“Your mother worked for us,” I say, and her face changes, confusion flickering before she locks it down hard. “She helped develop the fentanyl before anyone understood what it would become.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s not.” I reach for her face, and she flinches back, and I drop my hand, curl it into a fist at my side. “Tatiana Nikolayevna Morozova. Recruited when you were eight years old. She worked in our labs for three years before the trials started.”
“I knew she worked for the Bratva, briefly, but she got out.” Anya’s whole body is trembling now. “She worked for the university. She came home smelling like antiseptic, and she helped me with my chemistry homework, and she was not—she was not—”
“She was also an addict.”
The words land and Anya’s face goes white, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, like a piece clicking into place she’s been trying to ignore for seven years.
“No.”
“She was using. Testing the compounds on herself. By the time the trials started, she wasn’t testing anymore. She was feeding a need.”
“Stop.”
“She volunteered for batch seven.” My voice cracks, and I have to force the words past the tightness in my throat. “Put her own name on the consent form. Said she wanted to test what she helped create. Said she understood the risks.”
“STOP.”
Anya launches herself at me. I let her hit me. I let her tear my skin. I deserve every mark. She screams and calls me every name in Russian and English, and the German she slips into when she’s too furious to think.
“You’re lying,” she screams, and her fist connects with my jaw, snapping my head sideways, reopening the scratches she already put there, and the pain feels right, feels like something I’ve owed her for seven years. “She wouldn’t—she was my mother—she wouldn’t volunteer for—”
“I signed the authorization.” I catch her wrists to make her look at me. “I was twenty-five years old. Vadim put the paper in front of me, and I signed it the way I signed everything back then. Because saying no meant dying. Because I was a coward who did what he was told instead of asking questions about who I was killing.”
“Let go of me.”
“I didn’t remember her name until your file came on my desk.” My grip tightens, and she’s still fighting, still pulling, still trying to tear herself free. “Didn’t know she had children until I was reading your file before our wedding. Didn’t know she wasyour mother. None of that absolves me. I still signed. I still let it happen. I still benefit from the world that ate her.”
“LET GO.”
“I married you knowing what I did.” Tears are running down my face, and I can’t remember the last time I cried in front of another person, but I’m crying now. I don’t care, I don’t care about anything except making her understand. “I touched you, knowing. Fucked you knowing. And every single time, I hated myself more, because wanting you was the one thing Vadim never ordered. He told me to marry you, told me to use you, told me to extract what the Bratva needed from your brilliant fucking mind—but he never told me to love you. That was my sin alone.”
She stops fighting.
Her whole body goes still, and she stares up at me with those mercury eyes swimming with tears and hatred and something else, something I’m terrified to name.
“Love,” she whispers, and the word sounds like poison in her mouth.
“Yes.”
“You don’t get to call it that.”
“It’s the only word I have.”
“Then find another one.” She’s shaking in my grip, but she’s not pulling away anymore, just standing there trembling with tears streaming down her face. “Because love doesn’t look like this. Love doesn’t feel like being gutted and filled with glass. Love isn’t something you build on a grave.”
“You’re right.”
“I know I’m right.”
“But it’s still true.” I release her wrists and cup her face instead, my thumbs brushing away tears that won’t stop falling, my forehead dropping to rest against hers the way it has a hundred times before. “I love you. I’ve loved you since the first time you looked at me. I’ll love you until they put me in theground. And I know—Iknow—that loving you is the worst thing I’ve ever done to you. Worse than the signature. Worse than the lies. Because the signature was Vadim’s order, but the love was mine.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Ya lyublyu tebya,” I whisper against her lips. I say it in Russian because English feels too clean for a confession like this. “Ya lyublyu tebya i ya nenavizhu sebya za eto.”I love you, and I hate myself for it.
