Somewhere in that noise was Iskra Kozlova.
It shouldn’t matter where she ended up.
But it did.
The rings she had left on her nightstand were a gauntlet.
A declaration that she was no longer my property.
And that didn't sit right with me. It made me want to prove her wrong. To remind her of what passed between us.
??????
Summer was here and it should have been pleasing. It wasn’t.
Everything I did recently fell flat—a dullness that had settled over the months like a second skin I couldn’t shed. The slight edge my premium vodka used to remove no longer worked. My expensive cigars tasted bitter, the smoothness gone, the ritual of them hollow. The women I paid no longer held any attraction. Not even the ones Bogdan sourced with particular care. Not even the ones who looked nothing like her.
Iskra had been natural. Her eyes soft when she wasn’t watching herself. A smart mouth she deployed with the precision of someone who had decided early that it was her best weapon. It had taken almost two months for her to heal from the accident—and other than a few faint cuts on her hands and arms, there hadn’t been a single blemish on her when she walked out of my house and blew half of it down behind her.
The accident that took my son.
“Not the house,” I said, without looking at my men.“Take me to the graveyard.”
He was dead. The mortuary had been notified, the coffin chosen, the body buried. I had been given the location and hadn’t visited—the Chechens first, then my uncle, then the elusive cousin had kept me occupied with the particular convenience of men who needed to be dealt with. I had used them as an excuse and I knew it.
The car came to a standstill and Bogdan moved to open my door. My shoe caught the sun as I stepped out, the gravel shifting beneath my feet with the sound of a place that absorbed grief without comment. The old section bled into the new—the elaborate marble monuments of men who had lived long lives beside the smaller, quieter markers of those who hadn’t. I had a whole section bought and paid for. Ready to utilise, when the time came.
My step faltered when I saw how small the grave was.
She had visited often. I could tell by the small plant placed beside the headstone—tended, deliberate, the kind of thing that required returning to.
Makari Kozlov.
Beloved son of Iskra Natalya Kozlova.
Taken too soon.
Until we meet again.
I read the words.
Then again, as the anger began to seep in.
She had named him. And taken my name away from my son in the same motion—carved me out of the only record that existed of him, the way I had carved her out of every decision that followed the accident. I understood the symmetry even as it enraged me.
The anger vanished as quickly as it came.
She was his mother. She had visited him regularly. Named him when I should have. Grieved him in her own way.
Alone.
I thought of the three days it had taken me to give her the location of the grave. Three days I hadn’t examined too closely until now, standing over the soil with the sun on my back and nowhere useful to direct my attention.
I crouched down and said nothing for a moment. The apology arrived without words—directed at the ground, at the small grave, at the son I had held once and had buried without her and never visited.
My flesh. My blood.
The headstone was beautifully considered. The date inscribed in a much smaller font at the base—as though she hadn’t wanted it to be the first thing the eye found. As though the day of his death was information to be held rather than announced. I understood that too. I touched the soft blades of grass attempting to grow over the burial site before I stood.
