“Where is he?” I rasped.
My hands were shaking. I forced them to grip the towel and hold.
His brow furrowed.
“Who?”
“My son,” I spat.
The word landed between us. I watched his face for the flinch of it and found something worse—surprise. Genuine surprise that I would ask. As though the question itself was unexpected. As though I had stepped outside the boundaries of what I was permitted to want to know.
My fingers curled tighter into the damp towel. My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.
“He wasn’t in a poor condition. I made the decision to—”
I scoffed.
He stopped. His face turned to stone—the specific stillness of a man who has had his authority questioned and is deciding how to respond to it.
“He was always mine, Iskra.” His voice was flat and final.“Myson was buried while you were unconscious.”
I gasped.
The towel clutched to my chest. The lavender still in my hair. The bathwater barely cold. And this—delivered with cold eyes—the confirmation that he had buried our son and not told me. Had made the arrangements and the decisions and the choices and had come to my room weeks later to deliver it as a statement of fact rather than an explanation.
He was always his.
Even in death.
“Your obligation to me does not change,” he murmured.
He wanted his pound of flesh.
For a moment it felt as though there was no hot blood circulating around my body. Ice particles where warmth should have been.
“Fuck your obligations and fuck you,” I said, enunciating each word as carefully as I could.“Get out.”
“I’ll be back to breed you in two weeks’time,” he said, turning to leave.
I stared at his back.
“If you don’t give me what I want, someone else will.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” I said through clenched teeth.
The door slammed shut, but not before I saw Radovan’s wide eyes.
Fuck them all.
It wasn't until much later that I realised I no longer felt sad.
I only felt fury.
??????
Three days later I stood in front of the tiny grave.
Damp dirt piled high. Fresh. The darkness of earth that hadn’t settled yet.
