The gates vanished.
I would be back.
Chapter 62
Vadim
I tried to push the nipple into her mouth. She pushed the bottle away again.
This was the fourth formula and she wouldn’t drink more than a quarter of a bottle of any of them—a quarter being a generous assessment. She turned her face away from each one with the focused determination of someone who had decided and was not interested in further discussion.
“Be a good girl forPapochka,” I crooned, sliding the rubber nipple over her lips.
She pursed them tighter. Her face scrunched up with the specific outrage of a person being offered something entirely unacceptable.
She was as stubborn as her mother.
“I did warn you, sir,” the nanny said, wringing her hands from the doorway.
“You’re fired,” I said pleasantly.“Bogdan, see her out.”
Milk had gathered in the creases around Runa’s mouth and was beginning to drip. I grabbed the muslin and wiped her face with more care than the situation perhaps warranted.
“Milk is milk,” I muttered, studying her.“What is your problem?”
She stared back at me with those pale blue eyes—my eyes—and said nothing.
I knew what she wanted.
Four days of fighting with my five-month-old daughter had defeated me. She needed milk. The specific milk she had been drinking since birth—the one made for her, the one that smelled right and tasted right and came from the one person she wanted and wasn’t getting.
I winced as the crying began again.
Slow at first.
Then uncontrollable.
Then the particular exhaustion of a baby who had cried herself empty and still couldn’t stop.
Then a restless, broken sleep before it all began again.
I rocked her. Paced. Talked low. Did everything that had worked before and found that none of it was enough—because none of it was the thing she actually wanted.
She had defeated me.
As soon as she was asleep I needed to call the police station.
I stared down at my impossible child. She stared right back and screamed louder.
She might be more similar to me than I’d like to admit.
??????
The officer opened the cell door and nodded.
“Just knock when you are finished.”
The cell was small and cold. It smelled of damp and the bleakness of a room that had held many people and cared about none of them. A single bulb overhead. A cement bed with a state-issued blanket.
