I grunted but didn’t look away.
Olya slid a plate in front of me and moved on, entirely unbothered by whatever was passing between us.
Tau glanced at me. That was when I saw it—the tips of his lips edged fractionally upward. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one.
I gasped at the near smile.
He rolled his eyes and shifted closer, dropping his voice.
“Today they begin the reckoning,” he murmured.“The man who caused everything.”
For a moment I forgot to breathe.
Then something moved through me that I hadn’t expected—not relief exactly, not grief, but something older and darker than either. A bloodlust. The specific want of suffering inflicted on a specific person. I wanted him to feel it slowly. Days of it. Weeks. Blood ebbing away degree by degree while the pain kept his mind alert enough to understand exactly what was happening and why. I wanted him to have time to think about the truck and the shadow and the rolling and everything that came after.
It wasn’t until I looked away from the wall that I realised my expression had shifted.
Tau’s near smile was still there.
Mine mirrored it.
I reached for my plate. Not from hunger—I hadn’t felt hungry in days—but from the first sensation of having felt anything at all. The pastry was warm under my fingers. I didn’t taste it.
It was enough.
Someone was suffering for what they took from me. That was enough to make my hand move toward food. That was enough to bring me downstairs.
“Keep me informed,” I said, reaching for my tea.
He nodded. Once. The way Tau did everything—precisely and without elaboration.
Vadim had taken Spartak away from me, but Tau was proving to be considerably more valuable.
The honey and sugar were doing their work—warming something back into life, clearing the fog that had settled over everything since the hospital. I could feel my brain beginning to engage again for the first time since the loss. Filing. Observing. Planning, perhaps, in the distant way of someone who has remembered that planning is possible.
Ruslan walked in, cheeks flushed from the morning chill, bringing the cold air in with him.
“How was your morning patrol?” I asked, nodding toward my plate.
He reached across without hesitation—the unselfconsciousness of a younger brother who has never fully accepted that other people’s food isn’t also his food.
Olya’s screech was immediate and absolute.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t argue. Simply turned to the sink and washed his hands with the unhurried compliance of a man who had learned that Olya’s kitchen had its own hierarchy and he sat at the bottom of it regardless of what the Brotherhood’s code said about his rank.
Olya made him a plate.
I observed my odd little family.
Odd or not, it was mine.
I bit into the fig-filledpirozhki.
It tasted better when someone else made it.
??????
The warmth of the sun through the window and the weight of the blanket lulled me into something between sleep and waking. The television was on. I stared at it without seeing it.
