And his spawn.
Chapter 42
Iskra
The soft lavender fragrance rose through the steam.
I breathed it in slowly, bent down to test the water temperature with my hand, then added a little more cold before straightening.
When it felt right I stood and removed my robe.
After weeks I managed to look in the mirror.
I made myself stay there. The spotting had stopped. The lactation was gone. My belly had reduced—not gone, not entirely, a small paunch remaining where something larger had been. The body’s last record of what had happened. The final physical evidence that refused to resolve itself back into the person I had been before.
I turned to the side and rested my hand over it.
The last sign that something had lived inside me for a few short months. That it had been real. That the hands becoming themselves on a screen had been real. Thatprosti,malyshkawhispered into an empty corridor had been whispered to someone. My apology to my son, long before I knew his fate.
I blinked the tears away before they could fall.
Then I climbed into the bath.
The water received me and I lay back and let the lavender and the heat do what they could. For a while the world contracted to this—the steam, the silence, the warmth, the particular quality of a room with a locked door where no one could find me or report back or clear their throat or need anything from me at all.
Just this.
Just silence.
The men were off searching for more men. As they always were. As they always would be.
Madame Popova had the right idea entirely. She should have been given sainthood rather than executed by a firing squad. There should be a shrine built for her in Saint Petersburg—flowers, candles, the quiet reverence owed to a woman who identified a problem and solved it with the resources available to her.
I would have visited it.
One day.
I sank deeper into the water until most of my head was submerged, the lavender warmth closing over my ears and muffling the world to nothing.
It was a good business concept.
Genuinely underserved market.
??????
My bedroom door opened when I was drying my hair in front of the balcony windows.
I flipped my hair back and held the towel.
Without a word or a sighting for weeks he had the audacity to simply walk in. No knock. No warning. The door opening the way doors opened for a man who considered everything in this house his by default—including the rooms he’d assigned to other people.
I held my tongue as his eyes moved over me.
Another tailored dark suit. Cold eyes moving with their usual lurking assessment, cataloguing and filing. His dark hair trimmed and styled to perfection. Every inch of him composed and deliberate and entirely at home in a space he hadn’t set foot in for weeks.
Click.
The door shut behind him.
