Page 70 of Marrying the Pakhan

“Okay.” He doesn’t argue, doesn’t reach for me, accepts it with a quiet that somehow makes the anger worse instead of better, because some small, exhausted part of me wanted him to fight for a different answer. “The guest room’s made up. I’ll stay away from it, unless you need me.”

“Thank you.”

I turn toward the guest room, and he doesn’t follow, and I make it three steps before the words come out anyway, the ones I can’t quite hold back even now.

“I don’t know if I can trust you again the way I did yesterday. I need you to understand that. Whatever this becomes, it’s not going back to what it was before today, not completely.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“No,” he admits, low, honest in a way I wasn’t expecting tonight. “Not fully. But I understand enough to know I don’t get to ask you to pretend otherwise just because it would be easier for me.”

I don’t have anything else to say to that, so I don’t say anything, and I let myself into the guest room and close the door quietly behind me, sinking onto the edge of an unfamiliar bed in a house I’d finally started calling home.

I press both hands flat against my stomach, feeling for movement, needing the small proof of life under my palms more than I need sleep tonight.

“I’m going to keep you safe,” I whisper, to the baby, to Ginger down the hall, to the version of myself that walked into a club months ago believing the worst thing that could happen to her was a bad decision, not this, never anything close to this. “I promise you that, whatever else I have to figure out first.”

I think about Denise, about what she’d tell me if I called her right now at midnight, furious and pregnant and processing a truth too large to hold alone.

She’d probably tell me the same thing she told me the day I signed that contract. That love and good judgment aren’t always the same instinct, and it’s allowed to take time to figure out which one you’re actually following.

I don’t call her. It’s too late, and there’s nothing she could tell me tonight that would make any of this feel smaller than it does.

I lie awake a long time, fury and fear trading places in my chest, and somewhere past midnight, exhaustion finally wins out over both of them, pulling me under into a sleep too heavy to dream through.

33

VIKTOR

It’s been three days since I told her everything, and Harper’s been sleeping in the guest room, polite about it in a way that somehow stings more than if she’d slammed a door about it.

“Just until I’ve had time to process,” she said the first night, and I told her that was fine, that she could have whatever space she needed, and I’ve kept that promise since, even when every instinct in me wants to knock on that door and ask if three days is enough time yet.

It isn’t my place to decide that. I remind myself of this constantly.

She’s still here, still present at dinner, still warm with Ginger in a way that hasn’t changed at all, still civil with me in a way that’s careful without being cold.

It’s not the silence of a marriage ending. It’s the silence of a woman deciding, day by day, how much trust she’s willing to extend back to a man who spent months deciding for her how much truth she could handle.

I understand the distinction. I don’t love living inside it.

This morning, she asks me to pass the coffee without quite meeting my eyes, and I do. Ginger fills the space between us with an update on Theo’s opinions about a class field trip, oblivious to the careful distance her parents are currently navigating around her.

Once Ginger’s off to school, Dimitri arrives with a folder, and I meet him in the study instead of the kitchen, giving Harper the house to herself the way I’ve been giving her most mornings.

“Found three properties that fit what you asked for,” Dimitri says, spreading photographs across the desk. “Gated, defensible perimeters, far enough outside the city that surveillance becomes considerably harder to maintain without being noticed. This one’s my favorite.” He taps a photo of a stone house set back from a long private drive, hills visible behind it. “Single road access, sightlines for at least half a mile in every direction. A man would have to work considerably harder to watch us there than he does watching this house.”

“How fast can we move if we choose it?”

“A week, if you want it done properly. Faster if you’re willing to skip a few of the security upgrades I’d recommend adding first.”

“We do it properly. A week’s acceptable, assuming nothing changes before then.”

“Agreed.” Dimitri studies me for a moment, setting the photographs aside. “How’s Harper?”

“Angry. Reasonably so.”