Page 43 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
Mara is quiet for a moment. “A proposal.”
“That is the word he used.”
“What kind of proposal?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask because the way he said it made it clear that asking was not going to produce an answer until he was ready to give one.”
She looks at me steadily. “How did he seem? When you told him.”
I think about it honestly. Not the stillness, not the questions, not the window. The thing underneath all of that, the thing I caught in the two seconds before the processing took over. “Shocked,” I say. “Genuinely shocked. But not angry. I kept waiting for anger, and it didn’t come.”
“That’s something.”
“I don’t know what it is yet.”
Mara unfolds herself from the end of the bed and stands up, holding out her hand. “Come have coffee,” she says. “You looklike you need coffee more than you need to sit here thinking about it.”
She is not wrong.
The day moves slowly in the way days move when you are waiting for an evening that feels significant. I shower, dress, and eat properly for the first time in what feels like days. Mara stays home, and we do not talk about Roman again.
At six, I go to my room, and I stand in front of my wardrobe, and I look at my clothes for longer than the situation requires.
I am not dressing for a date. I know I am not dressing for a date because Roman Petrov doesn’t do dates, and whatever this evening is, it is not that. But I am also not dressing for the office. I am dressing for a conversation that is going to determine the shape of the next significant portion of my life, and I would like to look like someone who understood that when she got dressed.
I choose a dark navy dress, simple and well-fitted, and my good coat, and I pin my hair up because my hair up is the version of me that can hold a conversation with this man without losing the thread of it.
Mara is on the couch when I come out. She looks at me and says, “You look good.”
I say, “Thank you.”
She tells me to call her after and I say I will and I leave.
Viktor is at the curb at seven forty-five, which means Roman told him to be there at seven forty-five, which means Roman has been thinking about the timing of this evening the way he thinks about the timing of everything, with deliberate attention.
I get in the car.
The ride is twenty minutes. I spend them looking out the window, not thinking about anything useful. By the time Viktor pulls up to the building on 57th, I am exactly as prepared as I was when I left the apartment, which is to say not at all.
The door staff sends me up without a word.
Roman opens the door before I knock.
He is in dark trousers and a white shirt, no jacket. He looks like a man who has spent the day thinking something through completely and has arrived at the end of it. He steps back. I go inside. He closes the door. No drink offered this time. He gestures toward the seating area. We sit. Outside the windows, the city does its thing. The room is quiet.
He looks at me.
“I’ll keep this straightforward,” he says.
“Please.”
“We get married. Quietly, quickly, with my most trusted people present.” He holds my gaze. “Your father’s medical debt is cleared before the week is out. Aleksei Morozov stops being a name anyone in your life mentions again the moment you are under Petrov protection. The council gets the heir they have been directing me toward, and the Volkov alliance becomes irrelevant overnight.” He pauses. “You get security. A position inside my world that no one can challenge or remove. And the child grows up with everything I have built behind it.”
“You are not offering romance,” I say.
“I am offering a solution. A real one. The kind that doesn’t fall apart when circumstances change because it is not built on circumstances. It’s built on terms.”
I sit with that.
