Page 144

“Sex?” she says, “because your performance said otherwise.”

I chuckle. “No, it’s more than that.”

She sobers hearing that and looks away. I wonder if I’ve told her too much.

I keep my voice even and say, “Come down when you’re ready. I’ll go first.”

Her eyes lift to mine. “You’re abandoning me?”

“I’m giving Galina something else to look at.”

“She already knows.”

“Then give her nothing more.”

Elara exhales, then nods once.

I leave before I change my mind and pull her back into bed.

Downstairs, breakfast is already laid out. Anya is at the table with a bowl of fruit in front of her, picking through it with the seriousness of a child inspecting jewels. Galina moves in and out of the room with tea, toast, and the same calm face she wears for everything, whether it is a broken glass or a man bleeding on the front steps.

“Good morning,” she says.

“Morning.”

She pours my coffee.

“Where’s Elle?” Anya asks.

“She’ll come down.”

“Is it weird that I miss her already?” she asks.

Something in the way she says it makes a pang go through me.

She asks the question simply, as if missing Elara after one night apart is only a small private oddity she has noticed in herself.

But I hear what sits underneath it.

The dangerous ease with which a child starts making space for someone.

I look at my daughter and, for the first time since I woke with Elara warm and naked in my arms, I wonder if I’ve made a mistake.

Not because of last night itself. I am not a man who lies to himself, and I won’t pretend I regret what happened. If she walked into this room now and looked at me the wrong way, I would want to take her straight back upstairs and forget every reason I should know better.

That’s exactly the problem.

Elara is no longer just the woman I want in my bed.

She’s Anya’s safe harbor now. And what if I ruin that?

The thought is unpleasant because it is possible.

I have ruined enough things by wanting too much and saying too little. I have built a life around control and still managed to lose the one person I was supposed to protect. Sometimes, when I look at my eight-year-old kid, I feel like I don’t know her at all.

I have kept Anya safe in the ways I understand: guards, walls, locked doors, vetted staff, and still I know there are places in her I have left empty because I don’t know how to enter them without breaking something.

Elara found one of those places without trying.