"Nika."
"Hmmmm?"
She's coming down from her high, still thrumming with feeling but feeling the drowsiness of exhaustion pulling at her. She has one leg over him and his body is angled so that his arm falls effortlessly over her waist, curled along her backside.
He kisses her forehead and uses his other arm to prop himself up, looking down at her as she smiles at him from under her hooded eyelashes.
She's so content here, wrapped up in him, feeling as though this moment was made just for her.
"I have to leave."
And then her world comes crashing down.
"Leave? What do you mean?"
"When I left the organization, I made a deal to keep you safe."
She had never asked him the details of her safety, how it came so easy, how she suddenly one day was able to stop looking over her shoulder and live an enchanted life in her vineyard. She knows it had to have come at a price, but this…him leaving her…this she almost can't fathom.
"What kind of a deal?"
"I go in for select missions in exchange for a freeze on any outstanding hits on you."
"Select missions. The death missions, you mean."
He doesn't say anything at this, and her own anger is getting to her.
"What if you don't go."
"Then the agreement is off, and there will be people coming after you."
She deflates, he's going to have to keep on risking his life for her safety.
"I…I don't want you to go."
He stays silent, his eyes trained on her.
"Tell me you'll come home safe?"
"I'm good at what I do, and I should be successful."
That's right. He wouldn't make a promise he couldn't keep.
"How long?"
"I can't say for sure."
So that's it, he just goes – disappears really – and there will be no guarantee of when (and if) he comes home.
"Okay," she hears herself say, because she doesn't know what else there is in this moment.
"I have to leave in a few days."
A few days.
The day before he leaves, she works out her anger at the whole fucking situation by screwing him senseless, angrily riding him until she clenches up and releases everything, shaking with the feeling of letting it all go.
As she collapses against him, her face in his neck, she feels the wetness of her own tears against his skin. He strokes her back, slow and light, and she lets herself sob at how unfair the world is sometimes, to give her something so beautiful only to threaten to take it away.
She's swears she'll tell him. She promises she will. If he makes it back safely, she won't be chicken anymore, and she'll say she loves him. To his face. No matter what happens. She'll tell him.
It's been a week since he left, and while they spent their last few days before his mission doing normal things, like taking Leo on walks and having meals and having sex even, her own sense of doom casting a shadow over their time together she thinks.
Despite her optimistic demeanor, Nika has spent the last few years of her life expecting the worse of things – it's the only way she's known how to survive. This time, though, she won't let herself do that. She won't let herself picture her life without him in it.
She talks to Leo every day. She tells him that his daddy will come home and teach him how to ride a bike and drive a car and raise him to be a real man who respects women and takes care of those who are defenseless and never run away from the dark things that most people are afraid of.
When she's trying to sleep, though, alone in their big bed, she can't help the nagging thoughts, the worry, the fear that she'll never see him again. She finds a note in his side of the drawer one day (she wasn't snooping, she just wanted something that smelled like him). It's addressed to her, so he must have known she'd go rifling through his things. This makes her smile for some reason.
As she begins reading, however, tears begin to fall freely down her cheeks and over her smile, hitting the page she holds in her hands.
Dear Nika,
Don't be afraid. You asked me about who I was before I met you. You don't understand that I wasn't anything before I met you. You and Leo are my reason. Stay strong and trust that I will do everything I can to come back to you.
-F.S.
His handwriting is as neat and crisp as ever, almost machinelike, but his words are warm and his. She holds the paper close to her heart, full of love but also full of fear, and then she lets herself weep.
She loves him, and he has to come home so she can tell him.
He comes home on a Wednesday. Leo spends the morning being fussy. He's teething, so she coddles him, soothing him every time he cries out. She's just lulled him to sleep with an old lullaby she's fairly certain her mother used to sing her when she hears a creak next to the doorframe.
She panics, holding Leo closer to her chest as she jerks her head around.
And then she sees him, looking at her and Leo with such a sweet expression that it makes her let go of whatever fear and panic were with her before.
