He drops onto the sofa with the comfortable sprawl of someone who has been in this space since childhood. "Do you know what you've gotten yourself into, Claudia?"
"I think so."
"Youthinkso?"
"I know so."
He tilts his head. His eyes, darker than Rovin's, are sharp beneath the easy manner. "My brother is the best man I know. He's also the most dangerous man I know. Those two things are not separate. The thing that makes him good, his loyalty, his commitment, his absolute refusal to lose anything that belongs to him, that's the same thing that makes him dangerous. You belong to him now. That means you are the most protected person in the country. It also means there is no leaving."
"I don't want to leave."
"Good." He smiles. "Because I like you. And I'd hate to see what happens if you change your mind."
Later, when Volody has left and the house is quiet, I wander the rooms the way I've begun doing in the evenings, learning the space, making it mine. There is a library I hadn't noticed the first week, a small room off the hallway that Rovin uses for storage, filled with boxes and forgotten furniture. I open it one evening and spend three hours reorganising it into a habitable space. I find a leather armchair buried under a dust cover. Ifind a shelf unit that needs a quick clean. I carry my books from the guest room, which I no longer sleep in, and arrange them on the shelves. When Rovin finds me curled in the armchair at midnight, reading by lamplight, he stops in the doorway and stares.
"What is this?"
"A library."
"It was a storage room."
"It was wasted space." I look up at him. "You have six empty rooms in this penthouse. Let me fill them."
An emotional I don’t recognize on him passes across his face, quick and unguarded. It takes me a moment to identify it, and when I do, my heart clenches. It's hope. The raw kind, the kind that belongs to a man who has spent years building a fortress and has just watched someone start hanging curtains.
"Fill them," he says quietly. And then, softer, almost to himself: "Fill all of them."
He turns and walks away, and I know he's not talking about rooms.
I don't change my mind. The days take on a shape that feels natural, like settling into a current that was always flowing in this direction. I wake in Rovin's bed, wrapped in his arms. I eat breakfast across from him, and we talk about nothing and everything, the news, the weather, a painting I found in a storage room that I think should be in the living room. He listens with the attention of a man who is used to listening to intelligence briefings, but the quality of his attention is different when it's aimed at me. It's softer. More intent.
He wants to know everything about me. He asks questions at odd moments, in the kitchen, in the car, in bed with my head onhis chest after we've made love and the room smells like sex and sweat.
"Your mother," he says one night. "Tell me about her."
"Vanessa. She married my father when she was twenty-two. She spent thirty years being the perfect political wife and then she spent six months pretending none of it happened. She's in France now, vacationing with my aunt. She doesn't call me."
"Does that hurt?" he asks, kissing the top of my head.
"Not anymore."
"Why?"
I turn my head and look up at him. His face is shadows and angles in the dark. "Because I have something she never had. I chose this. She was chosenfora life and then abandoned when it fell apart. I walked into this with open eyes. The difference between us is agency."
His hand moves in my hair. Slow, rhythmic, possessive. "You will never be abandoned."
"I know."
"I will never let anyone take you from me."
"I know that too."
He pulls me closer, tucking me against his body, his arms wrapped around me like a cage made of warmth and intention. I press my ear against his chest and listen to his heartbeat and think about how strange it is that a man this dangerous can feel this much like safety.
Rovin
The call comes on a Tuesday morning.
