Inside the wings, the street is still there: the agents, the vendors, the call of Tangier. It just no longer applies to them.
翅膀之内，街道依旧：特工、商贩、丹吉尔的喧嚣。只是这一切，与他们再无关系。
“So why do I feel the same for you as I always have?” He kisses me softly, starting at my cheek, each kiss landing closer to my lips.
“I don’t know. I must confess this part is not written by me.”
Then and there, the air inside the pocket shifts.
For a heartbeat he only looks at me, wings still folded around us, silver eyes searching my face as if he were counting every life I have just laid between us.
“Writer,” he says at last, the word roughened by his clipped Russian vowels. Писательница. He is no longer mistaking me for Elena, and no longer pretending the distinction saves either of us. “You pull me out of icy corridors. You give me daughters. And then you say ‘welcome to the family’ like it is small thing.”
I open my mouth to answer, some dry, deflecting line already sharpening on my tongue, but it never makes it out. He lifts me and my legs find his waist, and I let him in, standing in the middle of everywhere and nowhere. He pulls me flush against him as the wings fold closer, turning Tangier’s chaos into a distant blur of sound and colour.
“This is mad,” I manage, the protest thin even to my own ears.
“Da,” he murmurs. “But you wrote mad first.”
«Да. Но безумие ты написала первой.»
His mouth finds mine then. It isn’t Wolfgang’s slow, feral claim but a different intensity altogether, centuries of corridors and half-remembered battles compressed into a single, deliberate act. The pocket tightens around us; the street slides further away. I feel the whole length of him against me, the soft rasp of feathers and leather, his body finally fully present in a timeline that isn’t trying to erase him.
For once, I don’t narrate it, don’t analyse it, don’t weigh consequences against myth. I only answer, letting him fill me, suspended in the middle of everywhere and nowhere. My fingers curl into the scars at his neck, and I let the archangel and the ex-KGB man both have their due.
Outside the pocket, men with wires in their ears scan the crowd for two vanished figures. Inside, under the shelter of impossible wings, Mikhail and I drop, together, into a different kind of gravity.
Он поднимает меня, мои ноги сами находят его пояс, и я впускаю его, зависнув между всем и ничем
Afterwards, he whispers against my throat, “Now you are with my fruit too.”
«Теперь ты носишь и мой плод.»
The last thing I remember is stone at my back and the slow unfurling of his wings. Then the world tips sideways.
他把我抱起，我的双腿缠上他的腰，我让他进入我，悬在万处与无处的正中央。
In Russian, плод means both fruit and the child not yet born. He chose the word. She heard both.
俄语里，”плод”既是果实，也是尚未出生的孩子。他选了这个词。她听懂了两层意思。
[Start the series here →]
© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange, published by CYcrds OÜ