He looks tired, she notes, and a little more weary than she's seen him before, but he's alive and that's the only thing that matters.
"Welcome home," she whispers as not wake the sleeping baby, "I missed you."
He looks at her, eyes searching her face, "it's good to be home."
He sleeps for almost three hours before coming downstairs to look for Nika. She's in the kitchen, fixing him a dish she's sure is his favorite – an old Russian pasta dish that she's sure is wildly unhealthy and not a part of his training regimen.
She hums softly as she stirs in the ingredients, smiling to herself as she thinks of how his sleeping form clung to her and almost didn't allow her to leave as she made her way downstairs.
"Are you hungry?" she asks, when she sees him standing in the doorframe.
He nods and takes out two plates from the cupboard, setting the table in what feels to be the most natural dance between the two of them in this kitchen. She heaps on two servings onto his plate, noting that he looks more gaunt than when he left.
He pours them water after she shakes her head at his question about wine.
"I'm sorry that you've been worried," he says, after taking a few bites of his food.
"It doesn't matter," she tells him, "you're home now."
Later, as he washes the dishes, she can't stop herself from throwing her arms around him from behind, clinging to him, her heart beating with the fear and nervousness of telling him how she feels.
He shuts off the water and dries his hands on the towel sitting next to the sink. Turning, he holds her tightly. She begins to kiss him, feverishly, needing an outlet for everything that's bursting from within her.
He reciprocates, and there's something in the forcefulness of his kiss that makes her think he needs this just as much as her.
"Wait," she breaks the kiss abruptly, "stop. I made a deal with God that if you came home safely, I would do something. I would tell you something."
"Okay."
"I don't want this to change anything, and I don't want anything from you just because I'm telling you this, but you have always been honest with me, and I want to be honest with you too…so…I love you."
There's a pause, and then 47 replies.
"Okay."
And then Nika feels it, the sinking of rejection, indifference, and she rushes to remind herself of the moments when he pauses before kissing her, of the way he cups Leo's head in his hands and reads to them from history books, but it doesn't dam the sob that's threatening to make it's way up her throat.
And she has to get out of here before any tears fall.
"Okay," she says through closed lips, forcing her lips into a smile, "I need to go check on Leo."
"Nika."
She turns.
"I don't know much about these things," he pauses for a second and all Nika can hear is the pounding of her heart. He looks at her, deliberately, "thank you for telling me."
Nika gives him the best smile she can muster – he must see the wateriness of her eyes and the trembling of her lip – and makes her way up the stairs.
She's staring over her son, sleeping peacefully under the slow turn of the wooden mobile, when his voice startles her out of her thoughts.
"How is he?"
"Sleeping like an angel."
"Good, the books all say that he's ahead of schedule in that department."
"Hm."
It's all she can muster right now.
"Why do you love me?"
So he's not going to ignore what just happened downstairs.
"What do you mean?"
"I care for you, Nika, but I'm not sure if I know what love is."
And this makes her angry.
"Bullshit. You love our son, I see it in everything you do for him, in the way that you would sacrifice yourself to keep him safe, in the way you rush to his side in the middle of the night if he so much as whimpers."
"Okay. Is that how you feel about me?"
"I - "
Nika pauses, her own thoughts jumbled by this question.
"I feel the need to protect you, yes. But I also know I love you because I find myself making exceptions for you."
47 considers this.
"I care for you, Nika - "
Ah, the gentle letdown. It doesn't feel so gentle within Nika's chest, however.
"It's okay, Frank. I'm not asking you to love me. You love Leo, and that is something I could have never dreamed of for him."
"Nika, let me finish."
She startles. Normally, he is patient and waits out her interruptions.
"I care for you, Nika. I care for Leo. I was raised in a place where we never heard of the word love. I asked you why you loved me so that I could see if it was what I felt as well."
"And?"
"I don't know."
"Oh."
