Chapter 5: Pushing her Away

Nikolai’s POV

I heard her fall asleep at that table before I ever closed my door.

I stood in the hallway longer than I should have, listening to the particular stillness of a house with someone in it who wasn’t moving anymore, and some part of me, the part I generally didn’t let make decisions, wanted to walk back into that kitchen and carry her to a bed that wasn’t a hard wooden chair. I didn’t. I went to my room instead, and I closed the door the way I closed every door that mattered, firmly, finally, and I told myself the distance was necessary and didn’t examine the word necessary too closely, because I already knew what I’d find if I did.

I had built my entire life on the principle that anything I let myself want too openly became a weakness someone else could use against me. It was a rule that had kept me alive in rooms that had killed better men than me. It had never once had to survive someone setting a table for two and waiting up for me to notice.

I woke early the next morning and found her already awake in the kitchen, moving quietly around a space she still didn’t fully trust yet, and I understood immediately what this was. She hadn’t been told to do this. She’d woken herself before dawn on her own, because she’d missed me leaving the morning before and had apparently decided, somewhere in that stubborn quiet of hers, that she wasn’t going to miss it again. I stood in the doorway for a moment longer than I needed to, watching her move between the stove and the counter with the same careful precision she brought to everything, like even something as small as cracking an egg deserved her full attention, like nothing in her life had ever been allowed to be careless.

I thought about the plate I’d walked past the night before without a word. I thought about the sound of a chair scraping back as she must have finally given up waiting for me and fallen asleep sitting upright. And then I made myself stop thinking about it, because that was exactly the kind of thinking that had no business taking up space in a morning that needed to go a specific way.

“You don’t need to do this,” I said, and watched her turn, watched her face arrange itself into that careful neutral expression she wore like armor. “Waking up early. Making breakfast I didn’t ask for. Whatever this is, the dinner last night, this now, I’d stop it. It isn’t going to change anything between us. I told you what this marriage is. Don’t confuse effort for something it isn’t.”

I watched it land. I watched something flicker behind her eyes, quick, controlled, the same discipline I’d noticed in her from the very first day, and she didn’t sign anything back at all. She just held my gaze for a moment, steady, and then turned back to the stove like I hadn’t said anything worth reacting to.

Good, I told myself. That was the correct outcome.

It didn’t feel like the correct outcome. It felt like watching someone quietly close a door I’d just finished telling them to close, and resenting them for actually doing it.

She set a plate in front of me a few minutes later anyway, and I noticed she hadn’t made one for herself, like some part of her had already decided this was a performance meant only for me and not a meal she had any right to share. I ate in silence, and I was aware the entire time of her standing near the counter, not sitting, not quite looking at me, occupying herself with small unnecessary tasks the way people do when they need somewhere to put their hands while they wait to find out if they’ve made things worse.

When I was nearly finished she set down the dish towel she’d been folding and unfolding and lifted her hands instead.

I want to work, she signed. As a sign language interpreter. I’m qualified for it. I’ve been fluent since I was nine.

I set my own fork down slowly, turning that over. Of everything I might have expected out of this morning, that wasn’t it. I’d expected silence, maybe. Retreat. The same careful compliance she’d offered me every single day since the wedding. Not a request. Not something that sounded, underneath the flat precision of her hands, like it actually mattered to her.

“Absolutely not,” was the first thing that came to me, reflexive, the same instinct that governed every decision I made about the people under my protection, keep them close, keep them accounted for, keep them where nothing could reach them. It was the same instinct that had kept men alive in my organization for years and the same instinct that had gotten men killed the one time they’d let it slip. But I watched her face while I held the words in my mouth, watched the careful, braced way she waited for exactly that answer, like she’d already rehearsed how to absorb it without letting it show, like rejection was simply the weather she’d learned to dress for every single day of her life.

I thought about the girl passing me napkins across a table because she’d decided I was worth trusting with her silence. I thought about the version of her sitting in front of me now, folded so carefully into whatever shape everyone else needed her to be, her mother, her stepfather, and now me, apparently, adding my own set of walls to a life that already had too many. I thought about how long it must take a person to learn to want something out loud after spending most of her life learning the opposite, and how close I had just come to teaching her that lesson all over again.

“Fine,” I said instead, and watched the surprise cross her face before she caught it. “You can look for work. I’ll have someone vet whatever position you take before you accept it. You don’t go anywhere without telling me where and for how long. And if I decide it’s putting you at risk, it ends. Those are the terms.”

Understood, she signed, and there was something underneath the sign I couldn’t quite name, gratitude maybe, or something closer to disbelief that I’d actually said yes.

I finished the rest of my breakfast without saying anything else, and I told myself the decision had been purely practical, that a wife with somewhere to be during the day was less conspicuous than one confined entirely to a house, that it served the arrangement better than it cost it. I told myself several things on my way out that door, actually, all of them reasonable, all of them true in their own limited way, all of them arranged carefully enough that I almost managed to believe them by the time I reached the car.

None of them were the real reason, and I knew it the moment I was alone behind the wheel with nobody left to perform certainty for.

The real reason was that I had watched her brace for rejection with the same quiet discipline she used for everything else in her life, expecting nothing, prepared for less, and some part of me that I generally kept locked down tighter than anything else I owned hadn’t been able to stand being the one who confirmed what she already believed about herself. That she wasn’t worth accommodating. That obedience was the only thing anyone would ever give her room to have.

I was doing this on purpose, I admitted to myself, finally, somewhere on the drive into the city, traffic thinning out ahead of me while something inside my own chest refused to do the same. The coldness at breakfast. The flat voice, the deliberate distance, closing the door on a woman who had done nothing wrong except make me want things I’d spent years training myself not to want. I was pushing her away methodically, the same way I approached everything else that threatened to matter more than it should, cataloguing the danger, building the wall, reinforcing it the moment I felt it crack. And the fact that I’d caved within minutes on the one thing that actually mattered to her told me exactly how well that strategy was already failing.

I had told Isabel, the night before my own wedding, that I wanted nothing more than a Kovalenko-Reyes daughter standing next to me by sundown. That had been a lie I told myself as much as I told her. What I actually wanted was sitting in that kitchen right now, learning slowly that I would give her almost anything except the one thing that would have made all of it easier.

The truth.