Chapter 7 Riley
Chapter seven
Riley
Iwake up warm. Too warm. The kind of warmth that makes you want to burrow deeper and pretend the world outside the glass doesn’t exist. Mikhail’s arm is a steel band across my waist, his nose pressed to the back of my neck, breath even and slow against my skin.
For a man who spent last night doing God-knows-what to God-knows-who, he sleeps like an innocent.
Like he doesn’t have blood dried beneath his fingernails.
I know his rhythm now. How he inhales right before he shifts. The way he throws his arm over his forehead and shoves the sheet down when he's hot. The way his thigh slots between mine in the dark, heavy even in sleep.
It’s been three weeks since the test.
Three weeks of him touching my stomach every morning like he’s checking to make sure I’m still real.
Three weeks of chamomile tea I don't want, and foot rubs that I do.
Three weeks of playing house in a glass tower I can never call home, with a man who is technically my employer and emotionally something far more dangerous.
I should get up. The doctor’s appointment isn’t until this afternoon, but I have numbers to run, listings to review, and a life to pretend I’m still planning.
Instead, I lie still and memorize the weight of his arm. The way his heartbeat thunders slow and steady against my spine. I let myself have this one selfish minute and bathe in his scent. Because minutes are all I have. The contract in his desk drawer says so.
He stirs before I do. Always does. Like some part of him knows the exact moment consciousness returns to my body.
“Riley,” He says as his hand slides upward from my stomach to cup my breast, thumb brushing idly over the nipple until I arch into him. “Stop thinking.”
“I’m not thinking at all.”
“Liar.” But he doesn’t push. He just presses his mouth to my shoulder, bites gently, and then rolls away with the discipline of a monk.
The loss of his heat is immediate. Cold air rushes in to fill the space.
The kitchen smells like coffee and the cinnamon sugar of French toast.
He’s already at the island when I shuffle in, wearing another of my new thigh-length nightshirts. He's reading an actual newspaper—who the hell still reads physical newspapers?—is spread next to his tablet.
“Read this,” he says, not looking up. His finger taps the screen of the tablet.
“Somerville. Union Square. Foot traffic is heavy, and rent is manageable for a first-year operation. The space was a bakery before, so the plumbing for shampoo bowls is already roughed in. Saves you eight thousand in build-out costs.”
I blink. He’s done research. Real research. Not just throwing money at a problem to make it disappear, but actually studying floor plans, pedestrian flow patterns, and water line schematics.
I slide onto the stool beside him, close enough that his bare shoulder presses against mine. The listing shows a narrow storefront with big south-facing windows and original hardwood floors scarred by decades of boots.
“You hate Somerville,” I say. “You said the traffic is a nightmare.”
“I hate driving in Somerville. Somerville is acceptable if the revenue projections hold.” He turns the tablet toward me.
There’s a spreadsheet already open. Rent per square foot. Estimated client throughput by hour. Product markup on salon-grade color. He’s calculated everything, his formulas neat and ruthless, the same mind that moves contraband through the Port of Boston now applied to my margins.
My chest tightens until I can barely breathe. It’s so fucking normal. So domestic. So cruel.
Because he’s planning a future for me, that doesn’t include him—or the baby growing inside me.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask quietly.
He finally looks up. Gray eyes, sharp enough to cut. “Doing what?”
“Helping me. Like… like you care if the salon succeeds.”
The silence stretches. He sets down his coffee cup too carefully.
“Because,” he says, “whether you believe it or not, I want you to have what you want.”
I will, I think. After…
I don’t say it. I just nod and stare at the spreadsheet until the numbers blur.
When he leaves an hour later—black coat, gun holstered under his arm, a kiss pressed to my temple like he’s done it a thousand times before—I stand in the silence of the penthouse and let the walls shrink around me.
I take his laptop to the library. I have seventeen tabs open.
Salon shampoo chair wholesalers in New Jersey.
Hood dryer units with adjustable ventilation.
Sterilization cabinets, color bar stations, and ergonomic cutting stools.
I make a spreadsheet of my own because that’s what I do—I budget, I plan, I survive.
But every number feels hollow.
I price a reclining shampoo chair at $1,200 and imagine washing a client’s hair while my back aches from pregnancy.
I look at sleek, minimalist stations and see a toddler’s sticky fingers reaching for the bottles.
I calculate break-even metrics and wonder if the baby will have his eyes or mine, and whether it will matter when I’m just a story told in hushed tones.
