It made me want to claw it away with my hands. To see him. To have that much at least. Instead I crouched down until I was level with it and stayed there.
It wasn’t far from Lev’s grave. Unlike his—the marble, the photograph, the dates carved in stone, the full accounting of a life—my son had nothing. No marker. No name. No record that he had existed at all outside of a scan picture in a purse and a whispered apology in an empty corridor and a small paunch in a bathroom mirror that was already fading.
I touched the cold soil.
The only thing left for me to touch.
Tau’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. He said nothing. There was nothing to say and he knew it—not condolence, not comfort, not the careful words people reach for when the real ones don’t exist. Just the weight of a hand. Solidarity from the only person who had called it a blessing when it was alive.
Nothing would have helped the desolation flooding through me.
Because it wasn’t just a contract now. It had never really been just a contract—not since the hand found the belly without permission, not since hearing the beat of his heart on a screen, not since the ache that greeted me every morning when I woke.
This was my baby beneath the earth.
Mine.
As if the universe understood what words couldn’t carry, it began to rain. Soft at first, then heavier—weeping with me, or letting me weep with it, the distinction ceasing to matter. The trees rustled and the sound moved through them like breath. A gust of wind swept over me, low and deliberate, like an acknowledgement from something that had been watching.
I lay my head against the ground.
As close as I could get to him now.
Shielding him from the world the only way left to me.
Knowing how futile it was.
Staying anyway.
Chapter 43
Vadim
She sucked the enjoyment out of torturing my uncle.
I was doing this for my—our son. The correction arrived before I could stop it and sat there, uncomfortable and accurate. The woman was fucking impossible with her demands. Yet here I was in my own club getting drunk with my men instead of in the cage at the pit beating the shit out of some nobody, which was where I should have been and where I had more sense than to go tonight.
I watched the women dance.
The shots went down easier than they should have.
I refused to meet my brother’s eyes. I could feel them anyway.
Tau had told me about her reaction at the grave.
I lifted another shot. The burn. Glass slammed against wood.
A flash of blonde hair moved beyond the crowd.
I paused.
Not her.
No. Not a blonde. Not tonight.
Not any night. That was not what this was.
I nudged Bogdan.