"This is what I know. I'll make any exception to my code, my rules, my life to make sure you're happy and safe. For Leo and for you. You run through my thoughts always, even when I'm trying to focus on other things. Everything I am, now, is because of you. So yes, I think I love you, Nika."
It's not the most romantic confession of love by a longshot – in fact, it probably wouldn't qualify as romantic at all. But for Nika, it's enough to make her stop breathing.
He loves her.
She wants to be pressed against him, in his arms, pressing her skin against his with this new knowledge that he loves her.
Leo chooses that moment to stir, though, beginning with the soft warning whimpers that threaten to turn into great wails.
She doesn't want to stop looking at her husband, though she turns her gaze to her son slowly and strokes his back, which seems to calm him down.
"You love me."
"Yes."
"Kiss me now, you idiot," she repeats over and over in her head.
And he strides over, obediently, raising his hand to trace over the blank space of skin where her dragon tattoo once was.
"As you wish."
Oops, so maybe that wasn't in her head after all.
When she cranes her head up and her lips meet his she feels a jolt of electricity that stuns her temporarily, but when she comes back down to earth she's bathing in his warmth, his safety, his love.
Nika had always pushed away the secret wonder that stirred up within her, the dream of what a fairytale life might look like.
She would dream of safety, of sunny days, of a family perhaps, but never in her wildest imagination did she dream of someone like 47.
To be fair, she doesn't think any woman dreams of a hitman kidnapping her and throwing her in the trunk of a car.
Now that she has this life, though, it is something that is outside of her dreams completely.
Nobody tells you how strong it makes you feel. She imagined feeling giddy and dizzy and foolishly happy, but there's a calm strength to her, emboldened by the knowledge that he loves her.
"Tell me you love me."
"I love you."
"Tell me again."
"I love you."
He never loses his patience, never snaps or becomes irritated. He tells her as many times as she asks to hear it, with the same calm matter-of-fact tone. Another woman might question his sincerity, but Nika has never believed anything more in her life.
"I love you," she says to him, "I love you, I love you, I love you."
Under other circumstances, Nika would be bothered that she gives her "I love you's" so freely and frequently to her husband, and he rarely ever (actually, never) says it of his own accord (except for that first time, but that was really prompted by her crying jag and confession of love wasn't it?). But her life isn't normal, and she doesn't doubt that he loves her one bit. It's not his way to offer words he thinks are unnecessary. She sees it in the way he wakes to tend to Leo so she can sleep, how he always makes sure to bring her a pair of socks to bed because her feet get cold, how he never fails to pick up a pain-au-chocolate (her favorite pastry) when he returns from town. She sees it in his eyes whenever he moves inside her, the care that he shows when she whimpers at the soreness as he enters. She sees it when he looks up at her patiently, letting her straddle him and work out the years of anger at being the one pinned under a body. She feels it when he brushes the gentlest of kisses against her body, straining to avoid touching her with any other part of his body. She sees it in his eyes as she brings Leo to her in the middle of the night as the baby suckles her breast and he watches them so diligently.
She doesn't need his words, she has the rest of him.
"Tell me again?"
"I love you."
But damn the fucker, she still loves it when he says it.
When Leo turns six months old, she broaches the subject with him.
"When do you think he's ready for school?"
"School?"
"Yes, most children do go to school, you know."
He doesn't laugh, and she's nervous, because even though she thinks she can read him better than anyone else on this planet, she doesn't know what he's thinking right now.
"What do you think?" he asks her.
"I think it would be good for him to start meeting other children. Maybe we put him in daycare in a few months, just for a day a week to start out."
"Okay."
"What do you think?"
"I think that sounds like a good plan."
"Are you worried?"
"Yes. I know it's not rational."
"I've heard love isn't rational."
"Yes, but I still try to be."
"I like that you aren't rational when it comes to Leo."
"You do?"
"Yes, I think it makes you human," she says smiling while running a hand through his hair and straddling his lap.
The house doesn't come with a library, but she converts the small study on the first floor into one.
