Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Eighteen: Positive

Roman

The results came back on a Thursday, an email from the lab that he read standing in his kitchen, the same kitchen with one photo on the wall, and the single word at the top of the report, positive, landed in his chest like a hit he hadn't braced for.

He called Delaney before he called Nadia, needing her voice first, needing to say the word out loud to someone who'd chosen to stay through the not knowing.

"It's positive," he said, the second she picked up. "Mia's mine."

There was a pause on the line, brief but heavy, and then Delaney's voice, steady despite whatever she was feeling underneath it. "Okay. How do you feel?"

"Terrified. Certain. Both at once, the way you get to feel two things that shouldn't fit together but somehow do." He sat down at the kitchen table, the report still in his hand. "I have a daughter, Delaney. Two years old. I missed her first steps, her first words, two birthdays, and I don't get any of that back, no matter what happens from here."

"No. You don't get that back." Her voice carried no judgment, just plain, careful honesty. "But you get everything after this. However Nadia wants to structure things, custody, involvement, whatever comes next, you get to actually show up now. That's not nothing, even if it's not everything you wish you had."

"Are you okay? Actually okay, not performing okay for my benefit."

Another pause, longer this time. "I'm processing. I think that's the honest answer. I'm not panicking, I'm not running, but I also haven't fully figured out what my role is supposed to look like in a two year old's life when I haven't even met her properly yet, beyond a tense five minutes in a photo studio." A breath, steadying. "I want to meet her. Really meet her, not in a crisis, not in front of cameras. Can we arrange that?"

"I'll ask Nadia today."

Delaney

She met Mia three days later, at a park neutral to everyone involved, Nadia keeping a careful, watchful distance while Roman crouched in the grass, introducing himself properly to a daughter he'd known for exactly four days.

"Hi," Roman said, so gentle Delaney felt something in her chest crack open, watching him, a man who broke bones professionally for a living, going soft and careful in front of a toddler who had no idea yet what any of this meant. "I'm Roman. I think I'm your dad."

Mia studied him with the solemn, unblinking attention of small children assessing something important, and then, without warning, held up a slightly crushed dandelion she'd been clutching. "Flower," she said, decisively, as if this settled the matter entirely.

"Flower," Roman agreed, taking it with the same careful reverence he might have shown an actual gift of significance. "Thank you. This is a very good flower."

Delaney watched from a bench a short distance away, giving them room, feeling something complicated and enormous move through her chest, watching this version of Roman she'd never seen before, tender in a way that had nothing to do with performance or cameras or even the softness she'd once written about him in fiction. This was new. This was real in a way even her own imagination hadn't quite reached.

"You can come closer," Roman said, glancing back at her, something hopeful in his face. "If you want to."

She walked over slowly, and Mia looked up at her with the same solemn assessment she'd given Roman, before offering, generously, half of a second dandelion she'd apparently been saving.

"Flower," Mia said again, holding it out.

"Thank you," Delaney said, throat tight, taking it carefully. "This is a very good flower too."

Nadia watched the whole exchange from a distance, arms crossed, something unreadable in her expression that Delaney couldn't fully parse, not quite hostile, not quite relieved, something more complicated sitting underneath the surface that she filed away without examining too closely, not yet ready to add another layer of worry to an already overwhelming week.

Roman

That night, after Mia had gone home with Nadia and Delaney had come back to his apartment, the two of them sat together on the couch in a silence that felt different from the careful, held breath quiet of the six weeks after the injury. This felt like exhaustion shared honestly, two people who'd absorbed an enormous shock together and were still standing.

"She liked you," Roman said. "The flower. That's not nothing, from a two year old."

"She liked you more. You're apparently very good at crouching in grass and receiving dandelions with appropriate solemnity."

"New skill. Developed this week, alongside several others I didn't know I'd need." He pulled her closer, careful, grateful, the specific gratitude of a man who'd expected, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this news might cost him the wedding entirely, and instead found her still here, still choosing to sit beside him through it. "I keep waiting for you to tell me this is too much. A ready made family you didn't sign up for, three weeks before a wedding you thought would be simple."

"I'm not going to tell you that." Delaney turned to face him properly, certain in a way that had cost her real effort to arrive at, the way certainty always seemed to cost something worth having. "I fell in love with a man who takes hits for his teammates without being asked to. I don't get to be surprised that the same instinct shows up here, with his daughter, and expect him to somehow be a different person just because it's inconvenient timing. I'm choosing this too, Roman. All of it. Mia included."

"You don't have to decide that tonight."

"I already decided it in the park, watching you take that first dandelion like it was the most important thing anyone had ever handed you." She kissed him, slow, certain, something steadier than any kiss they'd shared since the tunnel. "The wedding's still happening. Mia's part of the family now, whatever that ends up looking like practically. We figure out the logistics together, the way we've figured out everything else."

He held her close, something in his chest finally, fully unclenching after four days of bracing for an ending that hadn't come, and thought, not for the first time, that the woman he'd once blackmailed into a fake relationship had turned out to be steadier, in every way that mattered, than he'd had any right to expect or deserve.

"I love you," he said, simple, plain, the way his grandmother had always told him love should be said. "More today than I did last week, which I didn't think was possible until you showed me otherwise."

"I love you too," Delaney said. "Enough to build whatever this new shape of our life needs to look like. Dandelions included."

He laughed, low and real, and held her through the rest of the evening, the two of them quiet on the couch, tired and certain, building slowly, together, toward whatever came next.