Chapter 34
TESSA
Peggy hugs me before I can get my coat off.
We stand just inside the lounge at The Brass Camellia, pressed together awkwardly around the bag of hospital papers in my hand. Her hair smells of the same shampoo she used this afternoon. I put my face against it and start crying again.
She's here. Her boots are on the tiles beside my shoes, and her arms are around me, and I don't have to look down a corridor to find her.
“You're squashing my biscuits,” she says.
I pull back. There's a little packet tucked against the front of her coat, given to her before we left the hospital. She's kept it through the ride back to Beacon Hill, holding on to something she was supposed to eat.
“Good,” I tell her. “You can have crumbs.”
She laughs once, then makes a face because her chest is sore. I hold her more carefully. Beneath her coat, the torn collar is folded inward so it won't scratch the mark Ethan left.
Neither of us needed to be admitted. The questions and examinations are behind us for tonight, with papers explaining what to watch for and who to call.
I'd told the medical team about the pregnancy and the three babies before they checked me.
Bogdan stayed close through the waiting, leaving only when somebody needed privacy or his account of what happened.
He'd come back every time.
Peggy's knees have clean dressings beneath her skirt. I have no wound to point to, only muscles that won't quite stop bracing. After all the waiting, I'm grateful to be standing in a hotel instead of looking up at another bright ceiling.
The clock above the lounge mantel says a quarter to eleven.
Outside the glass doors, the courtyard lanterns are still burning. Somebody has put the dark candle cups back on their tables, orange faces grinning through the glass. I remember seeing them when Bogdan first brought me here with a bag of clothes and a hurt I couldn't stop touching.
He comes into the lounge behind us, his phone in his hand. His split lip has been cleaned, but the corner is swollen. When he sees Peggy holding me, he puts the phone away and waits.
I love him so much that it frightens me.
It hasn't become true only because he came down the corridor. I loved him when he sat through the scan with his eyes wet, and when he stood in my room yesterday admitting something ugly about himself. I was finding my way back before the first plate broke at supper.
Tonight nearly took away the time I thought I had to say it.
Klim appears at the lounge door, his coat dusty at one shoulder. Kirill is behind him, speaking quietly into his phone.
“Matvei's staying for treatment tonight,” Klim tells us. “He's awake. He asked whether both of you got out.”
I look down at my hands. They're clean now, but I can still feel the towel beneath my left palm.
“Tell him we did,” I say. “Tell him I'm bringing him something better than hospital biscuits.”
Peggy holds her packet up without letting go of me. “These are mine anyway.”
Klim's mouth moves at one corner. He nods and steps aside to make the call. I want Matvei to hear the words from someone who can see us, standing here in our ridiculous dresses with both our coats open.
Bogdan comes close enough to touch Peggy's shoulder. “Anything you need tonight, ask.”
She looks at him for a long moment. Then she lets go of me and puts her arms around him.
He seems surprised for half a second before he holds her. She says something against his waistcoat that I can't hear. He bends his head to listen and keeps his hand at her back until she steps away.
I know she won't wake up tomorrow feeling finished with what happened.
There will be mornings when a photograph or a familiar phrase catches her without warning.
But she gets to have those mornings. She gets to hate him and miss the person he pretended to be and order something expensive for breakfast while I sit beside her.
Ethan doesn't get another evening with her.
Peggy slips her arm through mine, and we go as far as the stairs together. Her room is ready, with someone from the hotel bringing tea upstairs and a guard in the passage. She stops with one hand on the banister.
“I might be awful company tomorrow.”
“You were awful company before him.”
The laugh comes more easily this time. She leans her head against mine for a moment, then looks past me toward Bogdan in the lounge.
“Don't spend the whole night being sensible.”
“I was never in danger of that.”
She squeezes my arm. I watch her go up until she reaches the landing and turns toward her room. For once, I let somebody else be the person waiting by her door.
When I come back, Bogdan is listening to Kirill.
I leave the bag of hospital papers on a chair and pause beside them.
The club will stay closed while police finish at the damaged wing.
Nobody is being asked to return there tonight, and the remaining staff have been taken home.
The wages continue. Garrett has been told his people are out.
Klim has put a copy of the old Halloween running order on the low table. I recognize the party heading above the first row.
“They knew about the supper?” I ask.
“It was in Fern's earlier attachments,” he says. “Before the ban. Before any of this changed.”
I look at the familiar time beside the staff meal. We'd cancelled everything that came after it, but that first row had stayed. Ethan hadn't needed to be inside our hotel or reading over my shoulder to know where to look.
Bogdan folds the page and hands it back to Klim. The old plan goes away with the rest of the records.
He authorizes the help the staff need without looking at a figure. His voice is quiet, but Kirill listens to every word. I recognize the man who can close a room with a glance, pay for a ruined business without asking anyone's permission, and make other dangerous men wait for an answer.
He's still that man when he sees me. Something in his face softens, and I want to go to him so badly that my feet start moving before I've decided what to say.
He meets me halfway.
“A little air?” I ask.
He gets his coat from the chair and puts it around my shoulders over my own. It's too much wool, but I don't object. I want the weight of something that belongs to him.
The courtyard is empty when he opens the glass door. Klim remains inside with Kirill, close enough to see us. Bogdan leads me past the first table to a bench beneath the lanterns, where the bricks are dry under the shallow shelter of the wall.
