Epilogue
Alina
Seven months later
Irun my hand over my still-flat belly with a smile. Too fast, but I’m happy. Arkady is ecstatic. But that is all secondary right now as we bob on the yacht in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Cyprus.
The sun is relentless out here. Not the polite, filtered warmth of a London summer that lasts three days and then apologises.
This is proper heat, the kind that soaks into your bones and makes you forget you ever owned a raincoat.
I tip my head back against the lounger and let it do its work.
My stomach rolls with morning sickness and seasickness, and I grab the bucket as Arkady rushes to hold it for me.
“I’m okay,” I gasp as the retching doesn’t produce any results. “But can we get off this fucking boat soon?”
“We can get off it as soon as it docks.”
I freeze. “Docks? You’re going to see him?”
It has never been decided. We were just here, floating about, knowing we were close, but nothing was set in concrete.
Arkady takes a deep breath and looks out to the shoreline. His gaze is covered by dark sunglasses, but I can imagine the intensity in his eyes. “No,” he says eventually. I wait for more.
It doesn’t come.
“Are you sure?” I venture.
He looks back at me and removes the sunglasses with a sigh. “Yes, krasotka, I’m sure. He wanted to fake his death and live a peaceful life out of the Bratva. Me showing up at his front door will bring hell down on him, and that’s not what he wanted.”
“But you wanted to see him again. Say goodbye,” I say quietly. “Even if you won’t admit it.”
He doesn’t answer. He just puts the sunglasses back on and sits on the edge of the lounger next to mine, his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging loose between them.
The ink on his forearms is darker against the tan he’s picked up over the last three days.
He looks like a man on holiday. Not a Bratva pakhan in turmoil.
I set the bucket down and reach for the water bottle, taking small sips until my stomach decides to behave.
The yacht rocks gently, and the coastline shimmers in the heat haze like something not quite real.
Somewhere behind that shimmer, in a villa that cost eight hundred thousand pounds to prepare, Nik Saranov is living a life that doesn’t include his son.
Arkady won’t say he has made his peace with it, because saying it would mean acknowledging that the man who built him also broke something in him by leaving, and Arkady Saranov does not acknowledge broken things.
He fixes them, or he destroys them, or he fucks them into submission on the bonnet of a Porsche 911 in the rain with the blood of his enemies on his hands.
But he does something I don’t expect. He reaches over and puts his hand on my belly.
Flat palm, fingers spread. The touch is light but deliberate, and the warmth of it cuts through the nausea and the salt air and the complicated mess of feelings that have been sitting between us since the yacht rounded the eastern tip of the island this morning.
I place my hand over his and twirl his ring.
“This is my goodbye,” he says.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I just let our hands settle on the place where our child is growing, and I understand what he means without him having to spell it out.
This is the continuation. This is the thing Nik built the exit for, the reason he set up the shell company and shot a man who wore his face and let his son grieve him.
Not for himself. For this. For the next generation of Saranovs.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“Thank you,” he says. “For not pushing.”
“Who, me?” I joke lightly, and he smiles, shaking his head.
“I love you more than anything, Alina. This entire thing between us started with an obsession for power from a man who would never amount to anything.”
“And ended in an obsession we have for each other.”
“And this,” he says, tapping his fingers lightly on my belly before he takes his hand back, replacing the sunglasses and stretching out on his lounger.
The subject is closed. The shoreline continues to shimmer, and Nik continues to exist somewhere behind it, and we continue to exist somewhere on this side of it, moving forward.