"Yellow walls. You painted them last week. You had paint in your hair." She's smiling at the memory. "The crib from your mother. The mobile with the dancing bears."
Her voice is fading. I press harder on the wound, but blood seeps through my fingers anyway. So much blood. How can there be so much?
"The rocking chair by the window," she continues. "Where I would have fed her."
"Her?"
"I know it's a girl. A mother knows." Her eyes find mine, suddenly clear. "Bury me in my red pointe shoes. The ones from Giselle. And... the baby shoes. Let me take them with me."
"Elena—"
"She needs shoes to dance in heaven."
I'm crying now. Can't help it. Maksim Petrov, who hasn't cried since he was seven years old, is sobbing over his dying wife while she plans her daughter's heavenly ballet lessons.
"I love you," I tell her. "Both of you. Forever."
"Forever..." she whispers. Then her hand goes slack in mine. Those perfect feet finally relax from their pointe.
I sit there in the spreading pool of blood, her body cooling in my arms. I think about the nursery, just down the hall, waiting for cries that will never come. The closet upstairs, full of maternity clothes she'll never wear again. The refrigerator that has those pickles she's been craving, the expensive ones imported from Russia.
All these pieces of a life that just... stopped.
The sirens are getting closer, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters now except the promise I made, and the name I need to trace so I never forget.
I dip my finger in the blood—her blood, our baby's blood—and write on the cream carpet. E-L-E-N-A. Five letters that held my whole world.
I trace it again. E-L-E-N-A.
And again.
And again.
The pattern soothes something raw in my chest. My finger moves without thinking now, muscle memory already forming E-L-E-N-A over and over until the letters blur together, until my finger knows the path by heart.
"Pakhan?"
Sergei's voice comes from the doorway. I don't look up, can't look away from Elena's face. She looks peaceful now. Like she's sleeping after a long performance.
"The reformers did this," I tell him. "All their soft modern ideas about legitimacy and cooperation left us exposed. Made us targets."
"Maksim—"
"No more. We go back to the old ways. The strong ways."
I hear him step into the room, glass crunching under his shoes. Glass? I look up for the first time and see the bedroom window is shattered. That's how they got in. That's how they got to her while I was downstairs in my study, reviewing contracts for the new legitimate businesses we were supposed to launch next month.
Legitimate. The word tastes like poison now.
"Who?" Sergei asks.
"I don't know. Young. Russian accent but trying to hide it. Said ballerinas are meant to fall."
Sergei's expression darkens. "I'll find him."
"No." I stand slowly, my knees cracking from kneeling in blood. "I'll do it. But first..."
I look down at Elena one more time. She's wearing the pale blue nightgown I bought her in Paris last month. It's ruined now, but she's still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
