Runa Valeria Dragunova.
A warmth settled deep in my sternum and I cradled her a fraction closer. She whimpered without opening her eyes.
“You’re apapochka,” Konstantin murmured, settling beside me and brushing his hand gently over Runa’s head.“My niece is considerably prettier than her father.”
I glanced at him. Then exhaled.
Yes. A father at thirty-seven.
Not to a son or an heir in the way I had imagined it. But this child was mine to claim—and somewhere beneath the fury and the exhaustion and the thirty-seven years of being everything except this, that fact was beginning to settle into something that felt permanent.
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The welcome Runa received when we reached home was too loud for her. She tried to burrow her face into my jacket, shying away from the noise and the people pressing in around us. She only raised her head when Olya spoke—gently, instinctively, the way Olya did everything that mattered.
This concerned me. I wasn’t capable of being soft-spoken at all times. That was simply the truth of it.
“She needs rest,” I said, and carried her upstairs.
Only then did I remember she would need a nappy change.
“Bring the case,” I said, as I neared the top of the stairs.
Her makeshift travel cot had been set up in my bedroom as instructed. I laid her on the bed and began to talk—about the house, about what life had been like for me and her uncle, about Chernograd in winter when the cold came off the water and the city turned to stone. It didn’t matter what I said. It was never about the words. It was about the tone—low, steady, the certain register that seemed to reach her before anything else did.
Her eyes stayed on me as I talked and worked on the nappy. It wasn’t as wet or heavy as before, which meant I had caught it in reasonable time. Progress.
Lev would have disregarded her for being female.
I pressed the fasteners shut one by one beside her legs, each one snapping into place while she yawned and bit into her fist with the focused dedication of someone with important business to attend to.
I lifted her and cradled her in one arm, then crossed the room and drew the full-length curtains closed, blocking out the light entirely. Her gurgles began—not unhappy sounds, something closer to the murmur of a person settling. I began to pace, talking low, the slow rhythm of it calming us both in the particular way of two people who had not yet decided what they were to each other but were finding their way toward it regardless.
Some things were in place for her as an emergency. But nothing was more important than her wellbeing.
She would soon forget her mother.
Chapter 59
Iskra
My head ached as I moved. I began to reach for it until I remembered.
Runa.
I shot up, ignoring the pain.
My clothes and other items from the suitcase were scattered across the floor. I searched the room. The bed we shared. Her toys and chair overturned in the middle of the room.
A long and pitiful wail ripped through my chest before the sound made its way out of my throat. Tears blurred my vision. I didn’t need to stand or search the bathroom or the closet.
He had taken her.
They had taken her.
Gut-wrenching sobs followed. Ones I couldn’t control. More animal sounds burst from my lips—the kind that come from somewhere beneath language, beneath thought, beneath everything.
Dark red on the floor.
