Epilogue
Katya
Three months later
The café Matilda chose is small and warm and tucked into a side street that I'd never have found on my own. But Matilda knows this city the way she knows everything, with a quiet authority that used to intimidate me and now just makes me proud.
My sister is sitting across from me in a cashmere jumper that strains slightly across her bump, seven months now, round and unmistakable, with a slice of chocolate cake in front of her and a look of absolute bliss on her face.
"Don't judge me," she says, fork already loaded. "This baby wants what it wants, and what it wants is chocolate cake. Constantly. And apples. Which is a combination I can't explain and have stopped trying to."
"Chocolate cake and apples?" I raise my eyebrows.
"Don't ask. Gennady found me eating Nutella on apple slices at two in the morning last week and I thought he was going to have me committed.
" She grins. The grin is easy, open, utterly lacking in the careful composure I remember from our childhood.
Matilda Petrova doesn't compose herself anymore.
She just... is. "But enough about my unhinged dietary choices. Tell me about your week."
My week. I think about my week and feel the same quiet thrill I've felt every time I've sat across from my sister over the past two months.
The first visit was the hardest. Killian drove me to the Petrov estate and walked me to the door and told me he'd be in the car when I was done, for as long as I needed, and when Matilda opened the door we'd stared at each other for eleven seconds, I counted, before she pulled me into a hug so tight I felt something inside my chest realign with an almost audible click.
We'd cried. Both of us, standing in her hallway while Gennady Petrov, the man who ordered our brother's death, the man my sister chose over everything she'd ever known, quietly closed the door to his study and left us alone.
We'd talked for four hours. About everything.
About Sergei and our father and the night the world split in two.
About the guilt she carried for leaving me behind and the resentment I carried for being the one left.
About the months between then and now, the silence that calcified into distance that became something neither of us knew how to bridge until a quiet man with steady eyes told me that my father didn't get to decide who I spoke to anymore.
We meet every week now. Tuesdays. Lunch. The café with the chocolate cake that Matilda can't resist, which I've noticed I've been ordering too, the last three visits in a row.
I'm thinking about that while Matilda tells me about the nursery Gennady is having decorated, about how he's already bought more stuffed animals than any child could conceivably need, about the way his hand finds her belly every time they're in the same room, the same unconscious gesture that…
That Killian does. The hand on my stomach. Every night, in bed, his palm flat against my lower belly, fingers spread, the weight and warmth of it becoming so familiar I barely register it anymore.
Except I'm registering it now.
I'm registering everything now. The chocolate cake I've been craving.
The apples I bought three bags of last week without thinking about why.
The tiredness that's been creeping up on me for the past fortnight, the kind that sits behind my eyes and makes me fall asleep in the study armchair at three in the afternoon.
The way my breasts have been tender in a way I attributed to the time of the month except…
Except my time of the month hasn't come.
I set my fork down.
"Katya?" Matilda tilts her head. "You've gone pale."
"When did your cravings start?" I ask, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears. Distant. Like it's coming from the end of a very long corridor.
"Early. Really early, actually. Like five, six weeks? The chocolate was first, then the apples, then the completely deranged combination of—" She stops. Looks at me. Looks at the slice of chocolate cake I've eaten three-quarters of. Looks at my face.
Her fork clatters onto the plate.
"Katya."
"I'm probably just—"
"Katya. How late are you?"
I count. My mouth opens. Closes.
"Three weeks," I say. "Maybe four."
Matilda's hand finds mine across the table. Her eyes are enormous.
"There's a pharmacy two doors down," she says.
I take the test in the cafe bathroom because I can't wait to know now I know it’s a possibility.
Two minutes. That's what the box says. Two minutes to change the shape of everything.
I lean against the edge of the hand basin and stare at the little plastic window and think about all the versions of this moment that could have existed.
The version where I'm sitting in my father's house, terrified, performing someone else's expectation.
The version where the test is the final checkbox on a contract, a confirmation of function, a proof of worth delivered to a council that measures women in output.
That's not this version.
This version has Matilda's voice through the door and a husband at home who pulls out my chair and a family that calls me by name and a house where every door opens from the inside.
The second line appears.
I stare at it. Watch it darken from faint to definitive, a slow materialization that feels less like a result and more like an arrival.
I open the bathroom door.
Matilda takes one look at my face and bursts into tears.
"Hormones," she says, pulling me into her arms. "Shut up. I'm blaming hormones."
I laugh against her shoulder. Then I cry.
Then I laugh again, because I'm standing in a cafe holding a positive pregnancy test and I'm happy.
Purely, simply, devastatingly happy, and the version of me who arrived at the Orlov estate three months ago in a white dress and an empty smile wouldn't recognize this feeling if it hit her in the face.
Which it has. Repeatedly. For weeks, apparently, and I was too busy being alive to notice.
The drive home takes forty minutes.
Forty minutes of my hand on my stomach and the road blurring past and the test in my purse and my heart beating so hard I can feel it in my throat.
I'm pregnant.
I'm carrying Killian Orlov's child because I chose to.
