Page 77 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
But I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn what it looked like to be in something without control around it, to be with Sofia in the specific sense of alongside rather than the sense of containing, to find out what we were capable of when the crisis had ended, and the ordinary remained.
I raised her hand and pressed my mouth against her knuckles.
She looked at our hands.
“Viktor, I’m not… I’m not going to fake forgiveness before I feel it. I don’t have that kind of patience for dishonesty.”
“I know that too.” I looked at her. “Neither am I. What happened happened, and it is going to take the time it takes. I am not in a hurry.” I paused. “For the first time in recent memory, I am not in a hurry.”
She leaned against my shoulder. I put my arm around her.
No announcement. No architecture. The simple movement of an arm, finding the position that was correct because she was there and I was here.
We stood there in the quiet.
I had lived in this city for twenty-three years and had understood it from below—from the command center and the security office and the functional machinery that ran the performance. I had never stood on a rooftop in the mid-morning with someone I had chosen and simply looked at it.
It looked different from up here. Smaller, possibly. More like a city and less like a machine.
“Tell me something,” Sofia said.
“What?”
“Something that isn’t operational. Something you wouldn’t have told me before.” She tilted her face up slightly, a small smile on her face. “Something true.”
I thought about it.
“You’re beautiful.”
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said a low, “Thank you.”
I kissed her shoulder.
She turned the ring on her finger—once, the small rotation I had watched her do when she was thinking.
“My turn,” she said. “Something true.”
“Okay.”
“I kept the ring because I wanted to. Not as leverage. Not as a statement. The morning after the wedding, I looked at it, and I thought about taking it off, but I didn’t, and the reason I didn’t was,” she held my gaze, “because it was yours. And I had already decided, before I was ready to admit that I had decided, that yours was something I wanted to be.”
I turned toward her. She turned toward me. The space between us closed in the unhurried way of something that did not need to be rushed.
I put my hand against her face—the same touch as the penthouse at midnight, but different now, the difference between a goodbye and a beginning—and she closed her eyes and leaned into it, and I held her face in my hand.
Then I kissed her.
Not with the charged urgency of our history. Not the fierceness of the suite or the desperate momentum of the wedding night.
She kissed me back. Our tongues fought for dominance as her hands found their way into my hair.
There was work ahead. I knew this, and she knew this. There were things that needed saying and things that needed time.
We had time.
We had decided, together, on the rooftop above Las Vegas in the mid-morning light, that this was what we were going to spend it on.
