"Aggressively pro. I've eaten half the jar."
I feel a kick against my hand. Strong. Definitive. My daughter, making her position known from inside her mother's body with the same stubborn intensity that her mother uses to make her position known from inside every room she enters.
"That's my girl," I say to the belly, and Wren rolls her eyes, but her hand covers mine and presses it tighter against the place where our daughter is moving, and for a moment we just stand there in the kitchen. Two people and a kick. A family.
A family. Something I never thought I'd have. Something I wasn't built for, or so I told myself for thirty-two years. My father had a family, and his family watched him die on the floor of his study with a knife in his gut. Families in my world are leverage. Liabilities. Soft spots that enemies probe and exploit.
The man who sold access codes to my building is buried in a place where no one will find him. And the world has learned, thoroughly and permanently, that the soft spot of Dominik Voronov is not a vulnerability.
It's a trigger.
The three men who stormed the penthouse were Kir's. He sent them the week after I outbid him at the auction, not to kill me specifically, but to take Wren. He wanted what I'd taken from him. It was a transaction in his mind. I stole his purchase. He'd steal her back. Simple arithmetic of the kind that men like Kir understand because it's the only kind they're capable of.
He didn't account for the fact that I came home early that day because Yuri intercepted a communication between Kir's second-in-command and a man on my security team named Ketterly. Ketterly sold the access codes to the lower levels for $50,000. The service entrance. The stairwell override. The elevator bypass. Everything Kir needed to get three armed men to the top floor of my building.
I killed the three men. Ilya found Ketterly. I dealt with him personally, at the warehouse on Atlantic.
Kir was harder.
After the failed breach, he went underground. Changed locations every seventy-two hours. Surrounded himself with men, good men, trained men, the kind you can't buy off or intimidate into standing aside. For three months he was a ghost, and for three months I hunted him with a patience that surprised even Ilya.
I found him in a warehouse in Red Hook, meeting with a contact from the Kozlov organization, trying to broker an alliance that would give him enough muscle to come at me again. Yuri tracked the communication chain. Ilya positioned the teams. I walked through the door at 2 a.m. with four men at my back and found Kir Belov sitting at a folding table with a cup of coffee. The look on his face when he saw me was worth every sleepless night of the previous three months.
I didn't shoot him.
I wanted to. I had dreamed about it. Months of imagining the specific angle and entry point, the look in his eyes at the moment of understanding, the silence afterward. But Wren had said something to me the night before, between bites of dinner, like she was commenting on the weather instead of rewiring my operating system.
She said: "The baby's going to need a father who comes home."
So I didn't kill Kir Belov. I dismantled him. Took his operation apart piece by piece over the course of two weeks. His supply lines. His distribution network. His contacts, his accounts, his safe houses, his men. I stripped him down to nothing, the way you strip a car for parts, and when I was finished, Kir Belov was a man with no empire, no allies, no resources, and no options.
He left the country. Ilya tracked him to Montenegro. Last I heard, he's running a bar in Kotor and drinking more than he serves. He'll die there, eventually, bloated and irrelevant.
My wife made me better. Not softer. Better. She taught me that there are forms of destruction more thorough than death. That you can end a man without ending his heartbeat. That power isn't just the ability to kill, it's the ability to choose not to and still win.
I think about that sometimes. About the man I was before her. The man who loaded hollow points and planned clean kills and would have put two in Kir's chest and one in his face without a moment's hesitation. That man is still inside me. He'll always be inside me. But he has a wife now with a daughter on the way and a cat named Pickle. These things don't make him weak. They make him precise. They make every act of violence a decision instead of a reflex. They make the violence mean something, because now there's something worth protecting on the other side of it.
Wren finishes her dinner. Washes her hands. Turns to me with that look on her face that I've learned to read the way sailors read the sky.
"Dominik."
"Mm."
"Take me to bed."
She says it plainly. A statement of want from a woman who has learned that she's allowed to want, that her needs matter, that the man she married will drop whatever he's doing the instant she tells him what she needs.
I lead her down the hallway of the home we moved into six months ago. A brownstone in the West Village. Four stories, with a garden, room for a nursery and a kitchen where the ceiling is low enough that I bump my head on the light fixture at least twice a week. Wren chose it. She said she wanted a home that felt like a home, not a territory, and I gave her the creditcard and stayed out of the way. The result is a house that smells like beeswax candles and fresh bread and the lavender sachets she puts in every drawer.
It smells like her. The whole house smells like her. I walk through the front door every evening and breathe in and feel the click reaffirm itself.
Our bedroom is on the second floor. The big windows look out over the garden. The bed was picked out by Wren, lower than my old one, with a headboard she found at a flea market in Brooklyn and refinished herself. There are books on every surface. A framed photo on the nightstand of the two of us at the courthouse the day we got married, Wren in a white sundress and me in a suit. Ilya is in the background looking like he still can't believe any of this is happening.
Neither can I.
She sits on the edge of the bed. I kneel in front of her.
Old habit. Good habit. The best habit I've ever built.