Page 28 of Marrying the Pakhan

“You think he knew who she married.”

“I think he found out the second my name landed on a court document, and I think everything about this custody case since then has been about more than a granddaughter.”

Dimitri’s quiet for a moment.

“I’ll pull everything we have,” he says. “Everyone connected to him back then, everyone who might know what he’s done with the last eleven years. Quietly.”

“Quietly,” I agree. “And double the men on the house tonight.”

He heads off to start making calls, and I stand there a moment longer, watching the crowd thin out around us.

An entire building full of people who have no idea a dead man just resurrected himself three feet from a woman I never meant to actually marry.

That night, once Harper and Ginger are both asleep, I walk the perimeter of the property myself instead of leaving it entirely to the men I’ve already stationed there.

Checking sightlines, gaps in the tree line, anything a man like Pavel would exploit if he decided patience wasn’t worth it anymore.

The house is quiet behind me, every window dark except the small lamp Harper leaves on in the hallway now.

I stand at the edge of the tree line and look back at it, at the one lit window, and think about how easily all of this could be undone by a man I thought I’d already survived once.

Dimitri texts me twice before midnight, updates on men he’s already reaching out to, old contacts who might know where Pavel’s spent the last decade. I answer each one and keep walking, unwilling to go back inside until I’ve checked every angle myself, twice.

12

HARPER

I catch myself saying it on a Tuesday, standing at the front desk with Renata beside me, half listening to a guest complain about the ice machine on the third floor, still broken after all this time.

“I still need to call home before Ginger’s bedtime,” I say, and it’s out of my mouth before I notice what I’ve called it.

Home. Not Viktor’s house. Not the place I’m staying. Home, easy, unremarkable, like I’ve been saying it for years instead of a few weeks.

Renata doesn’t catch it, still filing a complaint form, but I catch it, and I stand there for a second longer than the moment requires.

The court case ended weeks ago now. Nobody’s mentioned an end date since.

“You’re doing the thing again,” Renata says, glancing up.

“What thing?”

“The staring off into space thing. You’ve been doing it a lot lately.”

“I’m fine.”

“You keep saying that.” She falls silent for a moment. “You never actually told me the real plan,” she says a minute later, once the guest has wandered off toward the elevators. “The contract. Isn’t there a clock running on it somewhere?”

“A year, minimum. Either of us can end it after that with thirty days’ notice. We’re nowhere close yet.”

“So there’s no rush.”

“No rush.”

Renata studies me the way she does when she’s deciding whether to push or let something drop, and for once she lets it drop.

There’s no rush, technically. The contract gave us a full year before either of us had to think about an ending at all, and we’re not even halfway through it.

My shift ends at six, and I pick Ginger up from Mrs. Bennett’s on the way home, and she talks the entire drive about a project at school, some diorama involving a shoebox and more glitter than I’m going to enjoy cleaning off the car seat.