Chapter 22 — Cracks in the Ice

POV: BEATRIX

My hands wouldn't stop shaking.

It didn’t matter if I was in the car, in the elevator, or even sitting here in the penthouse—safe, home, with nothing to be scared of. I couldn’t get them to stop. The adrenaline just didn’t care. I kept seeing it all—his grip on my wrist, the sound of Julian crashing into the wall, that thick, shocked silence where even the air seemed too stunned to move.

None of it felt real yet, standing in the silence of a penthouse that had nothing to do with what had just happened three floors below street level in a different building entirely.

Usually, when nights ended like this, Nikolai disappeared behind his office door. He worked through things his own way, quiet, untouchable. I expected that. I didn’t even think about it; it was just habit. Getting used to being left alone with whatever you’re feeling, I guess.

Julian used to leave the room the moment I cried over anything, calling it dramatic and exhausting, until I learned to do most of my falling apart alone, quietly, somewhere he wouldn't have to witness it.

But Nikolai didn’t go anywhere. He came back from the kitchen with a glass of water instead, set it in front of me, and then sat close beside me on the couch, saying nothing.

He just stayed. His shirt was still messy from the party, one sleeve pushed up like he'd tugged at it without noticing. For the first time since I’d met him, he looked less like the guy who arranges everything behind the scenes and more like someone who’d been right there, in it.

"You don't have to do this," I said. "I'm fine. You can go to work if you need to."

"I don't need to."

"You always go to your office."

"Not tonight."

"Why not tonight?"

"Because tonight, you need someone here more than I need to finish a spreadsheet."

He didn't move. He just sat there while my hands slowly stopped shaking, while the water remained mostly untouched on the table, while the apartment settled back into its usual quiet around us. 

It took longer than I expected to feel steady again. He waited the whole time without once checking his phone or glancing toward the hallway that led to his office. 

In my twenty-six years, no one had ever simply waited for me to be okay without expecting something in return for that waiting.

"Why do you care this much?" I asked at last, quieter than I intended. "About a fake wife."

He didn't answer right away.

"Nikolai."

He looked at me. Really looked, longer than any normal conversation would require, with something moving behind his eyes that I couldn't quite name, though it made my chest tighten just watching it unfold.

"Beatrix," he said.

That was it. Just my name, gentle, deliberate, like it meant something he wasn’t ready to say yet. The world stilled around it. I didn’t push. I just understood, somehow, that pushing would make him lock the doors again.

Before I could ask him anything else, he stood abruptly and ran a hand through his hair, putting distance between us again as if he'd suddenly remembered he wasn't supposed to be standing so close.

I watched him take half a step back. Something ached in my chest at the loss, even though nothing had really happened.

That’s when Ivy showed up in the doorway, hair a mess, clutching her stuffed rabbit, wide-eyed and sharp for eleven at night.

“I heard the elevator,” she explained, though nobody’d asked. “Also, I couldn’t sleep.”

She looked back and forth between us, so matter-of-fact it almost made me laugh. “You guys are being weird,” she said. “In a good way.”

Neither of us argued with her.

****

POV: NIKOLAI

I have spent most of my adult life deciding in advance exactly how I would respond to any given situation. 

It is not a skill I developed by accident. It is the only thing that has ever kept me steady: the ability to see three steps ahead and choose my response before the moment requiring it even arrives. 

Arthur taught me that, in his own way, though he would never have used those words. Feel nothing you have not already decided is safe to feel. 

It has served me well in boardrooms. I did not particularly enjoy realizing that a man I had spent most of my life trying not to become had still managed to shape the one skill I relied on most. It has served me considerably less well tonight.

I had no idea what to say when Beatrix asked me that question. 

I’ve answered harder questions than that, from men who could end my career with a single phone call. None of them had ever left me standing in my own kitchen with absolutely nothing to say.

Standing in that kitchen with a glass of water in my hand, I had no idea what to say to Beatrix’s question. I’ve faced tougher interrogations from people with the power to end my career, and none of them left me speechless in my own damn kitchen.

Why do you care so much about a fake wife?

I stalled, pouring water I didn’t need just to keep my hands busy and buy a few seconds to think it through. Still came up empty by the time I sat down next to her.

The truth, if I were honest with myself, was much simpler and much more frightening than anything I was ready to say out loud. 

I had crossed a room tonight and put my hands on a man's throat because someone had hurt her, and I hadn't thought about the consequences once, not the board, not the deal, not the headlines. 

That had never happened to me before—not with Elena, and not with anyone else. 

Even in the worst months after she died, when grief made me careless with almost everything else in my life, I never lost my ability to think clearly in a crisis. 

Tonight, as Julian's hand closed around Beatrix's wrist from across the room, thinking had stopped being part of the process entirely.

I did not know how to explain that without admitting something I was not ready to admit, possibly not even to myself. 

So I stood there instead, a glass of water sweating slightly in my hand, and said the only word that felt safe enough to say out loud.

"Beatrix," I said, because her name was the only true thing I could offer her in that moment, and because saying anything more specific felt like standing at the edge of something I had spent four years, since Elena's death, making absolutely certain I would never stand near again. 

I had built an entire second life around that certainty. 

A life where I ran a company, raised a daughter, kept the world exactly as far away as I needed it to be, and none of it required me to feel anything I could not fully control. 

Beatrix had been quietly dismantling that life for weeks, and I had let her do it without ever telling her so.

She looked at me as if she knew exactly how much was hidden beneath that one unsaid word. Maybe she did. 

I have never been especially good at hiding things from her, however hard I have tried.

I stood up before I could do something considerably less careful than saying her name, some instinct warning me that if I stayed sitting that close to her for even another minute, I would say something I could not take back, and I was not ready yet to find out what that something might be. 

I noticed my hands were not entirely steady, though for reasons entirely different from hers.

I ran a hand through my hair, putting a few useless feet between us, and told myself the retreat was about giving her room to recover from the night.

And then Ivy’s voice cut through the room, saving us both from the silence.

“You guys are being weird,” she said, standing there with her wild hair and that old rabbit as if she’d woken up just to break the tension. “In a good way.”

I looked at Beatrix; she looked right back. For a second, she seemed almost surprised by how perfectly an eight-year-old saw the thing neither of us dared mention.

Of course, we didn’t argue.

I don’t have an answer for what’s happening between us. Not sure I even want one now. Whatever careful distance I tried to keep cracked wide open tonight, starting with a stranger’s throat under my hand and ending with her name in my mouth.

I still did not know how to put it back the way it had been. I was beginning to suspect I did not actually want to. 

Down the hall, I heard Ivy’s door click closed. The verdict was delivered. The silence she left behind didn’t seem to bother her at all.

Beatrix was still on the couch, watching me with a look I didn’t have the guts to name. And for once, I had absolutely no idea what happened next.