Page 44 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I sit with the full weight of it, what he is offering and what he is not offering, and I think about my father’s tired hands and Carla’s folded dish towel and Aleksei’s controlled smile and two pink lines on a bathroom floor and two years of sitting outside this man’s office with feelings I filed away every single day because there was nowhere else to put them.
He is not offering romance.
He is also the only man I have wanted for two years, and the father of the child I am carrying. He is sitting across from me in his penthouse at eight o’clock on a Friday evening offering me a solution that solves every problem I have been unable to solve on my own. Underneath the practicality of all of it I know exactly why I am going to say yes and it has very little to do with the terms.
“Yes,” I say.
Roman looks at me for a moment. Something moves in his expression, brief and controlled, and then it is gone, and he nods once, the way he nods when something has been decided and the next thing can begin.
“I’ll have my lawyer draw up the preliminary paperwork tomorrow,” he says.
“Alright.”
“And, Elena.” He holds my gaze. “Your father’s bills. I meant what I said. Before the week is out.”
I look at him, and I think about my father in his chair by the window, the tired set of his shoulders, and the way his hands have been sitting still lately when they never used to sit still.
“Thank you,” I say.
Roman says nothing.
18
ROMAN
Kostya arrives atseven with coffee and his folder, and I tell him before he sits down.
“I’m getting married,” I say.
He sets the coffee on the desk, and he looks at me, and he doesn’t say anything for a moment, which for Kostya means he is recalibrating several things simultaneously and has decided that the recalibrating needs to finish before he opens his mouth.
“Elena,” he says finally.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“This week. Private ceremony. You, Gregor, Pavel, and whoever she wants from her side.” I pick up the coffee. “I need you to make the arrangements today. The venue, the documentation, everything. Quietly and quickly.”
Kostya writes something in his folder. “The council session is in two hours.”
“I know.”
He looks up. “You are going to walk in there and tell them you are declining the Volkov alliance.”
“I am going to walk in there and tell them I have already declined it. There is a difference.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. Then he writes something else and closes the folder. “I’ll start the arrangements after the session.”
“Start them before. I want everything in motion before I walk into that room.”
He stands. At the door he stops, which is becoming a habit of his that I have decided to tolerate. “Roman.”
“I know what I’m doing, Kostya.”
He leaves.
I drink my coffee and look at the city and think about a woman in a navy dress sitting across from me last night saying yes. I think about the council session in two hours and Grigori Volkov’s face when I tell him the matter is closed, and I think about an heir that changes the shape of everything I have been building and everything I intend to build.
