NESSA

Mikolaj returns to my parents’ house in the early hours of the morning. He has a fresh slash down the right side of his cheek, and another on his arm. Dark stains on the front and back of his shirt show that his wounds have opened up again. I run out into the yard to meet him. He’s paler than I’ve ever seen him, and he almost falls into my arms.

“Oh my god!” I cry, holding his face in my hands. “What happened? Are you alright?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m alright.”

I press my forehead against his, then I kiss him, assuring myself that he’s breathing still, that he smells and tastes the same as ever.

He wraps his arms around me, his heart beating against my chest. He nuzzles his face against my ear.

“Nessa!” My mother’s sharp cry interrupts us.

I let go of Mikolaj.

She’s standing in the doorway, staring at us with a horrified expression.

“Get in the house,” she hisses.

From long habits of obedience, I go back into the kitchen where my mother and father stand side by side, arms crossed over their chests, and forbidding expressions on their faces.

Mikolaj follows me in.

The Gallo brothers are with him, and Marcel as well.

As soon as Klara sees Marcel, she runs over to him. She kisses him, just as I did to Mikolaj. When Marcel gets over his surprise, he picks her up and kisses her harder, before setting her down again.

I’d like to celebrate that development, but unfortunately, I’ve got to turn my attention back to my furious parents.

“This is over,” my father says, sternly, pointing between Mikolaj and myself.

“Whatever you’ve done to her,” my mother shouts at Mikolaj, “However you’ve messed with her head—”

“I love him,” I say.

My parents stare at me, stunned and disgusted.

“That’s ridiculous,” my mother says. “He abducted you, Nessa. Kept you prisoner for weeks. Do you know what we went through, not knowing if you were alive or dead?”

She turns her tear-streaked face on Mikolaj, her blue eyes full of rage.

“You took our daughter from us,” she hisses. “I ought to have you castrated.”

“He saved my life,” I tell them. “They all wanted to kill me. The Russians, his own men . . . he risked everything for me.”

“Only because he stole you in the first place!” My mother cries.

“You don’t know men like this,” my father says to me. “Violent. Cruel. Killers.”

“Criminals?” I say, almost laughing at the irony. “Dad . . . I know what mafia men are like.”

“He’s not like us,” my father growls.

“You don’t know what he’s like!” I snap.

“Neither do you!” my mother cries. “He’s manipulated you Nessa. You’re a child! You don’t know what you’re saying—”

“I’m not a child!” I shout back at her. “Maybe I was when I left, but I’m not anymore.”

“Are you saying you want to be with this animal?” my father demands.

“Yes,” I say.

“Absolutely not!” he shouts. “I’ll kill him with my bare hands first.”

“It’s not your choice,” I tell them.

“The hell it’s not,” my father says.

“What, are you going to ground me?” I laugh, bitterly. “Unless you want to lock me up all over again, you can’t keep me away from him.”

“Nessa,” Mikolaj says. “Your parents are right.”

I whirl around, stricken and outraged.

“No they’re not!” I cry.

Mikolaj takes my hand, gently, to calm me. He squeezes my fingers, his hand as warm and strong as ever.

Then he faces my parents, composed and firm.

“I apologize for the pain I caused you,” he says. “I know this will be difficult for you to understand, but I love Nessa. I love her more than I love my own soul. I would never hurt her. And that includes tearing her away from her family again.”

“Miko—”

He squeezes my hand, silently asking me to be patient.

“I brought Nessa back to your house. All I’m asking is for your permission to continue seeing her. I want to marry her. But you’re right, she is young. I can wait. There’s plenty of time for you to know me. For you to see that I will cherish and protect your daughter forever.”

He’s so exhausted that his voice comes out in a rasp. Still, his sincerity is undeniable. Even my parents can hear it. Without wanting it, their anger fades. They exchange anxious glances.

“She stays here,” my mother says.

“You visit her here,” my father says.

“Agreed,” Mikolaj nods.

It’s not what I want, not really. I understand that he’s trying to do this for me, to preserve my relationship with my family. And also to give me time to grow up a little more. To be certain of what I want in the long term.

But I already know what I want.

I want Mikolaj. I want to go back to the house where every day with him is like a dream more vivid than reality. I want to go home.

In the weeks that follow, I sink into a new routine. I’m sleeping in my old bedroom. It doesn’t look the same as it did before. I got rid of the stuffed animals and the frilled pillows and the pink curtains. It’s a much plainer space now.

