How could anyone be released from that?
The stewardess began the safety instructions. Her voice arrived at the edges of my awareness and logged itself there, unreachable.
Istanbul would be like a beautiful dream.
One a woman like me could never have kept.
I wiped my cheeks—the skin raw and sensitive, rubbed past the point of feeling. Eyes swollen. Lips swollen. Nose red from blowing into tissues I had run out of apologies for.
The weight of my own body felt like a burden I was carrying for someone else.
A corpse going home.
First Makari.
Now Runa.
More tears rolled down my cheeks and I let them. I had stopped having the energy to wipe them away somewhere over the water.
I reached for the pendant and pressed my lips against the scarf wrapped firmly around my neck—the burgundy cotton still holding the faint warmth of her, or perhaps I was imagining it because I needed to.
The entire flight felt like an out-of-body experience. As though the woman in the window seat were someone I was observing from a distance, someone I felt sorry for but couldn’t reach.
It was only when the plane touched down in Russia that the true fear seeped into my bones.
??????
I handed the taxi driver money without looking at it, not caring about the change, and turned to face the iron gates.
I looked up. The sky above them was a dark navy, the first thin line of lighter blue beginning to show at the edges—the earliest hint of morning, the hour when the city hadn’t decided yet what kind of day it was going to be.
Wind moved through the trees. Branches creaked. Leaves rustled with the particular sound of early autumn in Chernograd—cold finding its way back in, the way it always did, the way it always would.
Beyond the gates, the tip of the house I had so desperately wanted to escape.
I closed my eyes.
They ached. Everything ached.
“You can’t be here.”
I opened them.
Radovan. Standing just inside the gate, his breath visible in the cold air, his eyes moving briefly to something behind me before they came back.
“We’ve been told to turn you away,” he said.
“I need to speak to him,” I rasped. My voice didn’t sound like my own—scraped raw, barely there, the voice of a woman who had been crying since Istanbul and hadn’t stopped.
“You need to leave,” he said. His eyes met mine. His voice was hard in the way of a man following an order he hadn’t chosen.
I shook my head.
It was only a few hours before daylight. I moved to the tall stone pillar beside the gate’s hinges and pressed my back against it, then slid down until I was sitting on the cold ground.
Silence.
Only the wind.
