Page 44 of Babies for the Boss
I snort at that and move on. “A man’s girlfriend is a vulnerability. She’s a target of opportunity, a means to an end, something that can be used and discarded because there is no formal structure protecting her. There are no old laws, no codes, nothing that places her beyond reach.”
“Lucky me.”
I stop because I know she will not like this part. Then I make myself continue, because what we like does not matter. Not now. “A wife is different. There are men in the Bratva—not all of them, not even most of them, but enough—who still hold to the old ways. Men who consider a pakhan’s wife untouchable in a way that a girlfriend simply is not. It is not sentiment. It is code, and code has weight in my world in ways that sentiment does not.”
“Convenient for you.”
I hold her gaze, ignoring the half insult. “Fedor, for all his willingness to dismantle everything I have built, is one of those men. I have known him long enough to know where his lines are, and a wife is behind one of them.”
Molly is quiet, looking at me with those steady brown eyes, and I can see her turning it over. She wants to fight this, but she sees the math as clearly as I do. “Oh.”
“So this isn’t about romance,” I say, and it tastes like a lie. “I like you, Molly. But what I am describing is not a romantic proposal. It’s a survival strategy. A structure designed to keep you and our children alive.”
The words sit in the room, the intruder between us.
I’m not sure, in this moment, who I am lying to. Her, or myself, or both of us equally.I like you.As though what I feel for this woman, what has been moving through me since the wordtwinslanded in my chest and rearranged every fixed point I have ever navigated by, is something as manageable and contained as liking. As though the proposal that came out of me twenty minutes ago was a strategy rather than the most honest and unmanaged thing I have said in twenty years.
This marriage, if she agrees to it, will not be a strategic arrangement for me. It will be the truest thing I have ever done. But telling her that now, in this room, with the timing what it is and the proposal what it was, will sound exactly like what it isn’t—a man saying whatever is necessary to get the answer he wants.
Molly looks at me for a long moment. She is very still in the way she’s still when she’s thinking something through completely,rather than responding to the surface of it. “This is an impossible situation.”
There is no compromise in which we are both happy with the outcome of this situation. No happy medium. Either she is forced into a marriage to stay alive, which is her nightmare, or she dies, which is my nightmare.
“Yes. It is impossible.” From her perspective, I imagine so. But from my perspective, the impossible thing is to not take her every bristle, her every refusal personally. “Is it truly so unthinkable to marry me?”
“Not at all,” she says, and there’s something in her voice that is quieter than the rest of the conversation has been. “But until thirty seconds ago, I didn’t even know you thought of me as your girlfriend, Pavel.”
Well, fuck.
Everything Sister Mary Patrick said was right. I have had Molly beside me for years, have been inside this thing with her for months, and I have never once used the word. Never once made it explicit, given her the formal acknowledgment of what she is to me, what she has been. I kept the distance because distance felt like safety, because naming it felt like exposure, because a man in my position who admits to a girlfriend has handed his enemies a roadmap.
Instead, I handed her an ambiguity and expected her to be comfortable inside it, without even explaining why.
“Then I have been a fool,” I say quietly. The words come without difficulty. “I should have asked you to be my girlfriend. To be with me. Properly, explicitly, the way it deserved to be done.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I convinced myself that you deserved to feel safe, rather than targeted.”
“Even though being with you makes me a target?”
I close my eyes to avoid the anger on her face. “Yes. For that, I am sorry, Molly.”
She swallows hard. “I see.”
“There are many things I should have done right. I don’t want this to be one of them. This is something I can fix. I will do anything within my power to keep you safe. All three of you.”
“How do you keep us safe from you?” Her voice wobbles as her question burns. “You kept me in the dark?—”
“Let me bring you into the light. Let me keep you safe with a ring.”
The silence that follows is a different quality than the silences that preceded it. She looks away from me, toward the window, toward the city laid out in its evening amber and cold white, and she is quiet long enough that I don’t try to fill it. Molly’s silences are working silences, and interrupting them is counterproductive.
Then she says, without looking back at me, “Will it be a big ring?”
Something loosens in my chest with an almost physical sensation. “The biggest I can find. If that’s what you want.”
“Not the biggest.” She looks back at me, and there’s something in her face that is almost a smile, the slightly crooked one that doessomething structurally unsound to my concentration regardless of the circumstances. “I don’t want to get mugged.”
