Page 52 of Marrying the Pakhan

“There are new cameras on the fence line,” she says, no preamble, arms crossed. “I counted four just walking to the mailbox. And there’s a man near the garage I don’t recognize, and another one who was apparently walking the property at six this morning while I was getting Ginger ready.”

“Security review. Standard, given everything else going on.”

“Viktor.” Her voice has an edge to it I haven’t heard from her before, sharper than the courthouse, sharper than the school pickup line conversation. “I’m done with standard. I’m done with vague. I’m pregnant, and this morning I wake up to my house looking like it’s preparing for something you still won’t name.”

“Harper.”

“No.” She holds up a hand, stopping me before I can deploy whatever careful deflection I was about to reach for. “You don’t get to do the thing where you say my name like that and expect it to end the conversation. Not today. Not with a baby involved now, not just Ginger, not just me.”

I look at her, and my chest, steady for weeks now, finally starts to crack under the weight of how much she deserves better than what I’ve been giving her.

“You’re right,” I say quietly. “You deserve more than I’ve given you.”

“Then give it to me.”

“I can’t. Not yet.” Her face falls, and I press on before she can pull away entirely. “There are people whose lives are at risk if I say certain things before I’m certain of them, Dimitri’s contacts included, people who trusted me with information they’d be killed for if it traced back to them. I need a few more days. That’s nothing, Harper, and I know it isn’t enough either.”

“You’re asking me to trust a locked door again.”

“I’m asking you to trust me while I finish making sure that door doesn’t open onto something worse than what’s already inside it.” I pull out a chair at the kitchen table, and after a long moment, she sits, still tense, arms still crossed. “What I can tell you is this. Someone from my past has been watching this house. The car. The man at Ginger’s school. Both connected to the same person. I believe he means to use Ginger, and potentially this baby, against me.”

Harper goes pale, one hand instinctively moving to her stomach. “Against you how?”

“I don’t fully know yet. That’s the truth, not an excuse. The moment I know more, you’ll know it too. All of it. Not a sanitized version, not a version designed to keep you calm. The truth, whatever shape it turns out to have.”

“Why didn’t you tell me even this much weeks ago?”

“Because I’ve spent fifteen years believing the people I love are safer the less they know about the threats against them. Because telling you meant admitting how much danger I might have put you and Ginger in the moment I married you.” I reach across the table, and she lets me take her hand, though she doesn’t fully relax into it. “I still believe waiting a few more days is right. I understand if you don’t agree with that.”

She’s quiet a long moment, processing, her hand still in mine, and I watch her work through the same math I’ve been working through alone for weeks, fear and anger and the particular exhaustion of realizing the ground under your life isn’t as solid as you thought it was.

“What happens now?” she asks finally.

“Now Dimitri and I finish what we started, quietly, and the moment there’s something solid to tell you, I tell you. No more waiting for certainty I don’t actually need to have first.”

“That’s not the same as telling me everything.”

“No. It isn’t. I know that’s not enough, and I know you have every right to be angry that it isn’t.” I squeeze her hand anyway, needing the contact even if she isn’t ready to fully return it. “I’m asking for a a little more time. Not forever.”

She studies me a long moment, and I can see her deciding whether a little more time is something she can actually give me, or whether she’s already decided it isn’t.

“A little more time,” she says finally, voice tight. “Then I want everything, Viktor. Not pieces. Not a version you’ve decided is safe for me to hear. Everything.”

“You’ll have it.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

She doesn’t look fully convinced, and I don’t blame her, given how many times I’ve said some version of this exact promise over the last several weeks without following through. But she doesn’t pull her hand away either, and for now, that has to be enough for both of us.

We sit there a while longer, hands still joined across the table, the new cameras outside doing their quiet work, the safe room downstairs waiting, unused, for a threat I’m hoping never actually reaches this house.

Later, once she’s gone to pick up Ginger, I sit alone in the kitchen a moment longer, thinking about how little that partial truth actually cost me to give her, and how much more it’s going to cost when the days I asked for run out.

The weight of what I stand to lose doubled the moment she told me about the baby.

Today it settled into something I can start actually working against, instead of something I’ve been quietly drowning under in silence, even if I’ve only given her a fraction of what she deserves to know.