Page 34 of Graveyard Promises
From what the doctors told me, and what I’ve lived through this last two months, healing isn’t tidy. The skin closed up fast enough—stitches came out, the scar puckered into a pale line—but the muscle underneath took its sweet time learning to behave again. Physio became a thing that eats parts of the day: small, stupid exercises that feel useless in the moment but add up to being able to raise my arm without a hot spike of pain. Cold mornings still make the shoulder grumble. Sudden movements send are a reminder I need to take it easy.
Recovery came with its own griefs and small victories. Coming here to Paris was a defiant, ridiculous, perfect choice—proof that life could move forward. First steps down the hotel stairs with the sling were clumsy and brave. The first time I reached for a coffee cup with my right hand and didn’t wince, was a victory. The surgeons’ cautionary phrases—“take it easy,” “don’t overdo it”—hung around like an annoyed aunt, but Raphael’s impatience with caution made me laugh more than once. He wants action; the doctors want caution. Somehow we meet in the middle with gentle hands and dangerous promises.
Raphael’s been more surgery-cleaning and stubborn-care than I expected. Small rituals arrived: he helps strap on my physio bandages, presses warm towels to the knot of muscle under the wound, and kisses the place where the scar is paling until it aches in a good way. There’s a feral pride in watching him care for me. He’s protective and ridiculously tender—lifting me off a curb, putting his coat over my shoulder when the wind bites. The first week he kept me close as though I am rare thing; the second month he started pushing me harder—encouraging me to reach, to stretch, to test the limits—not cruel, just relentless in the way men who love can be.
Raphael pulls my body gently toward him, lips finding the curve of my shoulder where the scar is, then move to my mouth. The ache in my shoulder flares, then fades under the press of him. It’s not only my body that’s mending; the past two months have been a messy stitching of trust, of trial and laughter and small, private vows. Paris is loud with possibility. The one-year clock still ticks, but for the first time in a long time it sounds less like a countdown and more like a beginning.
He leans back a fraction, his forehead resting against mine, and asks quietly, “How’re you feeling?”
The question pulls together all the small aches and the big stuff—the scar, the nights, the flash of the cemetery—and I answer honestly, soft. “Tired. Sore. Lucky.”
His thumb sketches circles along the hollow of my jaw. “Lucky,” he repeats. He studies my face until the room shrinks to the two of us. Then the words come, low and plain and everything: “You mean more to me than anything. I love you, Sophia.”
The sentence lands and the air shifts. Letting it sit feels dangerous and impossible at once. My heart fights its cage for a second, and then slow awareness spreads through me—this man who broke me open is the same one who’s been putting me back together. A soft laugh bubbles up, half disbelief, half relief.
My hand moves. Fingers cup his face—soft palm to stubbled cheek—bringing him closer. The kiss is soft at first, honest, and when I whisper it back against his mouth it feels like staking my claim in return.
“I love you too,” I tell him, and the words are small and steady and finally mine.
He smiles down at me, slow and dangerous in the way that makes my knees go soft. Then his mouth is everywhere, soft kisses along my jaw, a trail over my cheek, a ridiculous, tender assault that makes me giggle out loud. The sound is small and bright in the room, he pulls back and studies me, like he’s memorising each freckle and scar.
“Mikhail?” I blurt before I can stop myself, because the thought has been gnawing at the edges of everything since the cemetery. “Did you—did you find him?”
Raphael’s face tightens for the fraction of a breath it takes to answer. “We ran their boys out of Miami,” he says, voice even. “But they’ll be back. They always come back.” He reaches for my hand and folds our fingers together. “Mikhail Orlov isn’t dead.No trace. We think he went home—mother Russia. For now, he’s a ghost in the wind. We keep looking. We will always look.”
A silence settles between us, not empty so much as full of plans.
“What about us?” I ask finally—because there’s a future to be carved out of this mess and I want to know where I fit in it.
“Together we will rule the families. You’re going to get a crash course in what we do, Princess,” he says, like the words are a promise and a challenge at once. “Your father will hate it. He wanted you bare foot and pregnant within a year. This upends that. It will rile him more than anything.” His thumb traces the scar on my shoulder where the bullet slipped through. “But there’s no one I trust more with my heart—or my empire—than you.”
Heat floods me at the weight of that. Empire. Heart. Not empty phrases from a man who knows how to use words as weapons.
Raphael leans in, voice low, almost a growl made soft by the smile in it. “Graveyard promises,” he murmurs, pressing his forehead to mine. “We made them in blood and stone. We’ll keep them—together.”
The word settles there, heavy and real, and for the first time since the cemetery I believe it might be true.
THE END