I watch him weigh honesty against protection, and I know the exact moment he chooses honesty. Because that's what he asked of me, and he won't offer less than he demands.
"Gregor Malekonosh," he says. "A council member. He's been running his mouth about you. Calling you my sullied bride. Saying the Irish Orlovs got what they deserved. Used goods for a second-rate branch."
The words land like stones dropped on glass. I feel each one. Sullied. Used. Second-rate. The vocabulary of my father's world, the language I grew up breathing, the words that taught me to build walls in the first place.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever apologized.
His eyes flash. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. Malekonosh is an ass, talks too much when he drinks, but Linchenko had it coming for years.”
"Linchenko?" I ask, because I know he was the man I was almost married to.
Aidan's jaw flexes. "I dealt with him too."
I look at the blood on his shirt. The split knuckles. The controlled devastation in his expression.
"I didn't plan this, Tanya. But I won't apologize for it."
A week ago, I would have been furious. My first instinct would have been to freeze him out and reclaim the situation on my own terms. But a week ago, I didn't know what it felt like to have someone fight for me.
Fight for me because someone said something cruel about the woman he chose, and his response wasn't politics or strategy. It was blood.
"What about my father?" I ask.
Something dangerous moves across Aidan's face. "I haven't touched him. I wanted to talk to you first."
I stare at him. "You wanted my permission?"
"I wanted to make sure you'd be okay with it. He is your father, after all."
The laugh that comes out of me is short and sharp and holds no humor at all.
"He called me a whore, Aidan. He told the council I was damaged goods because he felt ashamed and wanted to curry favor.
He tried to match me with Tomaas Linchenko knowing what that man would do to a wife who wasn't pure enough for him.
" I shake my head. "He's not worth your knuckles.
He's not worth the blood on your shirt. He's nothing to me now. "
Aidan watches me. Reading me. Making sure I mean it.
I mean it. For the first time, when I say my father is nothing, I feel the truth of it all the way down. He has no power here. Not over me.
"Okay," Aidan says. "Then I’ll leave him alone unless you tell me otherwise."
He stands there, this man with blood on his clothes and raw knuckles and eyes that haven't left mine since he walked through the door, and I do something I didn't plan.
I walk to him. I take his damaged hand and lift it and press my mouth against his split knuckles. Gently. I taste copper and I don't care. He goes completely still beneath the contact, and when I look up, the fury in his expression has been replaced by something stripped bare and aching.
"Come on," I say. "We should get you cleaned up."
I lead him to the stairs, to the bathroom that adjoins our bedroom. He follows without resistance; he lets me take his hand and pull him through his own house.
I reach into the shower and turn the water on. Steam begins to fill the room.
"I made a decision today," I say as I turn back to him.
"About what?"
I start unbuttoning his ruined shirt. My fingers work steadily, one button after another, peeling the blood-soaked cotton away from his skin. He watches me do it with dark eyes and doesn't move.
"I'm going to apply. To the university. The part-time psychology program." I push the shirt off his shoulders and it drops to the tile floor in a heavy, wet heap. "Three days a week. Two years."
Something shifts in his face. Through all the controlled fury, through the blood and the adrenaline and the aftermath of violence, something cracks open and what comes through is pure, undiluted light.
"Yeah?" His voice is rough.
"Yeah." I reach for his belt. "Your sister told me today about the time you gave a boy a black eye for bullying her and never admitted it."
"Iris talks too much."
"Iris talks exactly the right amount." I undo the buckle. "You've been protecting the people you love your whole life. Quietly. Without asking for credit. Without needing anyone to see it."
His hand comes up and covers mine where it rests against his chest. His skin is warm. His heartbeat is fast beneath my palm.
"I see it," I say. "I see you."
The words are his, turned back on him. The same thing he's been saying to me since the night he took me apart in the living room with nothing but honesty and patience. I see you. The most terrifying, most necessary thing anyone has ever offered me.
Now I'm offering it back.
His forehead drops against mine. His breath shakes, just once, and the vulnerability of it, from this man who is steady and sure and built like something designed to endure, undoes me completely.
"Get in the shower," I murmur against his mouth. "I'll be right behind you."