Chapter 7 — The Guest Wing

POV: BEATRIX

The elevator opened directly into a hallway larger than my entire apartment.

For a moment, I just stood there without stepping out.

My duffel bag and my aching cheek suddenly became the two most mismatched things in the building.

Marble floors stretched out under a chandelier I could have hidden my old couch beneath.

Somewhere past the hallway, floor-to-ceiling windows framed a skyline I usually only saw from ground level, craning my neck up at buildings like this one instead of standing inside them.

"Beatrix!"

The shriek came before I even registered the footsteps; small, fast, and thundering down a staircase that curved up out of sight to my right.

Ivy hit me at full speed, both arms locked around my waist, her face pressed into my side like she'd been waiting up for hours, which, judging by the pajamas and the very awake look on her face, she probably had.

"You're really here! Daddy said you were coming, but I didn't believe him because grown-ups say things and then don't do them, but you're actually here!"

I laughed, a real one, surprising myself, and wrapped my arms around her without thinking twice about it.

"I'm here," I said.

"Are you sleeping in my hallway? Can I show you my room? I have a whole shelf just for you. I made it this morning.

I didn't know what you liked, so I put a little bit of everything on it."

"Ivy." Nikolai's voice, quiet but final. "It's late. Let Beatrix breathe."

She didn't let go.

If anything, her grip tightened, both arms locking harder around my ribs like she thought someone might change their mind about all of this the second she loosened her hold.

I found myself smoothing a hand over her hair without deciding to, and something in my chest cracked open a little wider than it already had tonight.

A woman in a neat gray cardigan appeared at the top of the stairs, followed a moment later by a man in a dark polo who looked like he'd been awakened from somewhere deep in the building.

Both of them stopped dead at the sight of me standing in the hallway with Ivy wrapped around my middle at nearly midnight.

"This is Mrs. Alden," Nikolai said, gesturing to the woman. "She runs the household. And Desmond, security."

Mrs. Alden's expression shifted through surprise, confusion, and something that was carefully masked back into professional neutrality in under three seconds, though not fast enough for me to miss it.

Desmond didn't bother hiding his at all.

He looked at me, then at Nikolai, then back at me, his eyebrows climbing steadily higher.

"Mrs. Ashcombe will be staying," Nikolai said, in the same flat tone he used for everything, like he was announcing a change in quarterly earnings and not introducing a wife nobody in this house had known existed six hours ago.

"Starting tonight."

"Of course, sir." Mrs. Alden recovered first, folding her hands in front of her, though her eyes flicked to my swollen cheek and stayed there a beat too long.

"The guest suite is made up, if she'd like to settle in."

"That won't be necessary." Nikolai's answer came fast, clipped, and I watched Mrs. Alden's carefully neutral face flicker again.

"She'll be in the main suite. With me."

The silence that followed had a texture to it, thick enough to touch.

"Understood, sir," Mrs. Alden said.

If she had any further thoughts, she kept them hidden behind that same professional smile as she ushered a still-clinging, still-babbling Ivy back up the stairs toward bed, promising that the shelf tour could happen first thing in the morning.

Nikolai led me in the opposite direction, down a wide hallway lined with art I didn't recognize and probably couldn't afford to look at directly, past a closed door he didn't slow down for, and into a bedroom the size of my entire old apartment.

"The contract requires appearances," he said before I could ask, setting my bag beside a bed that could have comfortably slept four people with room to spare.

"Staff talk. If word gets out that we're sleeping in separate wings a week into our marriage, it undoes everything we're trying to build."

"Right," I said. "Appearances."

He crossed to a wide leather armchair by the window and, without another word, pulled a folded blanket from a shelf in the closet and draped it over the chair’s arm, as if this were a routine he'd already decided on before we even left my apartment.

"I'll take the chair."

"You don't have to," I started.

"I know I don't." He said it simply, already loosening his tie, already turning away from the conversation like it was finished.

"Get some sleep, Beatrix."

I changed in the enormous bathroom with the door locked, brushed my teeth with a toothbrush still in its packaging that had somehow appeared on the counter, and climbed into a bed so large I could have starfished across it and touched nothing but sheets.

Across the room, Nikolai settled into the armchair, folded the blanket over his legs, and turned off the lamp.

I lay there in the dark for a long time, staring at a ceiling I couldn't see, listening to a man I'd known for less than a day breathe steadily across the room, and thought that of all the strange things that had happened to me today.

Somehow, this might be the strangest one yet.

****

POV: NIKOLAI

I hadn't brought anyone into this apartment in four years.

Not a date, not a colleague, not even Arthur, whom I trusted about as far as I could throw him, which wasn’t very far at all.

Watching Ivy launch herself down the staircase and lock onto Beatrix as if she'd spent her whole short life waiting for that exact moment told me two things at once.

The first was that this arrangement was going to work better than I had any right to expect.

The second, the one I liked considerably less, was that it was already more dangerous than I'd planned for.

I had written the rule about Ivy myself. Don't let her get attached.

I had written it because I knew exactly what an eight-year-old's heart could do when something was given to her and then taken away again, and I had watched Beatrix Holloway walk through my front door for less than sixty seconds before my daughter broke that rule without help from either of us.

I said nothing about it. There wasn't anything useful to say.

Mrs. Alden's expression when she offered the guest suite told me everything I needed to know about how the staff would see this.

I corrected her quickly, faster than I meant to, and heard exactly how it sounded the moment the words left my mouth. Main suite. With me.

It came out like a man staking a claim instead of a man managing optics.

I told myself it was strategy.

Staff talked, and those who spoke to the wrong person at the wrong dinner party could unravel eighteen months of careful positioning in a single sentence.

That part was true. It just wasn't the whole truth, and I knew it the moment I saw her set her bag beside my bed and felt something tighten low in my chest that had nothing to do with contracts.

I took the armchair because it was the right thing to do, and because I did not trust myself—not tonight, not with the bruise still darkening along her jaw and the particular way she'd looked at that ice, as if no one had ever handed her anything gentle in her life.

I told her to get some sleep. I did not take my own advice.

Long after her breathing settled into something slow and unguarded, I lay awake in a chair too small for me, listening to a stranger breathe in my bed, in my house, in the room I had not let anyone else sleep in since the last time it mattered.

I understood, with a clarity that unsettled me more than anything that had happened in that cramped apartment tonight, that I had made a serious miscalculation somewhere between the elevator and this room, and I had no idea how much it would cost me.