I stop a few feet away, my gaze dropping to the box. It's familiar, somehow—the shape of it, the faded floral pattern on the lid. A memory stirs, too distant to grasp.
"What is it?"
Instead of answering, she closes the distance between us and holds out the box. "It was buried in one of the pots. Under the roses."
I take it from her. The metal is cold, rough with rust. I pry open the lid.
Inside, wrapped in yellowed cloth, is a journal.
My heart stops.
I know this journal. I've never seen it before, but I know it—the cracked leather cover, the swollen pages, the faint smell of earth and decay. It belonged to my mother. It has to have.
I open it carefully, and her handwriting spills across the page like a voice from the grave.
Russian. Elegant cursive, the letters slanting right the way she always wrote. I can't read the words—my vision has gone blurry, unfocused—but I don't need to. The shape of her script is enough. The loops of her ?, the sharp points of her ?. I'd know her handwriting anywhere.
"There's an inscription," Bianca says quietly. "On the inside cover. In English."
I turn to the front of the journal. The inscription is there, just as she said:
For my garden, my sanctuary, my hope.—Maria Kashkin, 2007
2007.I was thirteen. Dmitri was fifteen. Anna was still a child. Our mother was still alive, still tending her greenhouse, still believing that she could grow beautiful things in the shadow of our father's empire.
Two years later, she was dead.
"I thought you should have it," Bianca says. "It belongs to you. To your family."
I look up at her. She's watching me with an expression I can't quite read—not pity, not curiosity. Something quieter. Something that doesn't demand anything from me.
"Thank you." My voice comes out rough, scraped raw by something I can't name.
She nods. Doesn't push. Doesn't ask questions about my mother, about what happened, about why a journal buried in a pot of dead roses has shattered my composure more thoroughly than Sergei's threats.
"I should clean up," she says, glancing down at her dirt-stained hands. "I just wanted to give you that first."
She turns and walks away, leaving me alone in the corridor with my mother's words in my hands. I watch her climb the stairs, her footsteps soft on the worn carpet, until she disappears around the corner.
Then I stand there for a long moment, the journal heavy in my grip, trying to remember how to breathe.
I make it to my room before I fall apart.
Not crying—I don't cry. Haven't cried since I was fifteen, standing over two coffins, promising myself I would never be that vulnerable again. But something cracks open in my chest as I sink onto the edge of my bed, the journal heavy in my lap.
The room is dark. I haven't bothered to turn on the lights. Moonlight spills through the tall windows, casting long shadows across the floor, turning everything silver and black.
I open the journal again. Force myself to focus on the words.
The first entries are what I expected—notes about the greenhouse. Which plants needed more sun, which ones were struggling, which ones had bloomed unexpectedly. Sketches of flowers, garden layouts, ideas for new arrangements. The mundane details of a woman's private sanctuary.
My mother's sketches were always beautiful. Even these rough drawings—quick studies of roses and ferns and flowering vines—have an elegance to them, a sureness of line that speaks of practice and patience. She could have been an artist, in another life. Instead, she was a Bratva wife, tending her garden in the spaces between violence.
As I turn the pages, the entries shift. Become more personal.
Dmitri came to the greenhouse today, she wrote in an entry dated March 1995.He stood in the doorway for ten minutes before he would come inside. He's so like his father—all that strength, all that control, and underneath it a fear of softness. I worry for him. I worry that this life will harden him until there's nothing left but stone.
I turn the page.
