Makari.
I said it again in my mind. Turned it over. Let it settle.
It soothed me the way almost nothing else had.
Makari.
My son.
??????
The banging woke me.
I sat up immediately, heart already moving, the part of my brain that had been living in a house on lockdown for months reading every unexpected sound as threat first and everything else second.
Then I heard him groan.
My stomach turned.
The third woman in a week. Or thereabouts. I had stopped counting with any precision and started counting in spite of myself anyway.
The dull thuds against my door. Her moans carrying through it with the specific clarity of sounds that were meant to be heard.
I turned onto my side and shoved a pillow over my head.
What a pathetic piece of shit.
Even as I thought it I couldn’t deny the other thing sitting underneath the contempt. The stab of it. Jealousy—ugly and unwanted and entirely present regardless of what I told myself about contracts and functions.
He was escalating deliberately. Letting them into the room he had denied me from the first day of our marriage. The room at the end of the east corridor that had always been closed. Using the door between us as an instrument.
I tightened my grip on the pillow.
It didn’t help.
The thumps increased. Her moans. And then him—the sound of his orgasm carrying through the door with the same deliberate clarity as everything else.
Bastard.
I lay there in the dark with the pillow over my head and the jealousy I refused to name sitting in my chest like a stone.
The worst aspect wasn’t the sound. It was knowing that every person in this house could hear it too. The humiliation delivered not just to me but witnessed—Olya, Radovan, Spartak wherever he’d been reassigned, Tikhon, Tau, Bogdan. All of them aware. All of them filing it in whatever way people file the things they witness and can’t speak to directly.
Vadim had made it a ritual. A performance with a specific audience of one.
What he didn’t know—what he couldn’t see from behind his own ego—was that the majority of his household had quietly chosen a side. And it wasn’t his.
Olya was the most vocal about it, but only when she was certain he had left the building. The muttering. The cupboards. The particular energy she brought to making my breakfast versus his.
Even Radovan had started bringing me freshly baked pies and pastries.
Radovan. Who used to smirk at me on staircases and face the wall on Vadim’s instruction. Leaving food outside my door now like a man settling a debt he hadn’t known he owed.
I raised the pillow and listened.
Silence.
I exhaled slowly and lowered it. Turned onto my back.