Your mother? She was a surrogate. She opened a salon. We don’t talk about her.
I close the laptop.
It’s too much. I wander to the window. Boston glitters below, crooked and distant. From up here, I can’t see where Dante Briggs once counted my money and named my price. I can’t see who I was. Worse, I can't see who I'll be.
He comes home late, but he comes home.
That’s the thing. He always comes home. To me.
To this. To whatever the fuck we are. Dinner is quiet but not uncomfortable.
Pasta with mushrooms. I don’t know who cooked it—there’s a woman who comes in twice a week, silent and efficient, leaving meals in the refrigerator before disappearing again.
We eat on the couch with our thighs touching, while the November wind scratches at the glass.
Afterward, I show him my numbers. He sits with me tucked under his arm, his chin resting on top of my head as he reviews my spreadsheet on his tablet.
One hand splays across my stomach, thumb tracing idle circles.
He hasn’t stopped touching me there since the test. Like he’s etching a map on my skin
“You’re underpricing again,” he says, voice rumbling through his chest into my back. “In this zip code, women will pay for the illusion of effortlessness. They want to look like they woke up expensive. Add forty percent.”
“You’re a criminal mastermind and a salon pricing expert?”
“I know what people will pay for their vanity.” He adds a column, adjusts my formulas with fingers that are long, elegant, and scarred at the knuckles. I don’t ask. I never ask. “And you need a bigger cash float. Six months of operating expenses, not three. The first winter will be slow.”
“You sound like you want me to succeed.”
He sets the tablet aside. Turns my chin up so I have to look at him. His eyes soften, and I hate him a little for it.
“I want you to be untouchable,” he says. “I want you to have so much that no one can ever take anything from you again. Not even me.”
You're already taking from me…
He draws me down into the cushions. We don’t fuck tonight. He just holds me, one hand spread wide over my still-flat stomach, and tells me about a building he’s acquiring in the Seaport, about zoning laws and payoffs and the way concrete sets in December. Like I’m his partner or his wife.
Like I’m staying.
The OB’s office is in a high-rise medical building on Longwood Avenue, all glass and blond wood and the particular sterility of old money. Mikhail walks beside me with a hand at the small of my back, a sweater pulled over his holster. He looks almost civilian. Almost.
But his gaze scans every exit. Every face in the waiting room. We don’t have to wait. Mikhail Kutuzov does not wait. The receptionist barely looks at me before she’s ushering us through frosted glass doors into an exam room that smells like antiseptic and new beginnings.
Dr. Lennox is efficient and warm. She enters with a tablet and a smile so practiced it could sell waterfront property.
“Well, Mr. and Mrs. Kutuzov—”
Mikhail goes statue-still beside me. The words clot in my throat. We’ve never discussed what we are. I’m not his wife, or his girlfriend. I’m a signature on a contract next to his.
“Partner,” I blurt out.
Dr. Lennox blinks, her smile faltering into polite confusion. I try again, the word feeling wrong in my mouth, wrong for what he is, wrong for what I want him to be.
“We’re not… he’s not my husband. I’m just—" The truth burns its way out. “I’m just the surrogate.”
Silence.
Dr. Lennox recovers with professional speed. “Of course,” she says smoothly. “And which agency facilitated the match? I’ll need their records for my files.”
Mikhail speaks in his flattest voice. “There is no agency.”
Dr. Lennox looks between us. The age gap. The way his hand is glued to my back. “I see. So the insemination was performed at a clinic?”
“No,” I say. My face is hot enough to melt bone. “It was… the old-fashioned way.”
Oh, God. The look on her face.
“Oh,” Dr. Lennox says delicately. “I… see.”
The exam continues. She asks about my last menstrual cycle, about symptoms, and family medical history. I answer in a stranger’s voice. Mikhail doesn’t leave my side. His hand finds mine on the exam table, his grip crushing tight.
Then the ultrasound. The gel is cold against my lower belly. I flinch. Mikhail’s free hand comes up to cradle my shoulder, his thumb pressing into the muscle there, grounding me.
Dr. Lennox presses the wand against my skin, and the screen flickers to life. Gray static. Shadows. Blobs, I don’t know how to read. Then—a flicker. A tiny pulsing bean no bigger than a peanut.
“There,” Dr. Lennox says softly, her voice changing, becoming real. “That’s your baby. And there…”
She turns a dial.
The sound fills the room.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.