"No." I turn my hand over under hers so that my palm is facing up, and I close my fingers around her wrist, gently enough to just hold. I can feel her pulse under my thumb. Still fast. Still that hummingbird rhythm that I've become addicted to like a drug I didn't know I needed.
"I'm not letting you go," I say. "Not because of a contract or a transaction or a debt your father sold you into. Those are paper. Paper burns. I'm not letting you go because you are the only thing in my life that I have ever wanted badly enough to ruin everything else for, and if you leave, the man I'll become in your absence will be worse than anything you've seen so far."
She swallows. I watch it travel down her throat.
"That's not a reason to stay. That's a threat."
"It's not a threat. It's a fact. I'm giving you the fact and letting you do with it what you want."
"What I want is a choice."
"You have a choice. You've always had a choice. The lock on your door. The fork beside your plate. Every night when I put my mouth on you and you can feel that I'm waiting for you to stop me, you have had a choice." I tighten my grip on her wrist by a fraction. "You haven't stopped me."
Her breath catches.
"You haven't stopped me," I say again, quieter. "And I haven't stopped wanting to give you a reason not to."
The room is very quiet. The city hums outside the windows, and somewhere in the apartment Ilya's cleanup crew is scrubbing blood out of hardwood and patching bullet holes.
"I want something from you," I say.
She watches me. Wary. Steady.
"I want you to marry me and carry my child."
The words leave my mouth and detonate silently. I watch the shrapnel of them hit her face in real time. Shock first, her lips parting, her eyes widening. Then something else, something that cycles through disbelief and confusion and anger before settling on a fourth thing that I can't name but that makes her hand tighten around mine instead of letting go.
"You want," she says slowly, "to get me pregnant."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Because a child would root you to me in a way that no lock or keypad or alarmed stairwell ever could. Because biology is the one cage I could build around you that you would choose to stay inside. Because I have spent eight days watching you exist inmy space and wear my clothes and eat my food and come apart under my mouth, and the idea of something that is half you and half me, something that carries my blood and yours and lives inside you where I put it, is the only thought that has ever come close to making me feel something like peace.
That's the truth. But I can't say that, because it sounds insane even inside my own head, and Wren Calloway is too smart to respond well to insanity.
"Because I want you tied to me," I say instead. "Permanently. In a way that can't be undone with a keypad code or a court order."
"So it's about control."
"It's about permanence."
"Those feel like the same thing."
"No. Control is what I have now. The locks. The codes. The men outside the door. That's control, and it's fragile, and tonight proved how fragile it is. Permanence is different. Permanence is something you carry with you when you walk out the door. Something that brings you back not because you have to but because part of you lives inside the reason to."
She stares at me. I watch her process it, watch the gears turn behind those dark eyes that I dream about now, which is something I would never admit to another living human but is true nonetheless.
"You want to put a baby in me," she says, "so that I'll have a reason to come back to you."
"Yes."
"That's the most insane thing anyone has ever said to me. And my father sold me to the Russian mafia to cover a gambling debt, so the bar is high."
"I know."
"You've known me for eight days."