Chapter 9 — The Nightmare

POV: BEATRIX

Eleven days into a marriage that existed mostly on paper, I still woke some nights forgetting where I was.

The room helped with that, most mornings. 

It was too large, too quiet, too full of furniture that had never been mine, and for a few seconds after I opened my eyes, I would lie there recalculating my entire life before it all came back at once: the penthouse, the contract, the man sleeping several feet away on his own side of a bed we shared and never touched.

Ivy had taken to knocking on our door most mornings before either of us was fully awake, climbing into whatever space was available and announcing the day's plans as though we'd already agreed to them. 

Nikolai never sent her away. 

He also never quite knew what to do with her once she arrived, and there was a visible discomfort in his shoulders that eased only after I took over, which had become something like a routine. 

She had started leaving her stuffed rabbit on my side of the bed some mornings, a silent claim laid down before school.

I still hadn't figured out whether that was Ivy's doing or some quieter negotiation taking place entirely without words.

Tonight, it was a sound that woke me instead—thin and sharp, cutting through two closed doors before I'd fully woken up.

I was already moving before I decided to move, out from under the blanket, bare feet silent on the cold hallway floor. 

Nikolai's side of the room stayed dark and still behind me. 

Whatever instinct had pulled me upright hadn't reached him yet.

Ivy's door was slightly open, with a thin blade of hallway light falling across her bed. 

She was tangled in her blankets, her small fists pressed against her eyes, her breath coming in short, panicked hitches between words I could only half make out. 

“Mama. Mama, don't.”

I didn't think. I crossed the room and sat on the edge of her bed, and the second my hand found her shoulder, her whole body leaned into the touch like she'd been waiting for it.

"Hey," I said quietly. "Hey, you're okay. I've got you."

She didn't wake fully, not right away, just burrowed harder against my side, one small hand fisting into the fabric of my sleeve like she needed something solid to hold onto. 

I did the only thing I knew how to do for a scared child in the dark, the thing that had never once been done for me and that I had to learn from television, from other people's mothers, from the particular ache of wanting it badly enough to imagine what it might sound like. 

I hummed. 

Nothing in words, nothing I could have named if asked, just a low, wandering melody that rose and fell with her breathing until her breathing slowed to match it, instead of the other way around.

It took longer than I expected. 

Long enough for my back to start aching from the angle, long enough for a small, private memory to surface unbidden: myself at eight years old in a dark bedroom of my own, waiting for a door that never opened, slowly learning that the waiting itself was the thing that had to stop, not the fear. 

I thought, briefly and without meaning to, of my mother's bedroom down the hall from mine, and of the particular silence behind it on nights when I'd called out and no one had come. 

I pushed the memory back where it belonged and kept humming.

Eventually, the panic in Ivy's small fists eased into something closer to sleep.

When I finally lifted my head, Nikolai was standing in the doorway.

I had no idea how long he'd been there. 

He hadn't said a word or moved past the threshold, just stood there with one hand braced against the frame and an expression I hadn't seen on him before. 

Something closer to helplessness than I would have expected that face to show.

***

POV: NIKOLAI

I heard Ivy before Beatrix did. 

I want that noted, if only to myself.

I heard my daughter cry out before the woman sleeping three feet away from me did, and I still lay there for nearly a full minute, frozen, running through what I might do when I got to her room.

I had never once managed to talk Ivy down from a nightmare. 

Not once in eight years. 

There had been a night, not long after she turned five, when I sat on the edge of her bed for nearly an hour, with no idea what to do with my hands, my voice, or any of it, until her nanny finally appeared in the doorway and took over without a word, and I went back to my own room feeling like a man locked out of his own house. 

I had thought about that hour more times than I would ever admit out loud.

I could negotiate a nine-figure acquisition without breaking a sweat. 

I could not sit at the edge of my own daughter's bed and know what to say to make the dark less frightening, because no one had ever bothered to figure it out for me, and I had no template to follow.

Ivy's mother would have known what to do. 

She had always known, some instinct I had wrongly assumed I would simply absorb over the years by proximity, the way heat passes between two things standing close enough together. 

In the years since, I have learned that proximity alone teaches a man nothing. It only showed him, with increasing clarity, everything he did not know.

By the time I made it to her door, Beatrix was already there.

She was sitting on the edge of the mattress with Ivy curled against her side, humming something low and wandering, no real melody I recognized, nothing that sounded rehearsed. 

Ivy's small fists had uncurled. 

Her breathing had gone slow and even. 

I stood in the doorway, my hand on the frame, and watched a woman I'd known for eleven days do, effortlessly, the one thing I had never once managed in eight years of trying.

I did not move past the threshold. 

I told myself it was because I didn't want to wake her. 

I did not examine that answer very closely.

When Beatrix finally lifted her head and found me standing there, something crossed her face I couldn't immediately place. 

Not embarrassment. Something gentler than that.

She gently lowered Ivy back onto the pillow, pulled the blanket up over her shoulder, and rose without a sound. 

I stepped back into the hallway to let her pass, and she pulled the door most of the way shut behind her, leaving it cracked to the exact width Ivy always insisted on, though I had no idea how Beatrix already knew that detail.

We stood for a moment in the dim hallway, neither of us moving toward our own room.

"How did you know what to do?" I asked. 

The question came out harsher than I meant, closer to an accusation than I intended.

She didn't shy away from it. 

"I used to have nightmares like that," she said, wrapping her arms around herself against the chill in the hallway. 

"Nobody ever came. So, eventually, I figured out what I would have wanted someone to do, if anyone had bothered."

There was no self-pity in the way she said it. 

Just the facts, laid out plainly, the same way I might report a number in a meeting.

"And you?" she asked, tilting her head slightly and studying me in a way that made me acutely aware of how little I'd said all evening.

 "How did you learn?"

"I didn't," I said. It was the most honest sentence I'd spoken in years, and it left my mouth before I could stop it.

"That's not something you should have had to figure out alone," I added before I'd fully decided to say it, meaning her, the nightmares, and all of it.

She shrugged, a small, tired motion, as if the observation cost her something to say aloud. 

"The most useful things are."

I didn't have anything to offer in return that wouldn't have sounded hollow beside that, so I said the only true thing sitting in my chest.

"Ivy hasn't had a nightmare in months."

I hadn't meant to say it out loud. It had just been sitting there, something I'd noticed without letting myself look too closely, and it came out before I'd decided whether I wanted her to hear it.

Beatrix went very still.

Neither of us said what that fact was clearly pointing to.

I watched her open her mouth, then close it again, and saw her decide not to ask the question that would have forced both of us to say something out loud that I was nowhere near ready to hear myself say.

I was grateful for it and resented it all at once, standing in a dark hallway with eleven days of careful distance between us suddenly seeming much thinner than it had that morning.

"Goodnight, Nikolai," she said finally, and turned back toward our room before I could decide what I would have said if she hadn't.

I kept thinking about the sentence she hadn't let herself finish in the hallway, the one that now hung unspoken between our two rooms, and I understood, with the kind of clarity that comes at two in the morning, that neither of us was ready to be the first to say it.

I stood alone for a long moment after her door clicked shut, looking at the thin line of light still glowing beneath Ivy's door, and for the first time since the arrangement began, I thought eleven days was nowhere near enough to explain what I was starting to feel.