I look at him sprawled on the floor of his own study, poisoned by his wife, saved by an antidote made from research that killed my mother, breathing shallow and hands shaking.
“A man who loves me,” I say, and the words taste like surrender.
His eyes close, and something in his face relaxes, something that’s been tight with fear and guilt and desperate hope since I walked into this room with death in my hands.
“Then you saw everything,” he says.
We sit there on the floor surrounded by scattered chess pieces and empty glasses and the wreckage of a game neither of us really won, his hand in mine and the antidote working its way through his blood.
“You’re going to live,” I tell him, because someone should say it out loud, because he should know the game is really over.
“Am I?” His eyes open again, grey and exhausted and somehow still hopeful. “Or just survive?”
“There’s a difference?”
“There is for me.” His fingers tighten around mine with strength that’s slowly returning, the antidote doing its work. “Living means you stay. Living means you’re here tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Living means I get to keep trying to earn back something I probably don’t deserve.”
“You drank both glasses,” I say. “You don’t get to talk about what you deserve.”
“If that makes me a coward, fine. I’ll be a coward who loves you too much to keep playing games.”
“I’ll stay,” I say finally, and the words feel like stepping off a cliff, like jumping into darkness and hoping there’s something soft enough to catch me at the bottom.
“Why?”
“Because a world without you in it feels worse than a world where I hate you,” I say. “And I’m too tired to figure out which one of those is the right answer.”
His laugh is weak, more breath than sound, but it’s real, and something in my chest loosens at the evidence that he’s still himself underneath all the poison.
“That might be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Your standards are appallingly low.”
“My standards are you.” His hand squeezes mine. “That’s not low. That’s impossible.”
I just sit there holding his hand.
My mother would never forgive me.
I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself.
But he’s alive, and so am I, and for right now that’s going to have to be enough.
“I still need to punish you for what you did,” he whispers.
“I know.”
ROMAN - Winter Dacha, 4 Jan — 22:47
The bonfire spits sparks into January dark, and I’ve been out here for three hours, splitting birch until my shoulders burn and my palms blister and the feeling finally comes back into my legs in waves of pins and needles that make me want to scream.
She watched from the window the whole time.
I could feel her eyes on me through the glass, tracking every swing of the axe, probably checking whether I’d collapse, whether the paralysis would come back, whether the antidote she shoved into my thigh actually worked or just delayed the inevitable.
I didn’t look at her. Because if I looked at her, I’d have to think about the floor, the cold marble against my spine, the waymy lungs kept working, but my legs didn’t, the way she made me lie there helpless while she decided whether I deserved to live.
Helpless.
