But what about her? Did she want a baby? With him? Now? She must, at least in part, if her first instinct had been to protect it. Right?
“Dorogoy.” She leaned into his hand, breath heaving. “I faced down the enemy on the battlefield without flinching. But this . . . this terrifies me.”
“I know. But you’re not alone. I’m with you. I’m not going anywhere. We can go home, tell our superiors how the flu interfered with the mission, but all else is well here. Yes?”
She huffed out a breath and looked ready to roll her eyes. But she was a Russian soldier. She knew when to accept defeat. Or, at the very least, when to cut one’s losses and run, leaving only burned ground behind them for the enemy. She nodded.
“And then . . .” He settled his other hand on one of her wrists, still wrapped around her middle. “Then we do as we planned. We make a life for ourselves.”
“But I don’t want the life we planned.” She squeezed her eyes shut but only for a second. When she opened them again, her gaze held his. Too warm to be speaking a farewell. He hoped. “I want . . . I want to love our child. I don’t know how to be a mother, but I have to try. I want to try.”
“Then marry me, Nadya.” He caressed her wrist with his thumb. “It will not be a prison—I promise you. If you but let me, I will be your wings.”
A million thoughts warred across her face like a battlefield, and he couldn’t be sure which would win. Hope . . . or fear? But at last her eyes slid shut, she drew in a breath, and she leaned toward him. “I trust you, Zhenya. I . . . I will marry you. If you’ll have me.”
If he weren’t still so weak, he may have leapt up and danced. Instead, he grinned. “I will have you, milaya moya.”
“Well. We can take care of that before you leave England, if you like.”
At the unfamiliar voice, Evgeni startled. He hadn’t even noticed the man hovering in the doorway, but he was without doubt a Russian. The long beard gave him away as surely as the smoothly spoken words. Evgeni looked to his brother, who was chuckling.
Zivon waved toward the older man. “Allow me to introduce Father Evgeny Smirnov.”
Evgeni breathed a laugh. He’d known his brother would find any Orthodox church to be found. “A good name.”
“I was thinking the same of yours.” The priest grinned and lifted his brows. “So? A wedding before you go?”
Evgeni looked to Nadya. This certainly wasn’t what they’d planned. Not in general, not when they came to England. Not when they’d plotted how to render Zivon neutral. But it also wasn’t what he’d expected if the mission went wrong. He’d thought there would be death, or arrest. Fleeing in the dead of night, perhaps. Defeat.
This was no defeat, even if it wasn’t the victory he’d expected. It was better. Thanks, he knew, to his brother’s bargaining for them.
That was Zivon. Always needing to be the one moving the game pieces. Always anticipating the patterns and reacting to them.
Always taking care of him.
Nadya finally moved her arm. Put her fingers in his. And nodded.
A click. A whir. And his brother’s laugh.
“What?” Lily grinned. “I wasn’t about to let that moment go uncaptured.”
29
WEDNESDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 1918
Do you have it yet, milaya?”
Lily pushed away from her retouching desk, smiling over at the door. Zivon leaned into the doorframe, eyes bright behind his glasses. “You mean since you were last sent down to ask ten whole minutes ago?”
His smile sent a lovely wave of warmth flowing through her. She’d thought it would ease by now, but it seemed the opposite had happened. Every time she saw him—especially when it was unexpected—she was hit anew with how much she loved him. “The admiral is impatient. And I do not mind being his errand boy in this case, as well he knows.”
No one would ever hear her complain about it. She stood, casting a look over her shoulder, where Mama still held the loupe to the photograph Lily had passed to her five minutes before. “You’ll have to ask her. What do you think, Mama? Is it ready?”
She looked up with a sigh—and glinting eyes. “I don’t know, Lily Love. The composition is terrible. No effort was made at all to balance foreground and background, and—”
Lily’s laughter cut her off. “You’ll have to blame the German photographer for that. All I did was change uniforms, faces, and the ships in the background.”
“Ah yes. That is all.” Zivon had apparently moved to her side, given that his voice now came from beside her ear. And his hand slipped into its usual place on her waist.
Mama grinned at them, then at the photo, which she held up. “I see no evidence at all of your hand. It is, as usual, flawless.”
It ought to be, given the number of hours she’d poured into that one. She still had the crick in her neck to prove it, too, and lifted a hand to rub at it.
Zivon’s fingers brushed hers away, and his thumb dug into the knot in her shoulder. He always knew just where it hid. “Shall we take it up, then?”
“Of course.” But she didn’t move. In part because it would mean dislodging Zivon’s hand . . . but mostly because she knew what this photograph meant. If it worked as the admiral and Zivon thought, then it could well be the last one he ever called on her to create.
If it worked, the German army would think the English were mutinying too.
If it worked, those flames of rebellion on the Continent that had been smoldering and flaring up since August would erupt into a full-out blaze.
If it worked, the war would be over before another week could pass.
She wanted that. Of course she did. It was what she and everyone else here, everyone else everywhere, had been striving for these four-and-a-half interminable years. But it would mean a change to everything she’d come to know.
No more reporting here every day. No more Room 40 to report to. All the codebreakers would go back to their lives, their real careers. Professors and scholars, linguists and music critics, bankers and students.
Mama came close, handed the picture to Zivon, and gripped Lily’s hand. “You have done good work here, Lily Love. I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you, Mama.” Another something to be grateful for, that her mother had been working alongside her. That Zivon, his name clear, had stayed at his desk upstairs, where everyone knew they could turn to “Old Ziv” for any necessary help with languages. That the admiral had finally come to agree with his advice on how the British forces should, in fact, react to the mutiny.
She was ready for the war to be over. She just wasn’t entirely sure what life would look like when it was. They wouldn’t need her here, and they wouldn’t need her at the hospital much longer, now that male medical personnel were returning to take over. There was no Ivy to plan and laugh with. There were just her forgotten dreams, her camera, her parents . . . and a man who had to be wondering as much as she was what the future would hold.
They’d spoken of everything else—of churches and children and whether they thought it would be a niece or a nephew to be born in Russia in the spring. Of Paris and Moscow and neighborhoods in London where they might be able to find a house for a reasonable price. But he hadn’t asked yet the one question she was waiting for. He hadn’t presented her with a ring, though he had given her a strap for her camera, so she could sling it around her neck, which she’d proclaimed far better than jewelry.