"Tell me something," he says. "Something you haven't told me yet."
"Like what?"
"Anything. I want more of you than I currently have, and I'm impatient about it."
I think for a long moment, turning the question over, surprised by how much I want to answer it honestly. "I used to think love had to be loud to be real. My parents argued constantly, made up just as loudly, and I thought that was just what it looked like. Passionate. Real." I trace a fingertip along the seam of his shirt. "Tonight I watched five different kinds of love at that table, and not one of them was loud the way I expected. Yours included. It's steady instead. I didn't know steady could feel like that."
Something shifts in his face, soft and unguarded in a way I haven't seen from him yet, not even in our most intimate moments.
"Liv," he says, voice low, "I need you to know something, and I need you to actually hear it, not just file it away as something charming I said."
"Okay."
"I have never once in my life wanted steady. I've spent thirty years being the loud one, the easy one, the brother everyone counts on to fill silence because silence felt like something with teeth." His thumb traces along my jaw, tilting my face up to his. "You make silence feel like something I want to stay inside of. That's never happened before. Not once."
I don't have words for what that does to me, so I close the distance instead, kiss him unhurriedly. There’s no urgency behind it tonight, just warmth, just the steady, certain want that's been building all evening watching couples who are building something real out of the wreckage of their ownunconventionalbeginnings.
He carries me to the bedroom, lays me down like something precious instead of something he's claiming, and undresses me slowly. His mouth follows every inch of skin he uncovers like he's memorizing it for the first time even though he already has.
"Look at me," he murmurs, settling over me, his weight warm and grounding. "I want to watch you the whole time tonight. Every second of it."
"Okay," I whisper, and I keep my eyes open even when it gets hard to, even when pleasure starts pulling at the edges of my focus, because something about being witnessed like this feels more intimate than anything we did before.
Volody
The call comes up from the front desk a little after ten in the morning, Paul's voice clipped and careful.
"Mr. Mostovoi. A Cole Beckett is here. Says he's here to see his sister. He's, ah, insistent."
I glance across the kitchen island at Liv, who's gone very still over her coffee, knuckles white around the mug.
"Send him up," I say.
She looks at me like I've lost my mind. "You're letting him in?"
I shrug. "I'm curious." I set my own mug down, lean against the counter, arms crossed. "You don't have to be in the room if you don't want to be."
"I want to be in the room." Her jaw sets in a way I've come to recognize, the same set it had the night she walked back into Pietty's ballroom with her chin up after finding out what kind of evening she'd actually walked into. "I'm not hiding from my own brother in my own home."
My home,she said. I file that away to enjoy properly later, when there isn't a problem currently riding the elevator up to my front door.
Cole Beckett turns out to be smaller than I expected. Good suit, slightly too new, the kind a man buys when he wants to look like he belongs somewhere he hasn't actually arrived yet.He steps off the elevator already talking before he's fully through the doors.
"Liv. Thank God. You haven't been answering anything, I was starting to think—"
He stops when he sees me.
"Mr. Mostovoi." Recalibrating fast, the way men like him always do, swapping panic for performance in under a second. He extends a hand I don't take. "I'm Cole. Liv's brother. I think we should talk."
"I think you should sit down," I say, gesturing at the sofa, pleasant as anything. "Coffee?"
"I'm fine." He doesn't sit. He looks around the penthouse instead, taking in the windows, the height, the unmistakable smell of money that clings to everything in this building, and I watch the calculation move behind his eyes, the same look I imagine he wore weeks ago floating his sister's name to Voloshenko's people like a chip on a table.
"This is a hell of a place," he says.
"It does the job." I sit, unhurried, and gesture again at the sofa across from me. This time he takes it. "You said we should talk. Talk."
"Right. Yes." He glances at Liv, who's standing near the kitchen island her arms crossed, watching him with an expression I haven't seen from her before, something flat and careful, like she's bracing for a blow she already knows is coming. "I wanted to come congratulate you both properly. In person. Skip the text messages."
