Epilogue Katya
"I don't understand your life," Lacey says, rolling her eyes at me.
She says this approximately once a week now, which I've come to treat as a form of affection.
Perhaps the situation is odd for most people to understand, but it is what it is.
She's sitting across from me at the small table by the window of the coffee shop, her hands wrapped around a cappuccino, looking at me with the expression she reserves for situations where she's decided I've done something that requires explanation.
"Which part?" I ask, even though I already know.
"The part where you are married—" she glances at my finger, which holds a new, lovely ring, "but living in separate apartments.
" She snorts. "And apparently, spending every day together.
" Her brow knits together. "But not, like, living together like spouses.
And you seem—" she pauses, studying my face with the forensic attention of a woman who has known me for a decade — "fine with this. "
"We're dating." I shrug. "This is what people do when they date."
She stares at me. "You're married."
"I'm aware." I pick up my coffee, taking a sip. "We did everything backwards, so we are amending that."
"You're—" She stops. Starts again. "You were forced into marriage at gunpoint and now you're dating your husband."
"Correct." I nod.
She blinks, shaking her head, as though she can't fathom the reality of this. "That's insane."
"Probably." I shrug. "But it's working."
She stares at me for a moment, clearly wondering if I am full of shit or not.
"Okay," she says, after a beat. "You're dating your husband. I support it." She picks up her cappuccino. "I just want it on record that your life is completely?—"
The door opens, and we both glance at the two people who walk inside. I smile as I see Artem walking into the café with Pyotr.
He's in a dark coat, no tie, his hair slightly longer than it used to be, which he hasn't fixed, probably because I told him how much I enjoy running my fingers through it as he kisses between my thighs.
Just thinking about it makes me squirm in my seat, and as our eyes meet and he smiles slightly at me, just a small lift of his lips, I know he knows exactly what I'm thinking.
Lacey sighs heavily beside me, and I'm about to snap at her, but when I glance over, I realize she's looking at Pyotr with longing, and he's ignoring her.
"Lacey..." I warn.
"I'm not—" she closes her mouth. "He's just very tall."
"He's also very much my husband's second, and very much dangerous."
"You are married to the danger."
I sip my drink. "As you pointed out, it's because he forced the issue. Now, hush."
Artem arrives at the table. He looks at Lacey. "Lacey," he greets.
Lacey rolls her eyes at his formality. "Artem."
She gestures to the chair beside her. "Pyotr, have a seat."
Pyotr looks at Artem. Artem looks at me. I pick up my coat and take Artem's arm.
"We're leaving," I say.
"We just got here," Pyotr grumbles.
"You're staying," I tell him, even though I think it's probably a bad idea. "We're leaving." I look at Lacey. "Be nice."
"I'm always nice."
"Lacey."
"He can handle himself," she says, already turning back to Pyotr, smiling coyly. "Can't you?"
Pyotr, to his credit, looks entirely unbothered. "Generally."
Artem touches the small of my back as we move toward the door, which still does the thing it always does, which I've stopped being annoyed about. Outside, the April air is cool and clean, and you can smell spring in the air.
We walk.
"Where are we going?" he asks.
"I have something to show you."
He falls into step beside me, not questioning that. "I had suggestions for how to spend the afternoon."
"I heard your suggestions."
"And?"
"Later," I say.
He makes a sound that is almost a laugh.
The look he gives me is the one I've been receiving for months now, the one that used to be threatening and has become something else entirely, something that still has heat in it but a different kind of heat, something that has to do with patience and the specific confidence of a man who knows he's going to get what he wants and has decided he doesn't mind waiting.
It still makes my stomach turn over.
I've stopped pretending it doesn't.
The cinema is on a side street in the West Village, tucked between a dry cleaner and a building that can't decide if it's residential or commercial.
It's been completely closed for eight years, which is why I could afford it, and it looks like it — the marquee letters are half gone, the carpet in the lobby is the faded shade of red that comes from decades of foot traffic, and the whole place smells of old popcorn and dust.
