LOGINNIKOLAI Pov:She stopped walking when we were three steps from the entrance, the doorman holding the door open, and Arianna just….. stopped. Her feet planted themselves on the pavement like she had made a quiet, private decision and was now waiting to see what I would do about it.Noah stood beside her, looking between us.I looked at her, and she looked at me. There was something in her expression that wasn't quite bravery and wasn't quite desperation. It was something in between, she had this face a person makes when they had run out of options and had decided that resistance was the only thing left that belonged to them."I'm not going in," she said flatly like she was stating a fact about the weather.I tilted my head slightly. "Who said you'd be walking in?"I didn't give her time to process that. I crossed the two steps between us, bent, and put her over my shoulder.She went rigid for exactly half a second — shock, probably, that I had actually done it — and then she started fi
ARIANNA Pov:You shouldn't have tried to run.The words sat in my ear the whole way to the car. I got in and Niko shut the door close with a thud.What else was I going to do? Stand in the middle of the departure hall and make a scene with my four-year-old son standing right there, watching my face for clues about whether or not to be scared? No. I got in. I pulled Noah in beside me and he closed the door and I stared straight ahead.Nikolai got into the front. His driver pulled out without a word. He understood what Nikolai wanted without saying a word. Now, it was just Nikolai, I and Noah inside."Mama."Noah's voice was small and close. I felt his hand find mine in the space between us, his little fingers wrapping around two of mine the way he always did when he wasn't sure about something but didn't want to say so.."I'm fine," I said, reassuring him.He looked at me. He had this way of looking at me that I had never fully gotten used to, like he was waiting for me to say the true
NIKOLAI Pov:I told myself I wasn't sure.That was the word I kept using in my head as I stood at the window after the call ended, like I was a reasonable man giving a complicated situation the benefit of the doubt.But that was a lie, and I had always been very bad at lying to myself.The laugh she gave when I asked about the boyfriend, I caught it. That half-second where her face did something involuntary before she smoothed it back over. I had watched Arianna's face for two years before she left. I knew what she looked like when she was afraid and trying not to show it. I knew the exact way her eyes moved when she was calculating instead of feeling.She was hiding something.The elderly woman, the boyfriend, was almost convincing. She had always been a careful liar. Thoughtful about details, but there was something underneath the story that didn't settle.She was protecting something. And whatever it was, it mattered more to her than I did. More than her job, more than the life she
My brain short-circuited.The questions came at me fast, one after the other, and I stood there processing each one like a person trying to walk through thick fog. How old are they? Don't tell me you have a boyfriend.Nikolai's eyes hadn't moved from my face. They never did when he was thinking. He had this thing where he'd go very still and just watch, like he was giving the room permission to incriminate itself.I thought about confessing. Just for a second, it crossed my mind. A part of me, some tired and reckless part that had been carrying this secret for five years, almost wanted to say it. Just say it. Just put it down.But that part didn't get a vote.Because telling Nikolai about Noah wasn't just telling him I had a son. It was handing him a weapon. The only one that could actually finish me.And everything I'd done — the fire, the body they couldn't identify, the years of invisibility, the jobs that paid just enough, the life I'd built from the ground up with my bare hands —
Arianna's Pov By the time I knew what was happening, Nikolai crossed the room in three tides, cornering me, my back hitting the wall with a full force, his left hand on my waist, the right one resting on my neck deliberately. His lips found mine like he had been hungry for this, and had waited for an eternity just to kiss me. The kiss was so hot that I had to struggle to free myself from him, but his firmness was tight. He held my hand in place, kissing me more, biting my lips and giving me a quick sting of pain. And somewhere between the struggles, I didn't know when I kissed him back. My hand moved instructively towards his back, my fingers grazing his shirt.. God, how I missed this. He slid his left fingers into me, and I had to gasp from the sensation. “I missed this….fuck” he muttered in my mouth, still kissing me. He didn't touch me roughly. His hands were deliberate and unhurried, like he had decided exactly what he was going to do and the only thing left was the d
Arianna's Pov I stared at him. A second passed, then another. The seconds stretched at the edges because my brain refused to process what it just heard."You're married," I said, not as a question, but to process what I had just heard."I'm aware." He responded like it meant nothing."You're standing here telling me that you're going to keep me beside you, and I belong to you?" I said it slowly, like I was explaining something to someone who hadn't heard themselves. "You have a wife, Nikolai.""And you have a lot of nerve," he said, "lecturing me about what I do with my life." He tilted his head slightly. "Given everything."The ‘given everything’ landed the way he intended it to, so I had to close my mouth.He moved to the window. The city stretched out below him, indifferent and enormous, and he looked outside like he was already deciding what to do with it. The light caught the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, and I hated that I noticed. I hated that even now, even stand







