Let him, I answer and put the phone away.
Night deepens into the kind I like—few cars, honest cold. I take the back stair with my jacket unbuttoned so the holster sits easily. The guards on the landing look at my shoulder, not my face. The thread on her doorknob lies exactly where I left it, unbroken, a thin line of red against wood. I touchbrow, chest, shoulder, shoulder, and feel the cool cross under my shirt. The quiet fury wraps itself back into discipline.
I open her door and step inside.
16
VALYA
Snow freckles the window like breath on glass and his hand rests warm and heavy across my stomach as if my ribs are the only shore he trusts. He smells of soap, cold wool, and the clean bite of gun oil that refuses to become perfume. I let myself drift off again. In the dream, the house key hangs on a ribbon. Keys decide who may cross a threshold. When I wake, he is dressed for war—black knit under the jacket, holster settled, boots that speak in stone. He bends to me. The chain lowers with him, the cross grazing my hip through the sheet. It is cold as iron, stubborn as faith.
He moves his palm on my lips once, slowly, a benediction without theater. Last night settles into something I don't have language for yet. Reverence has a temperature. That is my discovery. He lifts his hand away, and the absence he leaves feels colder than the window.
"Where?" I ask because I'm my father's daughter and because I refuse to be a girl who pretends her house is not acity with a pulse. His gaze searches my face like a man checking a door he already locked.
"Out," he says. The word is deliberately small. He leans and presses his mouth to my temple, then he is gone, boots softened by the runner as he vanishes into a corridor that eats sound for breakfast.
I lie still and watch the snow settle into a steady fall. It is the kind of day that would forgive almost anything if asked correctly. I reach for the little leather book on the table, my grandmother's prayer book with the cracked spine and the red ribbon flattened by decades of thumbs. Last week, the page with the vows felt like a threat written in beautiful penmanship. Today, I open it without bracing. The ink has not changed. I have.
"To bind my fate to his," I whisper, waiting for the old recoil, the reflex that says binding is ownership and ownership a velvet word for prison. It doesn't arrive. Perhaps because last night, he kissed like a believer, not a thief. Perhaps because he did not try to bind me with hands. He spoke his promises like instructions for holy work, each one meant to be carried, not worn. Perhaps, I'm tired of treating love as a classroom where I pass or fail by how well I disappear.
"To trust him with my secrets." As a girl, I learned to set my mouth in the shape of a smile while I hid the ledger behindVogueand taped the charity boxes shut with my handwriting turned into armor. Trust is expensive in this house. I press my thumb to the page and wait for the flinch. It doesn't come.
I dress without the costume. Black sweater, wool skirt, hair braided low, twining with a red silk like an anchor. Thecrucifix warms in my palm before I fasten it. When the chain settles, my heart finds the old rhythm it taught itself.
The morning chooses silence for company. I take the back stairs past the linen closets that smell of starch and clean hands, past the service door where deliveries arrive on schedule, and sometimes what should never have crossed our threshold. The chapel waits the way bread waits under a cloth. The carved door gives with its polite groan. The air inside is beeswax and lamp oil, incense clinging to wood the way perfume lives forever in a shawl.
The icons watch with patient calm, a gaze that once frightened me and now feels like being seen by those who have already forgiven me for forgetting names. I bow, touch brow, chest, shoulder, shoulder, and light a taper for women who survived men and for men who remembered how. The wick catches with a small sound, and the flame stands up and behaves.
I set theBook of Vowson the rail and practice. The Old Church words are river stones in my mouth, rounded, resistant. Father Gavril told me to follow breath more than consonants. They stand firm and soften only when placed where they wish to rest. He is right. I keep the pauses he taught and put muscle behind the syllables until they bear my weight.
"To bind my fate to his," I say in English as well, because a woman should hear herself clearly at least once in a language she uses to order bread and tell a child to go to sleep. The sentence lands without banging into the walls. I say it again, louder. The saints keep their silence, and the Mother's mouth almost softens.
"What I bind," I tell her under my breath, "I will bind on purpose. Not because a man thinks protection is a cousin to possession. Not because my father wants to remake the city in my bones. On purpose."
I stay long enough to know the words will come when I call for them. Then I take the long, warm corridor back to daylight. The house this morning holds the expectant hush of winter households—silver faintly clinking in a far room, a broom soft against stone, the distant punctuation of laughter that has not yet remembered why it should be quiet.
Back in my room, breakfast waits on a low table—buckwheat kasha with a softening square of butter, twosyrnikisugared lightly, sour cherry jam that stains the spoon, black bread cut thickly, salted butter, and pickles at breakfast because this is a Russian house. I pour tea and taste the jam. When it doesn't satisfy, I open the small box I hid and eat the honey cake I kept back, the last of it. Food is sweeter when it belongs only to my hands. In a house where trays are counted and slices are offered with names, a secret piece is a small crown. The sugar melts like a lullaby, and the only rule I break is that I keep something for myself.
By afternoon, the snow thickens. I stand at the window with a book held open and unread. The line between stillness and waiting holds like a note under glass. I hear his hand on the knob, the soft turn that tells me he will not ask. The door swings. He steps in. He only takes that right when it is his. Today it is. His coat carries a skin of snow, and beneath it, a darker bloom spreads along his left side. The wool drinks it, and still the color shows, too black where blackshould be flat. The stain sits three inches above the belt, low and mean. He shuts the door with a careful hand that steadies the room before it can think to sway.
"Sit," I say. The word belongs to me right now. He sits on the edge of the chaise and undoes the coat. His mouth is a straight bar, pared of softness. He shrugs the jacket off, pulls the knit up enough to bare the damage. It is a clean tear along the ribs. Not a puncture. A slice, a warning, a lesson. Whoever taught it will not be proud of their work for long.
"Sergei?" I ask. My fingers are already moving, scouring drawer, tin, thread, the kit I keep for other people's children with bike accidents and for house guards who bleed in the wrong places because this house eats its own when it is hungry. I wash my hands in the bathroom sink until the heat stings, then come back with gauze and a bottle of spirits with that honest sting.
He doesn't answer because he doesn't lie to me. This should annoy me more than a lie would. I feel that odd sureness again, like the sensation of stepping onto ice that holds, until it doesn't. My brain, naturally contrarian, reminds me that ice is still ice. I ignore it.
"Don't be heroic," I still say. "Be still."
He leans back just enough to give me the angle I need and braces his forearm against the curve of the chaise. The muscles along his stomach tense and release, a controlled tide. He keeps his eyes on my face and not on the needle. I have to admire a man who knows where to put his attention when something hurts.
Alcohol, gauze, pressure. Blood is not romantic. It is iron and salt and stubbornness. I clean the edges, which areclean because the blade was clean. I thread the needle like my grandmother taught me to thread a prayer—enough slack to move, enough tension not to fail. The first stitch pulls his skin together. The second stitch coaxes the edges to meet. He never makes a sound.
"This is not a complaint," I say because talking helps the hands, "but do you know you are impossible to explain to women at my center? They ask me about the man with the shoulders. I tell them you are a complicated metaphor for public infrastructure."
"I'm flattered," he says dryly. The low humor in it eases my shoulders. He doesn't move while I tie the knot. He releases the breath I did not realize he was holding only when I pat the skin clean again.
"Stitches out in ten days," I say. "Unless you behave and make it seven."
