Chapter 9 Killian
Killian
Two hours ago, I stood in the kitchen making my wife a cup of tea.
Chamomile. No sugar. On the second night I offered honey and she refused it so quickly it felt like a reflex.
The kind of reflex that comes from learning that anything extra might come with a cost later.
So now I make it the same way every night.
Consistency is the only language she trusts right now, and I intend to become fluent in it.
Ma was sitting at the table when I filled the kettle.
“Sit down, son.”
“I’m making tea.”
“The kettle takes three minutes. You can’t give your own ma three minutes? Sit.”
I sat, because Saoirse Orlova raised me to understand the difference between a request and an order, and that one was very clearly an order.
She watched me over the rim of her mug, something dark and herbal that smelled faintly of damp earth.
Her eyes had that particular look they get when she has been thinking about something for days and has finally decided it’s time to say it out loud.
“You care about her,” she said.
It wasn’t a question. My mother rarely wastes time on those.
“She’s my wife.”
“That’s not what I said.” She tilted her head slightly, studying me with the quiet patience she’s always had when dealing with stubborn sons.
“I said you care about her. The tea. The sheet. The way you watch her when she doesn’t know you’re looking.
” The kitchen light caught the silver threading through her dark hair.
“You think I don’t notice, but I’ve been reading you since before you could talk.
You’ve never looked at anyone the way you look at her. ”
I didn’t respond. Mostly because she was right, and partly because anything I said would give her ammunition I wasn’t ready to hand over.
The kettle clicked behind me. I stood and poured the water over the teabag, watching steam curl upward in thin white spirals.
“I’ve heard things,” she said quietly. “About the Lazovskis.”
I kept my attention on the mug in my hands. “What kind of things?”
“That the father is… difficult.” She chose the word carefully, the way she always chooses her words. “That after the son died and the eldest daughter left, things got worse. That he blamed everyone except himself and took it out on whoever was closest.”
The tea had steeped too long. I pulled the bag and dropped it in the sink.
“But rumors are rumors,” she continued after a moment. “Half of them are projection, and the rest are gossip.”
She paused.
“Then I met her.”
I turned at that.
My mother’s expression had changed. Not pity, Saoirse Orlova doesn’t do pity, but something that lived close to grief. The particular grief of a mother Recognising the damage another parent has done to their own child.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, Killian,” she said quietly. “The way she checks your face before she eats. Before she sits down. Before she speaks. The way she flinches when a door closes too hard and then immediately pretends she didn’t.”
She set her mug down with a soft sound against the table.
“That’s not rumor,” she said. “That’s systematic. That’s a man who spent twenty years dismantling his own child until there was nothing left but obedience.”
The kitchen fell very quiet.
“I know,” I said.
“You know, and you’re handling it.” Her gaze flicked briefly toward the mug in my hand. “The tea. The distance. Giving her space without making the space feel like abandonment. You’re doing it right.”
“I don’t know if I’m doing it right,” I admitted. “I’m doing what feels right, and those aren’t always the same thing.”
“This time they are.”
She stood then and carried her mug to the sink with the unhurried calm of someone who has survived far worse than this and come out the other side intact.
“Your father was a complicated man,” she said as she rinsed the cup. “But he taught you boys one thing well. You don’t break what you want to keep.”
She paused beside me and squeezed my arm, the same brief, steady gesture she’d given Katya on the first night.
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” she said. “Iris too. That girl already adores her. And Grace, when she’s not busy growing your nephew.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “Katya has more people in her corner than she realizes.”
“I know.”
She studied me for another moment before asking, almost casually, “Do you also know that you’re in love with her?”
The question hit harder than I expected. Hearing it said out loud stripped away every comfortable label I’d been using to contain the truth.
“It’s been seven days, Ma.”
“Your father proposed to me after six hours.”
“And look how that turned out.”
The words came out sharper than I intended. My mother absorbed them without flinching.
“It turned out with six children and twenty-seven years with a man who loved me until the moment he stopped breathing,” she said softly. “The ending doesn’t erase what came before.”
She kissed my cheek.
“I’m proud of you,” she said.
Then she left the kitchen, leaving me standing at the counter with a mug of chamomile tea in my hand and a truth I wasn’t ready to name.
I delivered the tea the same way I always do. A knock on her door, the quiet exchange of mug for goodnight, then the sound of my own footsteps walking away. It’s a routine now. One I’ll keep following until she tells me to stop. Or until she tells me to stay. Either way, the decision will be hers.
That was two hours ago.
Now I’m lying in the dark in the guest room, staring at the ceiling and thinking about her.
I do that most nights.
My mind keeps returning to the flinch Ma described.
