Chapter 167: 167

I don’t have the heart to deny him. So I twist the baby to the side and peel off some of the blanket so Dmitri can see his face.

He just breathes, his expression smoothed free of fear and anger in a way I’ve never seen before. I could love a man who looked like that all the time. I can trust the angry Dmitri to keep us safe. I can trust the arrogant Dmitri to keep us fed and clothed and sheltered.

But a Dmitri who looks like that…

I could love him.

“His name is Mischa. I named him myself and I’m not changing his name now,” I tell him firmly.

Dmitri smiles and nods like he’s lost in a dream. “I wouldn’t change it even if I could.”

His appearance is going a long way in softening up my anger. “I’d hand him over to you, but…”

He looks down at himself and laughs incredulously. “I’ll hold him later, when I’m fit to.”

I switch Mischa onto my other breast and swallow the complicated knot of emotions threatening to rupture inside of me. “Is it over?” I ask quietly. I’m hoping beyond hope that he looks the way he looks for a good freaking reason.

His chest rises and falls and I sense immediately that it’s not over. It’s not even close to being over.

“Tell me,” I insist. “I want to know everything.”

Bee doesn’t move from her spot in the corner of the room, but she chimes in, too. “She deserves to know, Dmitri.”

Dmitri nods. “Very well. I’ll tell you everything.”

And he does. He tells me about Vittorio’s call, about his plan, about the trap laid for him and lastly, about the entire building coming down on his head. The more he explains, the colder I get, the more terrified, the more panicked.

It’s the knowledge that I came very, very close to losing Dmitri tonight that unsettles me to my core. My son could have lost his father before he had even taken his first breath.

“How the hell did you survive that?” Bee whispers, floating to the opposite side of my bed.

“Luck. And some quick thinking on my part. I took cover in the wardrobe in the room I was trapped in. The rest of the building collapsed around it, but it held strong by some miracle. Aleks led the men in and they literally dug me out. I had passed out when they found me, but they brought me back.”

“Fuck me, that’s insane,” Bee says, shaking her head at him. “Only you. Luckiest bastard alive.”

“You cheated death yourself,” I remind her icily. “Birds of a freaking feather.”

They both have at least enough decency to look guilty. But shame won’t temper my anger for much longer. Now that I know they’re here, that they’re not going anywhere yet, that rage is rising up and boiling over.

“You had no right to take that kind of risk,” I snarl at Dmitri. “You had me to think about. You had Mischa to think about.”

“I was thinking about you and Mischa,” he insists with a swallow. “Why do you think I risked it all? I wanted this over before he was born. I wanted to give us a fresh start.”

“You went in blind! It was reckless, what you did tonight.” Mischa unlatches and promptly starts to cry again. Silently, I pass him over to Bee, who walks him to the far end of the room, though probably just to get out of strangling range. “It was also short-sighted. Just like your lie about Bee.”

He sighs in a way that suggests he knew this particular lie would come back to bite him in the ass. “I’m sorry. I should have told you about that.”

“Then why didn’t you?” I yell. “You had plenty of opportunities and you didn’t. I asked you so many times about the noises I was hearing from the penthouse upstairs. ‘Renovations,’ you told me. Reno-fucking-vations! You lied to my face, Dmitri! Repeatedly. You promised to be honest, and even as you were making the promise, you were lying to me some more!”

I’ve worked myself up into full-on fury. Every cut on his face, every bruise on his skin is just another reminder of how careless he was with our lives.

“I thought I was doing the right thing⁠—”

“For whom? For us? Or for you?”

The silence hurts in a way I don’t know how to deal with. It stings and throbs and aches and burns all at once.

In the end, though, who do I have to blame but myself? Honestly, I’m not sure why I ever expected a different answer.

He rises and takes a few steps back before pausing at the foot of my bed. “I know I’ve hurt you, Wren. I’ll give you the space you need. But we’re gonna get through this. I promise you that.”

For our son’s sake, I hope he’s right.

But I’m running low on hope tonight.

42

DMITRI

Not even one month into my marriage and we’re already living in separate apartments.

I have to get an appointment any time I want to speak to my wife—and even then, she barely lingers in the room long enough to have a conversation.

She usually leaves me with three things—the baby, instructions, and blue balls.

Whenever I try to open up the conversation to something else, she gives me a weary expression and a sigh that warns me to give up before I’ve even begun. “I told you already, Dmitri: I need space. I’m just here to make sure you know how to take care of Mischa for the next few hours.”

Then she disappears, usually with Bee at her back. It’s infuriating: I’m relegated to glorified babysitter, while Bee gets to share the most intimate parts of Wren’s life. Not that she hasn’t been a useful mole during this emotional cold war, but still—I shouldn’t need a mole in the first place.

In the absence of progress, I’ve decided to put all my energy into making amends in the hopes that one day, she’ll forgive me. Not an easy thing to pull off when she refuses to be in the same room with me for more than a few minutes.

Which is why I find myself here, skulking around the kitchen in the lower penthouse at one in the morning, stocking up the cupboards with all of Wren’s favorite snacks and foods. I make sure each room has a stainless steel bottle filled with ice-cold water, just the way Wren likes it.

And of course—the notes.

A few months ago, I would’ve recoiled in disgust at the thought of it. Now, I don’t give a fuck. What’s the point of dignity when you don’t even have your wife to share it with?

So fuck it, I’ll grovel. One handwritten note at a time.

I’m pinning up the last scrap of paper when Bee walks into the kitchen in a fluffy blue bathrobe with her hair piled up in a bun at the top of her head.

“Oi, Romeo—still littering the kitchen, are we?”

“It’s not littering if she reads them,” I growl as I finish taping it up and step back to check my handiwork. “She does read them, yes?”

“She reads them,” Bee admits. “I just don’t know what she does with them afterwards.”