Cold air touches my face. It smells of damp leaves in the planters and the wax burning inside the little orange cups. After the crowded rooms and questions, the small space feels wonderfully still.
I sit, drawing his coat closer. One heel has rubbed a sore place above my ankle. I slip the shoe off beneath the gown and flex my foot, relieved by the simple possibility of being uncomfortable about something so small.
Bogdan notices. He bends and takes the shoe gently from my fingers, setting it beside its partner when I remove the other. The red soles catch the lantern light.
I expect him to sit beside me.
Instead, he kneels.
For a moment I think he's still looking at my ankle. Then he takes my hands, lifts his face and stays where he is, both knees on the courtyard bricks.
Through the glass, Klim stops moving. Kirill's phone lowers a little from his ear.
Bogdan doesn't look at either of them.
“I hurt you,” he says. “I knew something you needed to know, and I kept it from you because I wanted you to stay.”
My throat closes. His hands are warm around mine, although the night has already cooled the diamonds against my skin. I can see a fleck of dust caught at the shoulder of the waistcoat I made him.
“You trusted me,” he says. “I let you come home with me and sleep beside me while I kept that warning in a drawer. You were happy there, and I used it.”
I remember bringing him pastry. The ordinary tenderness of it still hurts, my little offering carried upstairs to a man who'd already decided what I wouldn't hear.
He doesn't tell me about the guards this time. He doesn't name the money, the fire or the things he's done tonight. He stays on the bricks and lets the hurt belong to what he chose.
“I'm sorry, Tessa. I love you. I love you when you're laughing at me, when you're tired of a dress, when you're asleep with all the pillows on the floor. I wanted you before I knew about the babies. I'll want you when they're grown.”
A tear drops onto our joined hands.
For weeks I've been frightened of how much space he could take up inside my life.
He could buy the building I worked in, fill my wardrobe, put men at my doors.
I'd loved being wanted by someone who could do so much, and then learned how lonely I could feel when he chose for me what I wasn't allowed to know.
Now he's here with nothing between us to make the answer easier for him.
“Please forgive me,” he says. His voice roughens on the last word. “Let me come home to you. Wherever that is.”
I take a breath, but it catches halfway. He waits, and I realize he really will stay on those cold bricks while his men watch him ask again if I need him to.
I don't need that.
I need his mouth at my temple in the morning.
I need to argue about where my scissors belong and laugh when Peggy adds something outrageous to his shopping list. I want him beside me at the next appointment, frightened and hopeful with me.
I want the man who finally stopped defending himself long enough to tell me the truth.
“I love you too,” I say.
His fingers tighten around mine. Nothing else moves for a second, as though he doesn't dare interrupt the words by breathing.
“And I forgive you.”
The relief changes his face. I haven't seen anything like it, even when the doctor found the third baby. He bows his head over our hands, and I lean forward until I can rest my cheek against his hair.
I'm crying too hard to look elegant. My feet are bare inside the hem of a dusty gown, my shoes are on hotel bricks, and his coat is sliding off one shoulder. I let it slide. For once, I don't care how the picture would turn out.
“Come here,” I whisper.
He rises only far enough to sit beside me and pull me into his arms. I kiss him carefully because of his lip, then less carefully when he makes a low, impatient sound and draws me closer.
His hand settles at the back of my neck.
I taste salt as I kiss him and tug both coats open between us.
His chest presses against my breasts through the velvet, close enough to make me ache for the rest of him.
I hook my fingers into his waistcoat and bring him nearer.
His split lip makes him wince, so I soften the kiss without letting go.
He brushes a tear from my cheek before I can hide my face.
I love him. I get to tell him again.
So I do.
He says it back against my cheek, holding me as though the words have finally given him somewhere to put all the feeling he's been carrying.
When I can breathe without shaking, I tuck myself against his side.
“I want to come home,” I say.
He kisses my forehead. “We can stay here tonight. Peggy's upstairs.”
I nod. Tomorrow can have the bags and the rest of my clothes. Tonight I want this bench, his coat around both of us, and my best friend close enough to call for me if she needs to.
I place his hand against the front of my dress, below the velvet's fitted waist. There's nothing for either of us to feel yet. I still remember the three little flickers on the screen, each one making the room larger and stranger than it was a moment before.
“Three,” I say.
He laughs softly, almost helplessly. “I know.”
“Do you? Because I keep remembering and having to sit down.”
“I'll buy more chairs.”
The laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it. He grins despite his sore lip, and for a few seconds we're two exhausted people making a stupid joke on the most frightening night of my life.
I want to remember this part too.
His thumb moves over the velvet.
“I keep trying to imagine holding all three,” I tell him. “Walking past a room and seeing three little beds. I know we won't sleep. I still want it.”
“So do I.” He lifts his eyes to mine, looking delighted by the prospect.
I can picture Peggy claiming a drawer for the things she buys without asking us. The rooms will fill, the beautiful quiet house becoming somewhere nobody can finish a cup of coffee before somebody else needs them.
“Next Halloween, you'll need five costumes,” he says.
“Six. Peggy will refuse to be left out.”
He draws me closer. “Whatever my dressmaker wants.”
Through the glass door, I can see the lounge clock. It's a little after eleven. There is still time left in Halloween, and for the first time tonight I don't want to hurry through it.
I went to a costume party looking for one reckless night.
Now, with Bogdan's arms around me beneath the lanterns, I get to want all the mornings after.