Page 56 of Bred By the BRATVA Ghost

He looks for a long time.

His hands come to rest at last on the curve of my belly, both of them spread wide. This man who once told me his hands had only ever been tools, and he goes down, not kneeling, he wouldn't know how, but folding, until his forehead rests against the swell of his child and his arms wrap around my hips and he holds on. I stand there with my fingers in his hair and feel the shudder move through him, the one that has no sound, and I hold my whole family in my arms.

"Ya lyublyu tebya," he says, against my skin. He says it in Russian first, always, like the words need a running start. Then, rougher, lifting his face to me: "I love you, Iris Vetrova."

I’ll keep my own name everywhere else, but use his for this room only. That's our arrangement, and it makes him say it exactly like that, every time, like he can't believe it’s real.

"I love you too." I draw him up by the lapels he's still wearing, walk him backward to our bed, and push, and he lets himself fall the way he never lets himself fall for anyone else, and I follow him down into the lamplight. "Now hold still, husband. I have some staring of my own to do."

I take my time with the buttons of his shirt. I know every scar underneath by heart now, I've traced the whole of him, the pale seam at his ribs from Palermo, the old burn along his forearm from a winter he's only told me about once, and I kiss each one as it appears the way he kissed my spine, a debt repaid with interest, and I feel him unmake himself under my hands, breath by breath, the way he only ever does here, for me.

After that there are no more jokes for a while.

There's lamplight, and the slow familiar gravity of him, and my name in his mouth like the first word he ever learned. There's the reverent, maddening care he takes with me now; one hand always braced like I'm made of something rare, until I inform him, breathless, that I'm made of Orlova stock and he can act accordingly, and the sound he makes then is almost a laugh.

After that it's the two of us the way we were on the island, hungry and certain and shameless, except better, because the door we're behind now is ours, and nobody is coming, nothing is chasing us, and every road out of this bed leads back into it.

When it's over, when we're a tangle in the wrecked sheets and my heart is doing its slow return descent, he arranges us the way he always does, my back to his chest, his arm my pillow, his hand settled low over the curve where our future is sleeping through the whole scandal. The window is open an inch. Far below, the garden has gone finally, blessedly quiet, except for one voice.

"Is that---?" Yakob says, into my hair.

"Aidan. Yes. Verse nine."

"There are more verses?"

"There are always more verses. Welcome to the family." I feel his smile against the back of my neck, an actual smile, the full one, the one maybe five living people have ever seen, and I pull his arm tighter around us both like a seatbelt. "Regretting anything yet, Ghost?"

He's quiet for a moment. The lamp hums. Somewhere in the walls, this old house settles the way it always settles, and the man who used to come out of walls holds his whole world in his two hands and breathes like he's finally learned how.

"Not a single one," he says, at last, into my hair.

I fall asleep in the middle of a smile, in the middle of my own bed, in the middle of my own life, with the Bratva Ghost wrapped around me like a promise he already kept.