“We’re going to talk about that,” she said. Her voice was wrecked and quiet, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d heard in an hour.
“I know,” I said. I pressed my mouth to her hair. “Not right now.”
“Gregory,” she said.
“I know,” I said, for the third time, because it was the only honest answer I had for most of what she might have said next.
She looked at me for a long moment.
She didn’t let go.
Epilogue – Sofia
The thing about surviving something was that it didn’t end when the danger did.
I knew that, technically. I was a medical student—had been a medical student, before all of this, before the months that had rearranged everything I thought I understood about my own life—and I knew the clinical language for what happened to a nervous system after sustained threat. But knowing the name of a thing and living inside it were not the same education, and the past month had been the second kind.
It was footsteps that did it, mostly. The particular sound of unexpected movement—heels on marble in the lobby below, or Gregory crossing from the bedroom to the kitchen in the early dark before he thought I was awake, or once, embarrassingly, the building’s maintenance crew in the hallway outside our door at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. My body responded before my mind could intervene, with a cold drop in the stomach and a spike of something animal and fast. Then the mind caught up and identified the sound as harmless, and the cold drop faded, leaving me standing in my own kitchen, holding a mug of tea too tightly, breathing through a threat that had never existed.
Gregory noticed. He didn’t say anything about it directly, but he’d adjusted his own movements in ways so subtle I’d almost missed them. He made more noise in the mornings now. He texted when he was on his way home, knocked before entering rooms in his own apartment, which I suspected cost him something in pride and which he would never acknowledge, not if I asked him directly for the next twenty years. The alterations were small and consistent, but they made a difference.
A month. It had been a month since the night Nico Calderon had stood in the penthouse I’d been slowly, reluctantly beginning to think of as home, and the distance between that night and this morning felt simultaneously enormous and insufficient. The body healed faster than the mind, which was something else I knew clinically and was discovering personally, lying in bed at odd hours, cataloging the places where the bruises had faded and the places where something else had not.
Gregory hadn’t left. That was the thing I kept returning to in the quieter moments, the fact that I kept picking up and examining from different angles. In the immediate aftermath, he’d been operationally present—arrangements to be made, men to be debriefed, Matvey’s questions to be answered, the administrative machinery of consequence that followed when someone died in a Bratva man’s apartment. I’d understood that. I’d expected the busyness.
What I hadn’t expected was what came after the busyness, when the arrangements were complete, and the questions were answered, and there was no remaining operational justification for his continued presence in whatever room I happened to be in, and he stayed anyway. Not loudly. Not with declarations or explanations. He just didn’t leave.
I was still deciding what to do with that.
Today, though. Today was something I’d been building toward all week, the appointment that had existed in my mind as a fixed point while the days rearranged themselves around it. I’d been marking the weeks the way I’d learned to mark them—the nausea that had begun easing, the particular exhaustion that was different from ordinary tiredness, the small, strange inventory of physical change that the medical student in me observed with professional detachment and the rest of me observed with something considerably less detached. We were going to the ultrasound. We were going to find out who was actually in there.
I was terrified, which I hadn’t told Gregory.
He was waiting in the kitchen when I came out of the bedroom, already dressed in the particular way he dressed for things that weren’t work—dark jeans, a gray shirt, his jacket over the back of a chair. His keys were on the counter. He had coffee in front of him that he wasn’t drinking, just holding, and when I came in his eyes came up to my face with the immediate, total attention I’d grown accustomed to and still hadn’t entirely adjusted to, the way he looked at me like he was running a check every time—assessing, making some internal determination about my state that he wouldn’t articulate unless the answer alarmed him.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said. Not a question.
“I slept.” I moved past him to the refrigerator, not because I wanted anything from it but because standing still under his scrutiny required more composure than I currently had in stock. “I slept fine.”
“Gregory.” I turned, and his expression was even, patient in the way he was patient when he’d decided to wait me out, which was more irritating than impatience would have been. “I’m fine. I’m a little nervous. That’s normal.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“Your face said it wasn’t.”
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth—not quite a smile, the precursor to one, the micro-expression I’d learned to read as a register of his amusement when amusement was something he wasn’t going to admit to. “My face didn’t say anything.”
“Your face always says something. You think it doesn’t, but it does.” I picked up the glass of water I’d left on the counter the night before and drank from it, and he watched me do this with the steady, unhurried attention of a man with nowhere else to be. “I’m nervous because I’m nervous. We’re going to find out if we’re having a boy or a girl or—” I stopped. Something shifted in my chest, the particular flutter that had been arriving at unexpected intervals over the past week, when the reality of the situation assembled itself too completely for my usual management strategies. “Or both. I don’t know. I’ve been trying not to think about it too hard because when I do, I get—” I set the glass down. “Overwhelmed.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Come here.”
I looked at him.
“Sofia.” His voice was quiet. No command in it—or not the operational kind, not the Gregory Kamarov of the first months, the man who issued instructions and expected compliance. This was the other register, the one that had appeared incrementally over the past weeks, low and direct and stripped of the armor he usually kept between himself and whatever he was actually feeling. “Come here.”
I crossed the kitchen. He turned toward me on the barstool and I stopped in front of him and he put both hands on my face—thumbs at my cheekbones, the same gesture he’d used the night he’d come through the kitchen entrance and found me standing against the wall with my heart hammering—and he looked at me for a moment that had the quality of something he was choosing carefully.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “we handle it together.”