No, she only felt relieved.
By the time they made it outside of the building, she could see Niklaus running towards her. He didn’t stop until he had her swept up in his arms.
“How did you get here so fast?” she mumbled into the side of his neck, her eyes closed as she held him tight.
“A little bird hacked the security cameras.”
“That fast?”
Niklaus shrugged. “You don’t know Winter.”
“I’m going to go clean up the body,” Luka called with a wave of his hand as he headed back inside the building.
“What happened to Rourke?”
“If he’s smart, he’s back in Ireland hoping the borders can protect him. And you already know about the father.”
He had told her all about it, though she was sure he had left out a number of details. But she hadn’t called him on this one—she didn’t think she wanted details as to how a man died.
“And now they won’t be a problemanymore.”
Not for her. Nor Jimmy. Nor anyone else that was being hustled by the pair of brothers.
In mere weeks, Niklaus had solved another problem for her.
He had always been rather good at that.
“Do you have another job?” she asked as he set her back on her feet, gazing up. “Are you leaving again?”
She might not have known what jobs he had been on before, so she hadn’t seen the beginning or the end, but now she was right in the middle of it.
“Not if I’m staying with you.”
She smiled. “What exactly are you asking?”
His lips tilted up into a smile that made her heart ache with happiness. “A few nights, or all of them. Your choice.”
She had never been able to resist him, not then, and definitely not now.
Epilogue
“There a reason you needed to disrupt my day, Volkov,” Niklaus asked as he joined his brother in his McLaren, already pulling on his seatbelt though they had yet to pull off.
He didn’t trust anyone’s driving but his own.
“I owed you a debt. An apology was never good enough, so I had to do something else.”
Niklaus just stared at his twin. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Mishca didn’t respond, merely putting the car into drive and pulling away from the curb. If Niklaus wasn’t already confused as to what was happening, it only got worse. Not only was this out of the ordinary for him—they had mended bridges though they still didn’t go out of their way to be around each other—but he was driving, and as far as Niklaus could tell, he didn’t have any of his muscle trailing them.
If it was anyone else, Niklaus might have thought that he was being taken to his death or at the very least an ambush. Though the McCarthy family was taken care of, and the man Niklaus had been tasked with finding was in the wind, he still had a meeting with the Kingmaker to tell him everything that had gone down.
He wouldn’t put it past his handler to orchestrate this just to fuck with him.
Except, they pulled over at a brownstone in a suburban neighborhood where there were people out walking their dogs, jogging, or other such things.
Mishca still didn’t explain as he killed the engine and climbed out, fully expecting Niklaus to follow behind him. His curiosity piqued, he did.
Producing a key, Mishca unlocked the residence, stepping out of the way with a nod of his head for Niklaus to go ahead of him.
“Are you going to explain, or do you want me to guess?” Niklaus asked as he walked in, the scent of freshly painted walls greeting him.
The space was fully decorated in warm neutrals, and looked lived in already despite how new everything looked. He heard voices coming from what he thought was the kitchen, Reagan he could tell, and Lauren from the soft laughter. And somebody else, but he couldn’t make out the voice.
“What, you bought me a place?” Niklaus asked. While he would never admit it aloud, the place was pretty nice. “Sorry, Russian, I don’t need it.”
“Not for you,” he said pocketing his keys. “Someone else.”
“Then who—”
The question was answered when his gaze moved to the three people that were walking in from the doorway across the room.
“I didn’t need all of this.”
“We know,” Lauren was saying, “but you deserve this.”
The woman Lauren was talking to was tiny, probably shorter than even Alex, with silver hair neatly smoothed into a bun at the nape of her neck. Wrinkles were abundant in her face from a lifetime of laughter and hard work. She had kind eyes, ones that had never looked at Niklaus with anything other than love and acceptance. While she had never hid the fact that she had adopted him—though she never told him the full story as to who and where he came from—she had never treated him as anything other than her son.
His mother, a woman he hadn’t seen in years, stood across the room from him.
It almost felt like his chest was breaking open.