The one that happens when a door closes too hard and Katya’s entire body braces before she smooths it away again.
I’ve seen it four times in seven days. Each time she recovers almost instantly, composure sliding back into place so quickly most people wouldn’t notice.
I noticed.
You don’t learn a reflex like that from words alone. Words erode. They diminish. They reshape the mind. But a flinch like that lives deeper. It’s muscle memory. It’s the body remembering something the mind would rather forget.
My jaw tightens until my teeth ache.
I want to make Lazovski pay.
Not loudly. Men like him thrive on spectacle. They turn drama into justification for the next cruelty.
No.
What I want for Katya’s father is quieter.
I want his alliances to evaporate one by one until he’s standing alone wondering where everyone went. I want the territories he thought this marriage bought him to close like locked doors. I want him reaching for the Orlov name and discovering it offers him nothing.
I want him to become irrelevant.
For a man whose identity is built on power and control, irrelevance is worse than death. Now I’m in exactly the right position to arrange it.
The ceiling gives me nothing back.
I should sleep. Tomorrow is full of meetings, a call with Helsinki, paperwork Liam wants finished before the end of the week. I need to be sharp.
But my mind drifts back to breakfast this morning.
To the moment Katya looked at me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. It was quick. A stolen glance. Gone the moment I turned my head. But I caught it.
She was looking at my hands.
More specifically, at the cut on my finger.
It’s nearly healed now. Just a thin pink line. Barely visible. But she studied it with an expression I couldn’t quite read, as if the wound itself was a language she was still trying to translate.
The sound that follows is so quiet I almost miss it.
A door opening down the hall.
Slow. Careful. The kind of movement made by someone trying very hard not to be heard.
Bare feet on hardwood.
The footsteps stop outside my door. Silence stretches long enough for my heartbeat to start climbing. Then two soft taps land against the wood.
I turn on the lamp and cross the room, opening the door to find Katya standing in the hallway wearing thin grey pajamas. Her dark hair falls loose around her shoulders and her bare feet are pale against the floorboards.
“I can’t sleep,” she says.
I step aside and open the door wider. “Come in.”
She hesitates for the briefest moment before walking past me.
“Can I get you something?” I ask. “Tea?”
She shakes her head, frowning slightly as her teeth catch her lower lip in a gesture that nearly unravels what little restraint I have left.
“I keep…” She stops and starts again. “Every night I lie there trying to sleep and I can’t because I keep—”
Her jaw tightens.
“What is it, Katya?” I ask quietly.
She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again, there’s color rising along her throat.
“You,” she says. “Your hand. When you cut your finger and you…” She gestures awkwardly toward her mouth. “You put it in your mouth. And I can’t stop thinking about it.”
She looks furious with herself.
“Every night,” she mutters. “Every single night, Killian. That’s all I see. Your stupid finger in your stupid mouth, and I don’t even know why.”
My mouth twitches before I can stop it. Her eyes narrow immediately.
“Did you just almost smile?”
“No.”
“You did. Your mouth did the thing.”
“There was no thing.”
She points accusingly at my face. “That thing. The one you do when Iris says something ridiculous.”
Something in her composure is dissolving now, replaced by something raw and entirely unfiltered.
“This isn’t funny, Killian. I’m standing in your room in the middle of the night telling you I can’t sleep because of you, and you’re—”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Your face is laughing.”
The twitch becomes a pull. The pull becomes something dangerously close to a smile.
Because the woman I’ve been in love with for seven days just walked down the hall in the middle of the night to tell me she can’t stop thinking about my mouth.
She chose.
She couldn’t sleep, and she came to me.
“Katya,” I say carefully.
“What?”
“Sit down.”
She perches on the ottoman at the foot of the bed, back straight, hands folded in her lap, the flush still visible along her neck.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she says quietly.
“That’s okay.”
“I think I want…” She falters, frustration tightening her voice. “More. More than tea through a door and goodnight in the hallway. But I don’t understand what more means because nobody ever—”
She stops, shaking her head.
“I don’t have the language for this.”
I watch her struggle with something she’s never been allowed to name.
“I thought if I came here and told you,” she says slowly, “maybe it would stop.”
“It won’t stop.”
Her eyes lift to mine.
“What you’re feeling isn’t something broken,” I tell her quietly. “It’s something that was never allowed to exist before.”
She studies my face carefully.
“Killian,” she whispers.
“Katya.”
The silence between us changes.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says again, but this time the words sound more curious than frightened.
“Neither do I.”
She looks at me for a long moment before her gaze drifts slowly down my chest, across my stomach, and back to my eyes.
Then she says quietly,
“I’m ready to be your wife now. If you want me to be.”