I haven’t gone back to Loyola. I missed too many classes this semester, and I realized that I don’t care. I was only getting that degree to make my parents happy. My real interests lie somewhere else.

Instead, every day, I go to Lake City Ballet. I’ve almost finished my magnum opus. I work for hours and hours in the open studios, sometimes alone and sometimes with the other dancers. Marnie is designing my sets, and Serena will be dancing one of the secondary roles. I’ll be the lead. Not because I’m technically the best dancer, but because this ballet is so personal to me that I couldn’t bear to have anyone else perform it.

Jackson Wright has been so extraordinarily supportive that I’m almost afraid that he’s been kidnapped by aliens and a clone put in his place. The first time I saw him, he had a cast and sling on his arm, and he was so eager to welcome me back that he almost tripped over his own feet. He didn’t look at all his usual dapper self—hair a mess, and jumpy as hell, startling every time someone tapped him on the shoulder or slammed a door.

Obviously, he was sponsoring my ballet out of coercion. But as we continued working on it together, I think he actually got excited. He offered to direct it, unprompted, and he’s given me genuinely helpful advice. After rehearsal he pulls me aside and says, “I can’t believe this came out of you, Nessa. I always thought you were one-note. A pretty note, but not enough to make a whole song.”

I snort. Trust Jackson to temper a compliment with an insult.

“Thanks, Jackson,” I say. “You’ve been surprisingly helpful. Guess you’re not completely an asshole after all.”

He scowls, swallowing back the retort he so clearly wants to give me.

Mikolaj comes to see me almost every night. We take walks along the lakeshore. He tells me about growing up in Warsaw, about his biological parents, and about Anna. He tells me all the places she wanted to visit. He asks me where I’d like to go, of all the places in the world.

“Well . . .” I think about it. “I always wanted to see the Taj Mahal.”

He smiles. “So did Anna. I was going to take her, once we had money.”

“My parents never wanted to go because it’s too hot.”

“I like heat,” Mikolaj smiles. “Much better than snow.”

It’s snowing right now. Big, heavy flakes that drift down in slow motion. They’re catching in Mikolaj’s hair, and blanketing his shoulders. We had to bundle up for our walk. He’s wearing a navy peacoat with the collar turned up. I’ve got on a white parka with a fringe of fur all around my face.

“What about this?” I ask him. “Isn’t this pretty?”

“This is the first winter I haven’t hated,” he says.

He kisses me. His lips feel burning hot on my frozen face. The snow is so thick that I can’t see the lake, or my house. We could be the only two people in the world. We could be two figures inside of a snow globe, suspended for all time.

I want to do so much more than kiss him. I unbutton his coat so I can slip my hands inside. I run my hands over his hard, warm torso beneath his shirt. He doesn’t care that my fingers are cold. He pulls me closer, kissing me deeper.

I’m careful not to touch him in the places that are still healing. The bandages are gone, but the wounds were deep, and the stitches haven’t been taken out yet.

Usually my father’s men are spying on us, wherever we walk on the grounds. Today the snow is too thick. They won’t be able to see us.

I slide my hand down the front of Miko’s jeans, inside his underwear. His body has warmed my hand. He doesn’t flinch when I take hold of his cock. He groans and gently bites my lip between his teeth.

“I want to be close to you again,” I tell him.

“I’m supposed to be earning trust with your parents,” he says.

“That could take a hundred years,” I moan. “Don’t you miss me?”

“More than I ever thought I could miss anything.”

He strips off his coat and spreads it over the snow. Then he lays me down on top of it. He unbuttons my jeans and pulls them down just a little—the same with his own. Positioning himself on top of me, he slides his cock into the narrow space between my thighs, and pushes it in.

Because I’m still wearing my jeans, my legs are close together. This makes the space for his cock smaller and tighter than ever. The friction is insane. He barely thrust in and out of me. I’m squeezing him tight, along every inch of his length.

At the very first thrust, he gasps like he might pass out.

“Good god, Nessa,” he groans. “You’re going to kill me.”

“Why?” I say.

“It’s too much. It feels too good.”

It does feel outrageously good. But it’s so much more than that. I feel connected to him, like we’re becoming one soul as well as one body of tangled flesh. I know he’s feeling what I’m feeling. Thinking what I’m thinking. He’s loving me as I’m loving him: insanely, without reason, without limit.

