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“What?” I snap.
She smiles and shrugs. “It’s just kinda trippy, seeing you like this. Fatherhood has really changed you. It’s softened you. Made you feel less… pakhan. More human.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“It’s a very good thing. This whole family man thing suits you, Dmitri, in case you didn’t know.”
I scowl. “Except I don’t really have a family at the moment, do I? My wife’s barely speaking to me and I get to see my son in brief midnight shifts.”
“I know, I know,” she says, rising and adjusting the ties of her bathrobe. “All I can say is this: you two are madly in love with each other. It’s gonna take more than a little lie to break the kind of connection you two have.”
“It was more than a little lie.”
“She forgave you for killing her sister, Dmitri!” Bee reminds me with a not-that-soft rap of her knuckles on my skull. “If she can forgive that, she can forgive this.”
“It keeps adding up, though,” I whisper, as much to myself as to Bee. “One lie, after another, after another…”
“So don’t add anymore,” she scolds. “Let this be the last lie, the last secret. You wanna be a family? Well, then—be one. The only person stopping it is you.”
With that, she slips out of the room and disappears. Mischa is snoozing against my chest, so I sit in the dark with him for a long time. Not moving, barely breathing. Hell, I’m barely even thinking, really.
It’s just one thought. One endlessly looped thought, burning a hole in my brain.
For them, I will fight until my last breath.
43
DMITRI
It’s been almost two weeks and she’s still freezing me out.
My wife is a ghost. I can smell her on my son, I can hear her in the next room—but she’s never actually a presence in front of me for long enough to be real.
Our longest interactions happen when she comes to relieve me or vice versa. So it’s no surprise that I’ve come to look forward to those precious few minutes whenever I can steal them.
I’ve had Mischa now for two hours. He’s due for his next feed so I’m expecting Wren to come and get him any minute now. Of course, there are the unwelcome times she sends Bee in her place—but today, Bee is already with me.
Mischa opens his deep green eyes and gives me a quizzical look. I’m not some football to be tossed back and forth, you know.
“I hear you, little guy,” I whisper softly. “But your mama can be stubborn.”
“Oh, she’s the stubborn one, is she?” Bee remarks without looking up from her computer.
“It’s been two damn weeks and she still won’t talk to me about anything apart from Mischa. I’ve given her the space she wanted.”
Bee rolls her eyes as she slams the lid of her laptop closed. “Ugh, when are men gonna learn? Sometimes, we don’t actually say what we mean!”
“Wren’s not like that.”
“Wren may not know what she wants right now. She’s all over the place! She’s tired and emotional and sick of staying in this penthouse all the time. Do you know that she burst into tears at her appointment with Liza last week?”
“No,” I growl, “because you never told me. Why the fuck didn’t you?”
“It felt personal and I didn’t want to betray Wren’s trust by telling you.”
“You’re telling me now.”
“I know that,” she snaps. “But only because I have a point to prove. Which is that she’s vulnerable and she feels like she’s doing this alone and she’d probably feel that way even if she were surrounded by a barrage of people every single day because none of them are you.”
