Page 108 of Captured By the Pakhan

I don't know how long. I know that I beg, twice, in words I won't be repeating; I know that at some point the blindfold is soaked through at the outside corner and that neither of us mentions it; I know that when he finally, finally puts his hands and then his mouth on me I go somewhere for a while that isn't a place.

And I know that the last thing before that happens is his voice, very close to my ear, saying something in Russian I still do not understand.

Afterward he does the whole thing.

He unties my hands and rubs both wrists between his palms for two solid minutes, which they do not need. He peels every single piece of wax off me himself, slowly, one at a time, into the bowl, doesn’t permit me to help, and doesn’t rush it. Warm cloth over all of it. Water, which he holds, because my hands are shaking too much to be trusted with a glass.

The blindfold comes off last, and the light in the room is already down to nothing, because he thought about that half an hour before I did.

Then he gets in beside me and pulls a blanket over both of us and puts a hand flat and low on my stomach, where nothing has touched all night, and holds it there.

I am non-verbal for a while. He doesn't fill it.

"Say the Russian," I manage, eventually.

"No."

"Ilya."

"You will have it eventually. Not tonight." His hand moves once. "Tonight you get English."

"That's not⁠—"

"Raven."

I open my eyes.

He is looking at me, in a dark room, with his hair a disgrace and forty-one hours of a very long fortnight in his face, and he isn't composed at all.

"In June," he says, "in this house, after the first time, you said something out loud and then you pretended to be asleep."

Everything in me goes very still.

"You knew."

"I knew before you'd finished the sentence." A pause. "I let you pretend, because you were not in a state to have meant it and I was not going to hold you to something you said with your hands still shaking. And then you left eleven days later, and I have thought about those four seconds every single day since, and I would like to be finished thinking about them."

I lie there with my heart going.

"I love you," I say.

Awake. Looking at him. Nothing between us and nowhere to go.

And Ilya Yaroslav — who has run a criminal organization across four cities for eleven years, who killed his own uncle in a study when he was twenty-five, who isn't, by any measure, a good man and has never once claimed to be —

— closes his eyes for a second, like a man setting something down that he has been carrying up a hill.

"I love you," he says. "I have loved you since a corridor in Kansas, and I have been extremely badly behaved about it ever since, and I intend to be badly behaved about it for the rest of my life."

"That's not really a⁠—"

"It is the best I have," he says. "You will have to take it."

I take it.

Epilogue

Raven