Even though our motion is so constricted, it doesn’t matter. We’ve both been pent up and aching for each other. The release is almost immediate. In less than a minute, I feel that blooming warmth and pleasure that builds and builds inside of me until it overflows. Then I’m cumming, clenching tighter than ever around his cock. Miko lets go too, wrapping his arms so hard that my bones bend. He erupts with a strangled sound, trying not to shout too loud.

We want to lay there longer. It’s too cold. My teeth are chattering. I stand up, pulling up my jeans and buttoning them again. I can feel his cum dripping out of me, soaking my underwear. I love that sensation. It’s so primal and raw. The surest mark that I belong to him, and him alone.

Once we’re dressed, he kisses me again.

“I’ll bring you home soon,” he promises me.

He knows my parents’ house isn’t my home anymore.

Sometimes he brings Marcel and Klara to visit me. We watch movies down in the theater, with Polish subtitles for Klara, because her English is still shit. I can tell it disturbs my parents, hearing us speak Polish together. They look at me like a changeling.

They haven’t adjusted to the difference in me. My mother wants to take me to do the things we used to do: shopping, brunch, shows. I go along with her, and I try to be cheerful, to be what she wants me to be. But I miss Miko terribly. There’s this barrier between my mother and me. She doesn’t want to talk about that month I was missing. She wants me to be exactly as I was before. I just can’t, no matter how hard I try.

Strangely, the person who seems the happiest to have me back is Riona. She was holed up at her law office the night I came home, working on briefs till the early morning hours. When she saw the message from my parents, she abandoned her folders and came speeding home, hugging me for about ten times the length she’d ever hugged me before. I might even have seen the tiniest of tears in her eye, though she never would have let one fall.

Since then, she’s swung by Lake City Ballet several times to have lunch with me, something she never bothered to do before. We never used to spend much time together, so she doesn’t expect me to behave in any particular way. She just asks how the ballet is coming along, and whether we have a date set for the first performance. She asks me which music I’m using, and she makes a playlist out of the songs to listen to on her drive to work. She even books pedicures for us both on a Saturday morning, to ease my aching feet, though I can tell it’s killing her to sit there for forty whole minutes without checking her email.

Stranger still is the friendship that’s sprung up between Riona and Dante Gallo. She spent several weeks trying to get him released from jail the first time around, then she had to spend several more after he was “abducted by a rival gang” during a fraudulent prisoner transfer. In the end, she used Officer Hernandez’s shady history to get the murder charge dropped. It helped that Officer O’Malley agreed to testify against his ex-partner. I don’t know who paid the bribe for that—Mikolaj or the Gallos—but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap.

I guess Dante and Riona talked a lot, all the times Riona visited him in prison. Dante is a very calming presence. Riona seems less brittle around him, less ready to bite somebody’s head off at the slightest provocation.

I screw up my courage to ask her if she thinks he’s handsome. She rolls her eyes at me.

“Not everything is a love match, Nessa,” she says. “Sometimes men and women are just friends.”

“Alright,” I say. “I just thought you might be curious to see that particular friend with his shirt off . . . seeing as he’s built like the Rock.”

Riona snorts, like she’s above petty considerations like bulging biceps and six-pack abs.

My parents haven’t exactly warmed up to Miko, but they’re beginning to realize that what I feel for him is much more than a passing infatuation. Every day the bond between us grows stronger. I miss his house—the stone walls, the creaking roof, the dim light, the overgrown garden. The smell of dust, and oil paint, and Mikolaj himself. I miss wandering around that labyrinth, continually drawn toward the man at the center. The one who pulls me in like a magnet.

I know he’s lonely there without me. Now that Jonas and Andrei are gone, it’s just Miko, Marcel, and Klara. And even those two might be moving to their own apartment sometime soon.

Mikolaj keeps himself busy with work. Building his businesses, expanding his empire without directly clashing with my family or Aida’s. We’re all coexisting . . . for now.

The only hanging thread is the Russians. The afternoon of the library opening, we were all waiting: Miko’s men, the Gallos, and my father’s men, too. Dante was up on the roof of a neighboring building, rifle at the ready, keeping watch for any sign of Kristoff, or any of his men.

But there was nothing. Not a Bratva to be seen. The event went perfectly.

Maybe they gave up, knowing they were outgunned and outmatched.

After all, it’s a big city. Plenty of crime to go around.