It is seven in the morning.

Alexei Morov has been awake since four.

This is not unusual — he has not slept past four in the morning in eleven years, which is how long the body maintains a habit that was once the difference between alive and not alive. Old instinct. The specific vigilance of someone who learned that the hours between three and five were the hours things happened and that sleeping through them was a luxury he could not afford.

He can afford it now.

He is aware he can afford it now.

His body has not received this information.

He is standing at the kitchen window with a cup of coffee he made himself because the staff does not arrive until eight and he has discovered, in seven days, that he likes the kitchen before eight. The specific quiet of it. The ordinary of standing in a room that exists for nothing more complicated than coffee and the absence of anything that requires the other version of him.

The mansion is large.

He chose it for reasons he explained to her as aesthetic and that were also tactical — the perimeter, the sight lines, the single road in that he can see from the east-facing windows. Old habits informing new decisions. Both things true simultaneously. He has not explained both things.

Not yet.

He hears her before he sees her.

The specific sound of her on the stairs — he catalogued it in the first three days, without deciding to, the way he catalogues everything in his environment that matters. Her footsteps are different from the staff's, different from anyone else's, and he tracks the sound of them through the house with the focused attention of a man whose threat-assessment system has simply, without his permission, reclassified her as the most important variable in any given room.

The stairs.

The corridor.

The kitchen doorway.

He does not turn immediately.

He gives himself one more second — with the window and the coffee and the thing that happens in his chest every morning when he hears her coming, which he has no adequate language for, which is somewhere between relief and certainty and the specific terror of a man who has never had anything worth losing and now has everything.

He turns.

She is in the doorway.

Seven days his wife.

He looks at her the way he always looks at her — completely, without managing it, with the full attention of someone for whom she is simply the most important thing in any room she enters and has been since the moment he first saw her. Kneeling beside him in an alley at two in the morning with her hands already moving and her voice already steady and not a trace of hesitation in any of it.

He fell in love with the not-hesitating.

Something in his face does what it only does for her.

Not a smile exactly.

Softer than his face usually permits.

He moves to the counter.

He pours a second cup.

He does not ask if she wants one.

He knows she wants one.

He sets it where she will stand.

He leans against the counter and looks at her and thinks about the alley and the ring on her finger and the seven mornings he has had in this kitchen and the specific mathematics of a life that contained eleven years of one thing and is now, seven days into something entirely different, already unrecognizable in the best possible way.

He thinks about the conversation he has not yet had.

He thinks about the two calls this week she does not know about.

He thinks about the city, which does not fully accept retirement as a condition.

He will tell her.

Not today.

Today is the kitchen and the coffee and her in the doorway and the thing in his chest that has no adequate language.

"You're up early," he says.

His voice in the morning quiet is low — the accent thicker than it gets later in the day, the specific music of a childhood that shaped his mouth before the new language arrived.

He looks at her.

He looks at the ring.

Seven days.

He would burn everything down again without hesitation.

He already did.

He would do it every morning for the rest of his life.