Because I walked down a hallway and knocked on a door and said I'm ready and meant it.
Because he waited until I wanted him and then gave me everything and the everything took root and is now the size of, according to Matilda's gleeful googling, a blueberry.
A blueberry. Our blueberry.
The estate gates open as I approach. The house rises ahead of me, stone and iron and the kind of permanence that used to feel like confinement and now feels like the opposite. Home. It feels like home. It has felt like home since the morning he unbuttoned my dress and let me breathe.
I park and sit in the car for a moment, both hands on my stomach, and I think about how to tell him.
I could be strategic about it. Build the reveal. Set the scene. Killian would appreciate the precision.
Or I could just tell him. Walk through the door and find him and say the words and watch his face.
I choose the second option. Because I spent twenty years being strategic and careful and choreographed, and one of the things this man has taught me is that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is say what you mean without dressing it up.
I find him in the study.
He's at his desk, sleeves rolled, reading something on his laptop, and he looks up when I appear in the doorway and his expression does the thing it always does. The shift, the warming, the private recalibration from public to personal that I will never tire of seeing.
"How was Matilda?" he asks.
"Enormous. Happy. Obsessed with chocolate cake." I cross the room. I'm vibrating. I can feel it. A low-frequency hum running through my body that I'm almost certain he can see, because he can always see, because he never misses a thing.
His eyes narrow slightly. Reading me. Noting the flush on my cheeks, the brightness in my eyes, the way I'm holding my handbag too tightly.
"What is it?" he asks. Curious and attentive. The way he always is when something in my behaviour deviates from baseline.
I reach into my handbag and pull out the test, and place it on his desk, beside his laptop, face up.
Two lines. Clear and unmistakable.
He looks at it.
The stillness that follows is the most complete I've ever seen from him, and Killian Orlov is a man built on stillness.
But this is different. This isn't the controlled, deliberate silence he uses in meetings and negotiations.
This is the silence of a man whose operating system has just crashed and is rebooting in real time.
His eyes move from the test to my stomach. Then to my face.
"Katya," he says, and his voice cracks. Right down the middle. Like a fault line splitting open.
"Three weeks," I say. "Maybe four. I didn't know.
Matilda and I were talking about her cravings and I realized I've been eating the same things, and I've been tired, and I'm late, and I—" I'm talking too fast. I can hear myself talking too fast. "I took the test while I was out.
I couldn't wait. I'm sorry, I should have waited, we should have done it together, but I—"
He stands. The chair rolls back behind him. His hands find my face and he looks at me with an expression I've never seen before.
Not the composure. Not the careful, measured control. Not the twitch or the almost-smile or even the full smile that I unlocked.
"Say it," he whispers.
"I'm pregnant." The words come out steady and sure and mine. "We're having a baby, Killian."
He kisses me, and it’s desperate and shaking and unlike any other kiss we’ve ever shared. It’s the kiss of a man who has just been handed something he wanted so badly he didn't dare name it out loud in case the naming made it disappear.
When he pulls back, his breathing is ragged and his hands are trembling against my face.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
"Happy." There’s no hesitation. "So happy I can't believe it's allowed."
"It's allowed." His thumb traces my cheekbone. "Katya, it's allowed. This is allowed. You are allowed to be this happy."
I laugh, which turns into a sob, which turns into another laugh, and his arms close around me and he holds me against his chest with his hand — that hand, the hand that bled for me, the hand that unbuttoned forty buttons, the hand that finds my stomach every night — pressed flat against my belly.
Against our baby.
"I love you," I say.
It’s the first time I've said it out loud.
Three months of growing it and feeling it and living it, and I've never said the actual words, because some part of me was still holding them in reserve, still waiting for the catch, still bracing for the moment when the invoice arrived and the price was named.
But there is no invoice. There never was. There's just a man who waited until I was ready and then let me come to him on my own terms, and now I'm standing in our study with his child growing inside me and the words are out and they're real and they cost nothing.
His reaction is everything.
The composure doesn't just crack, it dissolves.
His whole face opens, transforms, becomes something I've never seen on any man, let alone this one.
He looks young. Stripped of the weight and the strategy and the thirty-five years of careful self-regulation.
He looks like a man hearing the one thing he's been waiting to hear his whole life.
"I love you," he says, and there's nothing quiet about it. Nothing measured. Nothing controlled. "I have loved you since you opened your own car door, and I will love you until there is nothing left of me to love with."
I wrap my arms around his neck and hold on.
In the kitchen down the hall, I can hear Saoirse starting dinner.
Through the window, the garden is gold with late afternoon light.
Somewhere in the house, Iris is playing music too loudly, and somewhere else, Liam and Grace are living their own version of this story with a baby due any week now.
Killian’s brothers are arguing in the den, like usual.
This is my family. Not the one I was born into. This one. The one that fed me and named me and taught me that the first person who should choose me is me.
I chose.
I chose the man who pulled out my chair. The man who brought me tea. The man who bled on a sheet so I wouldn't be shamed. The man who showed me every exit and then gave me a reason to stay.
And now there will be three of us.
I close my eyes.
I choose to stay.