Chapter 8 #2
She wanted out. When this was over, she wanted to return to her studio and her dog and her north-facing light and the quiet life she'd built before I dragged her into a war zone. She wanted the option to walk away from me.
I should have been prepared for that. Should have expected it, even welcomed it—she deserved the choice, deserved to decide her own path without the weight of obligation or trauma binding her to someone who'd brought violence into her world.
Instead, something cracked in my chest.
"When Anton is dealt with," I said carefully, "you can have whatever you want."
The words came out lower than I intended. Weighted with something more than professional agreement.
Her breath caught.
I watched her register the promise underneath—not just freedom, but me. Not just her life back, but the option of something else. Something that included the man sitting across from her, blood memory on his hands and devotion burning in his chest.
Whatever she wants.
I meant it completely. If she wanted to disappear, I would let her go.
If she wanted to stay, I would spend the rest of my life earning that choice.
If she wanted something in between—part-time partnership, occasional contact, a connection that existed in the spaces between danger—I would take whatever pieces she was willing to give.
I was hers. Had been hers for five months, maybe longer. The violence of tonight hadn't changed that. If anything, it had crystallized the feeling into something harder, sharper, more unshakeable.
She was silent for a long moment. The city glowed beyond the windows. Ghost's breathing was slow and steady between us.
"Okay," she said finally. The word was small, but it carried weight.
"Okay?"
"Okay, I'll help you." She held my gaze. "Partner."
The word settled something in my chest. Not resolution—there was too much uncertainty for that. But foundation. Something to build on.
T he negotiation had given her energy. I could see it in the way she sat straighter, the way her eyes had sharpened with purpose instead of fear.
But I could also see what she couldn't.
The tremor in her hands when she wasn't actively using them.
The shadows carved deep beneath her eyes, darker than they'd been at the gallery.
The pallor of someone running on empty—adrenaline and shock and sheer stubborn will carrying her through a crisis that should have sent her into shutdown hours ago.
Her body was failing even as her mind kept racing.
I'd seen this before. In operatives who pushed through injuries. In my brothers during the worst of the Volkov conflict. The human machine could run on fumes for a surprisingly long time, but the crash, when it came, would be devastating.
"When did you last eat?"
The question came out in the Daddy voice before I could stop it. Low. Firm. Not asking so much as requiring an answer.
Her eyes flicked to mine. Something shifted in her expression—surprise, maybe, or recognition. The awareness of someone who had heard that tone before, across five months of careful conversations, and knew exactly what it meant.
"I—" She stopped. Considered. "Before the gallery. I had almonds."
"That was two days ago."
The words hung between us. Two days. Forty-eight hours of fear and revelation and violence, and she'd been running on a handful of almonds and whatever coffee she'd managed to consume in between crises.
Her stomach growled.
The sound was audible in the quiet of the apartment—loud, almost comical, completely undermining whatever argument she might have been about to make. Color flooded her cheeks. She looked away, embarrassed, and something in my chest went tender at the sight.
"Stay here," I said.
I was already moving toward the kitchen. The refrigerator was stocked—I kept it that way by habit, even though I ate most of my meals at the compound. Crackers in the cabinet. Cheese in the dairy drawer. Apples in the crisper, organic, the kind that actually tasted like something.
I assembled the plate without thinking, muscle memory taking over. Simple foods. Easy to eat. Nothing that would overwhelm a stomach that had been empty too long.
When I returned to the living room, she was still on the couch. Still watching me with those grey-green eyes that saw too much.
I set the plate on the coffee table in front of her.
"Eat."
Not a request. An instruction.
Her hand reached for a cracker.
The motion was automatic. Instinctive. The obedience of someone who had been waiting for this—waiting for someone to take control of the small, impossible tasks that her overwhelmed brain couldn't manage on its own.
She took a bite.
"Good girl."
The words slipped out before I could stop them. Quiet. Warm. The exact tone I'd used a hundred times in our Discord conversations, when she'd completed some small act of self-care and needed acknowledgment.
Her whole body responded.