I unlock the door and we step inside.
The lobby is dim, catching the afternoon light through the dirty front windows. Ahead, through the doors, the house. Two hundred seats, most of them intact, the old cinema kind, wide armrests, red velvet worn to the thread in places, rows that slope gently down toward the stage.
The stage.
That's what I saw when I first came here.
Most cinemas don't have them — screens, yes, but not actual stages.
This one was built in the twenties as a performance space and converted later, and the stage is still there, proper depth, proper wings, the bones of something that was always meant for bodies rather than images.
Artem stands in the aisle and looks at it.
"It needs work," I say. "Obviously. The seats can be reupholstered, the lighting rig needs to be completely replaced, the sprung floor?—"
"I can see it," he tells me, looking around with discerning eyes.
He's still looking at the stage, his expression doing the thing it does when he's calculating, but underneath the calculation something else, something that has been coming to the surface more easily lately, something I've stopped needing to look hard for.
"The money is moving," he says. "The first transfer cleared last week. Pyotr has the nonprofit structure almost finished." He pauses. "It's going to take time."
"I know."
"And it won't?—"
"I know," I reassure him. "I know what it is and what it isn't. I'm not building this because I think it fixes anything." I look at the stage. "I'm building it because Irina wanted to teach, and she didn't get to, and I can't give her that. But I can give it to someone else."
There's something else I know, too, that I don't say aloud: that the FBI is still out there, still watching, still circling the edges of our life with the patience of an institution that doesn't need to hurry.
Nadia is gone, disgraced, reassigned, whatever they do with agents who overreach and lose, but the agency isn't. I've made my peace with that.
Some things don't resolve. They just become part of the landscape, and you build anyway.
He's quiet for a moment. "Show me."
I look at him. "What?"
"Show me what it's going to be." He gestures at the stage. "Show me."
I look at the stage. At the old boards, the dusty wings, the light coming through the single high window at the back. No music. No proper floor. My feet in ordinary shoes and four months of not-quite-enough rehearsal in my body.
I go down the aisle and up the three steps at the side and I stand in the center of the stage.
It's quiet. The specific quiet of an empty theater, which is different from any other silence — fuller, somehow. More expectant.
I start to move.
Nothing formal. No choreography, no piece, just movement, the vocabulary I've been speaking since I was nine years old, the language that was always mine before anything else was.
My arms finding their shapes in the dim, my feet knowing the floor even when the floor is wrong, the freedom of a body that has been through everything and come back to this.
I don't know how long I dance.
I stop when I feel his hands.
He's come up on the stage without my hearing him, which should not be possible and is completely consistent with everything I know about him, and his hands are on my waist from behind, and he turns me toward him and his face is very close and his expression is the one I finally named on a staircase four months ago and have been seeing clearly ever since.
"Well?"
"It's going to be extraordinary," he says, his voice low against my ear. "Like everything you do."
I roll my eyes. "You're going to have to work on the compliments. That was almost sincere."
"I'm practicing."
"Practice harder."
He kisses me.
It's not urgent, not desperate, not any of the things our kisses have been in the past. It's the kiss of two people who have fought their way to the same place from opposite directions and have decided, without ceremony or announcement, to stay there.
When we pull apart his forehead is against mine and his hands are still at my waist and the empty theater is around us with its two hundred worn velvet seats and its stage that used to be a cinema screen and this moment feels like a movie.
Something is happening.
"Later," I remind him.
His hands tighten on my waist. "How much later?"
"Not very," I admit.
He smiles. Not the predatory one, not the one that used to mean something tactical. This one reaches his eyes, which I've learned is rarer than it should be and which I've decided I'm going to spend a considerable amount of time being the reason for.
Outside, the city is loud and indifferent.
Inside, in an old cinema on a side street in the West Village, standing on a stage that is going to become something — not a solution, not an absolution, just something — I let myself be held by a man who is not a good man and is mine anyway.
It's enough.
It's more than enough.