Epilogue
NIKOLAI
Three Months Later
Mikhail does not sleep past five.
I’ve learned this over three months, the way you learn things that can’t be argued with, by accepting them and adjusting accordingly.
He wakes at five and does not cry. At least, not right away.
He simply becomes awake in the way he does everything, completely, all at once, and the room changes around him.
I get up before he escalates.
I lift him from the bassinet, and he looks at me in the low light with Nina’s eyes, which are the thing I was not prepared for, the directness of them, the quality of attention in a face that is three months old and already reading the room.
He’s been doing it since the first week.
Nina saw it immediately and said nothing, and I saw her see it and said nothing back, and we have not discussed it because we don’t need to.
I carry him to the hall.
The estate at five thirty in the morning is quieter than it has been at any point in the last three months. The overnight rotation is finishing up outside. Marta doesn’t arrive until seven thirty.
Rico’s morning brief doesn’t come until eight. There’s a window, narrow and reliable, between the world ending and the world beginning again, and Mikhail and I have been spending it in the hall for eleven weeks.
I walk the length of it slowly.
He’s on my shoulder, his face turned out, looking at the dark end of the hallway with the focused patience of someone who has decided something is there and is waiting to be proven right.
I put my hand on his back, and I walk, and the house is quiet around us, and outside the window, the city is just beginning to make up its mind about the day.
I think about the man who lived in this house a year ago.
He got up at five for different reasons, and the hall was a different hall, the same dimensions, the same floors, a completely different thing.
A hall you walked when there was something that needed thinking through, something that couldn’t wait for the desk and the brief and the machinery of a day that started at eight.
I walked it when the faction was building, when the fronts went down, and when I read a file with Nina’s name on every page and understood what it meant and what it was going to cost to tell her.
Now I walk it because Mikhail wakes up at five, and he’s better company than the faction ever was.
At six, I hear movement from the bedroom.
By six thirty, Nina appears in the hallway in her gray T-shirt, hair loose, moving with the purpose of someone who has somewhere to be. She looks at me with the baby on my shoulder and doesn’t say good morning.
“I have a call at seven,” she says.
“It’s six thirty.”
“I need thirty minutes to prepare.”
“It’s Saturday.”
She looks at me with the expression she reserves for things I say that she finds beneath response. She takes the baby from me, kisses the top of his head, hands him back, and goes to my study.
I stand in the hall for a moment.
Then I follow.
She’s already at my desk, laptop open, her notes from the previous week pulled up on the screen, the phone on the desk beside her.
She has taken over my desk in the same way she took over the chair in the first week, gradually, without announcement, until one day it was simply hers.
I have another desk. I have not told her this.
I sit in the chair in the corner with the baby on my knee, and I watch her prepare.
She moves through her notes with the focused speed of someone for whom this is as natural as breathing, annotating, reordering, flagging two things she wants to raise, and crossing out one she has decided against.
The baby watches her from my knee with the same attention he gives the end of the dark hallway, and I watch them both, and the study is quiet, and the city outside is coming up gray and slow.
At seven, her phone rings.
She picks up at the first ring. “I know why you’re calling,” she says, before her editor has finished saying her name.
“The last section. I’ll tell you the same thing I told you on Thursday.
The sourcing is clean, and the structure is intentional, and if you move that paragraph, it loses the pacing in the fourth section, and the whole piece lands wrong. ”
She listens for a moment.
“Then read it again,” she says. “Read it the way I wrote it, not the way you want it to go. Call me back.”
She hangs up.
She makes a note on the screen, looks at it, makes another, and reaches for the coffee that Marta has not yet made because Marta doesn’t arrive until seven thirty, and it’s seven, and there’s no coffee, and she looks at the empty mug and then at me.
“There’s no coffee,” she says.
“I know.”
“Why is there no coffee?”
“Because you came in here at six thirty on a Saturday.”
She looks at me for a moment with the expression she has been giving me since the church, the one that means she has assessed the situation and found me wanting and has decided to let it go this time.
She turns back to the screen.
The baby makes a sound on my knee, not distress, just commentary, the noise he makes when he’s been observing something long enough and has formed an opinion. Nina looks over at him. He looks back at her.
She reaches across and takes his hand briefly, one finger wrapped in his fist, and then she goes back to the screen, and he goes back to watching her, and I sit in the corner and watch both of them.
I think about a year ago.
The church. The woman in the front row with her arms crossed, her jaw set, and her eyes already reading the room before the ceremony had started.
I remember the moment I raised my hand, the music stopping, the silence of a room full of people understanding that something had changed before anyone had explained what.
I remember looking across the church, finding her, and making the decision in sixty seconds.
I think about what I planned for.
Access, intelligence pipelines, press circles, a journalist inside my world who could see things that money alone could not buy. All of it was true. All of it was only a small part of what happened next.
What happened next was a woman who counted exits and hid in the back of a truck and threw a paperweight at my study wall and took apart the biggest story of her career alone in the dark and came back from it with her edges fully intact.
What happened next was a bathroom floor at six in the morning, a laugh I did not see coming, and a breakfast table where she said two words and waited.
What happened next is this study on a Saturday morning with a three-month-old on my knee and Nina on my phone, arguing with her editor about a paragraph she is right about.
Her phone rings again.
She picks up. “I told you to read it again,” she says. A pause. “Yes.” Another pause, longer. Her expression changes slightly, the way it does when something lands the way she intended. “Good. Run it as filed.” She hangs up.
She sits back in the chair.
She looks at the screen for a moment, and then at me, and she rolls her eyes,
“You could have made coffee,” she says.
“I had the baby.”
“Marta has the baby monitor.”
“Marta isn’t here yet.”
She looks at the clock on the screen. It’s seven twelve. She looks back at me.
“The piece is running as filed,” she says.
“I know. I heard.”
“It’s a good piece.”
“I know that too.”
She looks at me for a moment, and the study is warm, and the city outside is coming up properly now, the gray giving way to something with more light in.
She’s at my desk in my chair on a Saturday morning in a gray T-shirt that has seen better years, and she has just won an argument about a paragraph with a man she has been winning arguments with for eleven years.
She reaches her arms out for the baby.
I get up, cross the room, and put Mikhail in her arms. He goes immediately to her shoulder, his face turned out, already looking at the room.
She puts one hand on his back and looks up at me, and I look at her, and I think about the church and the calculation and sixty seconds and everything that came after.
I have no complaints.
I have never had any complaints.
Not one.
The End.
P.S. If you enjoyed reading Marrying the Bratva King, then I think you’ll enjoy Sexting My Best Friend’s Dad! Swipe to the next page for a quick sneak peek…