Page 50 of Marrying the Pakhan

“I’m pregnant, Viktor. I found out yesterday.” Her hands twist together in her lap, the first sign of nerves she’s let show since she started talking. “I wanted to tell you sooner. I just needed a day to actually sit with it myself first.”

The words finally land, all at once, and my chest goes tight and warm in a way I don’t have immediate language for, too big and too fast to name cleanly.

A child. An actual child, mine, growing right now inside the woman sitting next to me on a couch I bought without ever imagining a family filling it beyond Ginger.

“Viktor.” Harper’s voice cuts through whatever’s happening in my head, uncertain now, watching my face for a reaction I haven’t given her yet. “Say something. Please.”

I realize I’ve been silent too long, staring at her like she’s just handed me something I don’t know how to hold.

I’ve faced down men with guns in warehouses without this much internal static. Fifteen years of training myself to react instantly to threat, to danger, to anything requiring a decision under pressure, and none of it prepared me for two sentences from the woman I married for entirely practical reasons months ago.

“I’m sorry. I’m processing.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “This wasn’t something either of us planned.”

“I know.”

“I never expected to want children. Not really. Not with the life I’ve built, the risks that come with it.” I take her hand, still twisting in her lap, and hold it still against my chest the way I always do when I need to ground myself in something real. “But I want this. I want it more than I have any right to, given how little warning I had to prepare for wanting it.”

Harper’s eyes go glassy, relief breaking across her face in a way that tells me exactly how much she’d braced for a different answer.

“You’re not scared?”

“Terrified,” I admit. “Fifteen years of running a business that puts targets on the people close to me, and now there’s going to be a child who’s mine by blood, not choice, not circumstance, just entirely, completely mine to protect.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. I’m answering the question underneath it too.” I press my palm flat against her stomach, still barely believing there’s anything there yet. However, I know there is, some tiny fierce fact of biology that’s already rearranged everything I thought I understood about my own priorities. “I want this baby, Harper. I want it the way I’ve never let myself want anything, completely, without any of the distance I usually keep between myself and things I might lose.”

She laughs, wet and surprised, and presses her forehead against my shoulder, and we sit there a long moment, my hand still resting against her stomach, both of us adjusting in real time to a version of our lives neither of us saw coming even a few months ago.

“I thought you might panic,” she says eventually. “Given everything else going on right now.”

“I did panic. For about three seconds.” I kiss the top of her head. “Then I got to the part where I actually thought about a child who’s ours, and the panic didn’t stand a chance against that.”

“What do we tell Ginger?”

“Whatever you think is right, whenever you think she’s ready to hear it. I’ll follow your lead on that.”

“She’s going to be thrilled. She’s been asking for a sibling for weeks, did you know that? I thought she meant a puppy the first time she brought it up.”

“A sibling and a puppy aren’t mutually exclusive requests. She might negotiate for both once she realizes she has leverage.”

“Don’t give her ideas.”

“Too late. I’m fairly sure she’s already three steps ahead of both of us on most things.”

I laugh, real and unguarded, and for a while we sit there, planning nothing specific, imagining everything, a version of the future that includes a nursery and a name and a whole life neither of us was building toward when this marriage started as a piece of paper solving a custody problem.

“Boy or girl, do you have a preference?” she asks eventually, half teasing.

“Healthy. That’s the only preference I actually have.”

“That’s the diplomatic answer.”

“It’s the honest one, too. Ask me again once there’s an actual answer to have a preference about.”

It isn’t until much later, after Harper’s asleep, curled against my side with one hand resting on her own stomach even in sleep, that the rest of it finds its way back into my head.

A child. My child, coming into a world where a man who’s spent months watching my family from parked cars and school pickup lines is still out there, patient, unaccounted for, closer to my daughter’s future sibling than either of them will ever know unless I finally do something about it.