Reading, the secret pleasure of it, never quite disappeared from Nika's life even when all other traces of her youthful joy fled over the years she belonged to Belicoff. Her hitman likes to read more practical things – non-fiction accounts, biographies, manuals, scientific textbooks – so she creates room on her shelves for those items, but she also fills her library with works of the great stories and poems and literature that took away from the horrors of her previous life if only for a few hours.
47 still reads to their son diligently, at least once a day, sometimes twice a day. Nika loves those moments, when she hears her husband's calm voice lull the baby to sleep. Sometimes, Nika will read to Leo as well, anything from nursery rhymes to sad poems to beautiful prose.
But the moments she cherishes just as much as those are the ones where she is alone with her books, without the threat of anyone catching her reading and laughing at the notion of a whore enjoying literature.
She likes it when they go for walks and he straps on the silly contraption that holds Leo close to his chest. Her son faces outwards, his head turning constantly as he tries to follow the world around him. His feet dangle, and sometimes he kicks in excitement.
"Frank, look."
Her husband turns to her, she's pointing to their boy. He's still – so unnaturally still that she is slightly worried. But then there's the look of wonder on his face, shocked into awe – has she ever been so reverent of anything in her life?
Her son – their son – is entranced by a butterfly that his landed, of all places, on her husband's shoulder.
"Thank you for letting me part of his life."
She's going to have to become accustomed to all of the voluntary words he's offering up lately, because she can't keep coming to the verge of bursting out into tears every time he lets loose a string of words like these unprompted.
She takes his hand and tells him, "I love you," as she does many times a day now. And she knows that no matter how much time will pass, she will always carry the warmth of this moment with her.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
They meet the other parents at the daycare orientation the day before they drop Leo off for his first day.
She dresses conservatively and re-applies her lipstick more often than needed. Her husband seems calm, though she has her suspicions that he really is not.
When they arrive, the small talk is pleasant enough. The other mothers look twice at her husband, she notes with a spike of pleasure she doesn't quite like. He's unbearably handsome, she thinks, with his hair grown out a bit and cropped close, and a bit of scruff to contrast with his clean cut suit. He no longer dons his red tie at every occasion, but the unbuttoned top button of his white shirt seems to only make him tenfold more attractive.
There is one mother in particular, who still has her youthful body but whose face is beginning to show the lines of time, who Nika is particularly wary of. Her husband looks older, wealthier, and has the receding hairline and paunch of middle age. Nika sees the way this woman looks dissatisfied at her own husband and how she eyes Nika's husband with appreciation.
Frank, to his credit, doesn't break the woman's wrist when she touches his arm in the middle of a conversation. His jaw clenches a tiny bit, but he hides it well and makes pleasantries for the sake of their son.
They sit in a semi-circle around the director of the daycare, in chairs that are comically small she thinks. The director, a woman in her earlier forties Nika thinks, goes over the goals of the daycare, the different schedules that are available, and then she asks for questions.
There is a momentary pause as all of the parents in the room avoid eye contact with each other, all trying to get out of asking a question.
Her husband's hand goes up, though, and the director smiles kindly at him as she gestures for him to speak.
"What safety precautions are in place here?" he asks, and Nika has to keep herself from openly laughing in this session. He would have probably asked about the security system here if that weren't overtly suspicious for them.
The director launches into a short spiel on the value of safety at this particular daycare and Nika can feel herself tuning out slightly, but 47 remains engrossed. It's endearing, she thinks, how he is so focused and protective of them he is.
It's then that she really comprehends that the pervading feeling of fear and volatility that has dominated the majority of her life is no longer there every day. There are still moments where she experiences flashes of terror at the thought of Belicoff and his goons coming to find her, but those are few and far between these days. No, she hasn't felt unsafe in a very long time, and as 47 asks a follow up question about how the center prevents sickness from spreading, she feels so much love that she thinks her heart will explode – she hasn't felt unsafe since the moment he returned to the vineyard.