I reached up and touched his cheek. Soft stubble under my fingers where there used to be nothing.
“You’re so grown up now, Ruslan,” I whispered, my eyes blurring again.“You never got to meet your nephew. I never got to meet him either.”
The sobs came from somewhere deeper than I expected—the kind that pull at the chest, that take the breath with them. I pressed my forehead against him and let them come.
The door opened somewhere behind me. Men’s voices. Movement.
I didn’t look up.
Vadim had decided I wouldn’t see him. I had been unconscious for days and he had made those decisions without me—what happened to the body, what arrangements were made, what was done with the small cold weight of him. He had made it very clear, in every way except words, that I had no rights.
Not to the child I had carried.
Not even in death.
??????
It was a strange feeling, coming home.
The silent drive. Tau and Radovan exchanging looks in the front, glancing back at me every so often in the rearview mirror as though checking that I was still there. My brother’s hand gripped mine until it ached. My anchor. My reminder of who I was — a Kozlova, before any of the rest of it.
I had thought I might fear being in another SUV. The truck. The rolling. The sky and road and sky. But I felt nothing. I was empty in every sense of the word and the body that had survived the impact seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion.
The familiar gates pulled open. The men outside nodded even though they couldn’t see past the tinted glass — the gesture automatic, trained, the house running exactly as it always had. The tyres crunched on the drive and the vehicle brought me back to my gilded cage as though nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
The door opened and Olya stood in the doorway, one hand raised against the glare of the afternoon sun, squinting to find me in the brightness.
I climbed out and brushed Radovan’s hand from my arm before he could steady me.
My brother carried my bag.
I straightened my spine. Raised my head. The muscle memory of composure — practised since the cathedral, since the ring on my finger, since the first morning I walked down these stairs in someone else’s house and decided to survive it.
Olya came down the steps and pulled me into her arms. I patted her back until she released me. Her words of sympathy arrived somewhere at the edges of my awareness and logged themselves there, to be felt later or not at all.
The familiar path. The foyer. The hallway. The staircase I had gripped every morning of this pregnancy. The banister under my palm exactly as it always was.
At the top, I stopped.
I looked east—the corridor that was his. The room that he had never invited me into. His door was closed. Another stark reminder.
Then I turned west.
The room with the red and gold walls and the chandelier and the balcony where I had watched Chernograd and called it a cage.
I stood between the two wings and waited to feel something.
Nothing came.
Nothing at all.
Tau cleared his throat. The sound was too deep to be my brother’s.
With a sigh, I moved towards my prison.
??????
