His hands close around my wrists before I can pull away, holding me there in front of him with a grip that’s already weaker than it should be, already showing the first signs.
“Why do you have an antidote?”
“Because I’m not a murderer,” I snap, trying to pull free, trying to get to the lab before it’s too late. “Because I wasn’t trying to kill you, I was trying to understand you—”
“And what did you learn?” His grip loosens, but his eyes hold me there, grey and steady and somehow still Roman even with death moving through his blood. “What did you see?”
I look at him, really look at the man who drank poison rather than keep playing a game that might kill me.
“I learned that you’re a fucking idiot,” I say, and my voice breaks on something that might be a sob or might be a laugh or might be both at once. “I learned that you’d rather die than hurt me, and I don’t know what to do with that information. I don’t know how to reconcile it with everything else, with my mother, with the signature, with all of it—”
“Figure it out later.” His hands release my wrists, and he pushes me gently toward the door, toward the lab, toward the antidote that might save his life if I move fast enough. “Figure it out after I’m not dying.”
I run.
The hallway stretches endlessly in front of me, and my feet pound against marble, and the numbers scroll through my head like a countdown, thirty-three minutes, thirty-two, because even my math can’t account for Roman fucking Volkov and his pathological need to do the unexpected.
The lab door slams open under my hands, and I’m at the cold storage before I finish processing that I’ve arrived, grabbing the vials I prepared because I knew, I always knew, I was never going to let him actually die, no matter what the game revealed.
Two vials of the experimental antidote, synthesized from my mother’s original notes, from the research Vadim wanted to sell and Roman manipulated me into, and my hands perfected in the months since I became his wife.
He’s on the floor when I burst back into the study, slumped against the side of his desk with his legs stretched out in front of him and his hands lying open and useless in his lap, the paralysis already spreading from his extremities toward his chest.
“Can you feel your legs?” I drop to my knees beside him, already uncapping the first vial.
“No.” His voice is thick, his tongue heavy, the compound affecting his motor control faster than I expected. “Can’t feel anything below my waist.”
“Neurotoxin. It paralyzes from the feet up. This will hurt.” I slide the needle into the muscle of his thigh, pushing the plunger with hands that shake worse than his did during the chess game. “Three minutes. Then you breathe again. Until then, pray.”
“Better than dead.”
“Marginally.”
The second injection goes into his other thigh, and I sit back on my heels, watching his face for signs that the antidote is taking effect, that his lungs will keep breathing and his heart will keep beating, and I won’t have to explain to anyone how I accidentally killed my husband while trying to prove a point about his moral character.
“You came back,” he says.
“I told you I had the antidote.”
“You also told me you wanted to see me choose.” His head lolls back against the desk. “Did I pass your test?”
I don’t know how to answer that.
Did he pass? He drank both. He took the choice away. He saved me from killing him by killing himself.
“You threw the board,” I say finally. “You didn’t let me win. You didn’t let me lose. You just—ended it.”
“I couldn’t watch anymore.” His voice is slurring now, the antidote starting to work, but his body is still heavy with poison. “Couldn’t play a game where the only endings were you dead or me dead or both of us pretending this never happened.”
“So you chose all of the above.”
“I chose the only option where I didn’t have to keep hurting you.” His hand twitches against the floor, trying to reach for me, but too weak to manage it. “I chose the option where it ended, one way or another, right then. No more moves. No more strategy. Just—done.”
I take his hand. I can’t not take it, because even now, even after everything, I can’t watch him reach for me and fail.
“I didn’t want you to die,” I whisper. “I wanted to see who you really are.”
“And who am I?” His thumb moves weakly against my palm, the smallest possible caress. “What did you see?”