A softening. A subtle release of tension I hadn't realized she'd been carrying. Her shoulders dropped. Her jaw unclenched. And there—just for a moment—a shiver ran through her frame. Visible. Unmistakable.
She felt it too.
The dynamic that had built between us for five months, asserting itself despite everything.
Despite the violence. Despite the revelations.
Despite the fact that we were sitting in my apartment at four in the morning, negotiating war and survival and the complications of wanting someone you'd met in person less than a week ago.
Lis and Ptichka. Still there underneath. Still real.
I wanted to feed her by hand.
The desire hit me like a physical force—the image of her fingers replaced by mine, lifting food to her lips, watching her accept each bite with that soft, surrendered expression.
I wanted to take the plate and pull her into my lap and feed her slowly, piece by piece, until she'd eaten enough to satisfy me.
Until the tremor in her hands had steadied.
Until the shadows under her eyes had softened.
I didn't.
Not yet. Not now. Not when she was still processing everything, still trying to reconcile the man who'd killed with his hands and the man who wanted to take care of her in ways that had nothing to do with violence.
Instead, I watched her eat.
She worked through the crackers first, then the cheese, then the apple slices. Each bite deliberate. Focused. Like eating was a task she'd been assigned and intended to complete properly.
I kept my hands still on my thighs. Kept my expression neutral. Kept the wanting locked behind my ribs where it couldn't overwhelm her.
But God, it was hard.
Every instinct I had was screaming at me to gather her up, to wrap myself around her, to claim her in all the ways I'd been fantasizing about for five months.
She was here. She was real. She was wearing my sweater and eating the food I'd given her and responding to my praise like she'd been waiting her whole life for someone to notice when she did things right.
Mine, something primal whispered. Mine to protect. Mine to feed. Mine to praise. Mine.
The possessiveness should have frightened me. Should have reminded me of all the reasons this was complicated, dangerous, potentially disastrous.
Instead, it felt like the truest thing I'd ever known.
"More?" I asked when the plate was empty.
She shook her head. "I'm okay. That was—" She paused. Looked at me with something soft and uncertain in her eyes. "Thank you."
"You don't need to thank me for taking care of you."
The words came out rougher than I intended. More honest than I should have allowed.
Her breath caught. That small sound again, the one that hit me like a fist to the chest every time she made it.
"Maks—"
"Finish your water," I said gently. "Then we'll talk."
She obeyed. Of course she obeyed.
And I sat there watching her drink, my hands aching with the effort of staying still, and wondered how I was supposed to survive loving someone this much.
W e talked about logistics. Where she'd sleep, how we'd work, the timeline for examining the pieces I'd flagged.
At least, that's what I told myself we were doing.
In reality, I was barely tracking the words coming out of my own mouth.
My attention was fixed on something else entirely—the way she kept shifting closer on the couch, unconscious gravity pulling her toward me inch by careful inch.
The way her eyes kept drifting to my hands, then away, then back again.
The quality of awareness that hummed in the space between our bodies.
"I'll set up a workspace for you tomorrow," I heard myself saying. "Secure systems, access to my databases, everything you'll need for the authentication work."
"Okay." Her voice was soft. Distracted.
She was watching my hands.
I followed her gaze, saw what she was seeing—my fingers resting on my thighs, deliberately relaxed.
The same hands that had killed three hours ago.
The same hands that had assembled her dinner, that had held her face in the gallery, that had typed patient messages to her every night for five months.
"I'm trying to reconcile them," she said quietly. Reading my thoughts, the way she always seemed to. "Your hands. What they've done. What they could do."
"They're just hands."
"They're not." She looked up at me. Those grey-green eyes, endless and uncertain. "They're part of you. All the parts of you."
The air between us had gone thick. Heavy with things we weren't saying, with the weight of everything that had happened since she'd fallen into my arms in a Chelsea gallery and changed the trajectory of my entire life.
"Maksim."
Just my name. Soft. Uncertain. But the way she said it—like she was testing the shape of it, like she was asking permission to use it—made something crack open in my chest.
"The things I told Lis." She was looking at her hands now, not mine. Picking at the cuff of my sweater—my sweater, on her body, claiming her in ways I didn't have the right to. "About what I am. What I need."