Her eyes peered out from beneath it. They darted behind me—checking for Runa, hoping—as the metal door slammed shut and left us alone.
“Runa?” she croaked, sitting up slowly.
Her forehead, nose and lip were bruised, grazed and cut. I had watched her cling to my gates on the camera footage—had watched and done nothing, told myself it was what she deserved—and the evidence of it was written across her face in a way that was harder to look at in person than on a screen.
“What do you want?” I asked her.
“My daughter,” she said, her voice stronger this time than it had any right to be.
“You know you can’t have her,” I said, shaking my head.
I looked at her properly for the first time. Her cheeks were sunken. Dark circles beneath her eyes that went deeper than tiredness—the specific hollowness of someone who had not eaten or slept in days. The vibrant glow she’d had in Istanbul, the warmth I had studied in photograph after photograph on a private jet, was gone entirely. What remained was this—a woman in a police cell wrapped in a state blanket who had come back to Chernograd for one reason and had not stopped trying to get to it for four days.
She flew off the cement bed. I stepped back instinctively. But she didn’t come at me—she crouched at my feet and held onto my ankle, her fingers curling around it with what strength she had left.
Not a threat. Not a performance.
Just a woman holding onto the only thing she could reach.
“Vadim.” Her voice cracked on the single syllable—my name in her mouth carrying the weight of everything that had happened in her apartment, everything since, everything before.“She is our daughter. I need to be with her.”
I remained silent. Shocked, though I wouldn’t have admitted it. Processing what my fury had kept me from seeing clearly while she was at the gates—the desperation that wasn’t strategy, wasn’t manipulation, wasn’t another plan being assembled. Just a mother. Four days outside in the cold and the rain, even put in the back of a police car, and still here.
Now the cogs turned. Runa’s needs on one side. My retribution on the other.
Her head rose. She stared up at me from the floor of a police cell with my handprints on every bruise on her face.
“Please.” Her voice dropped to almost nothing.“After Makari—”
The name landed in the room.
Tears welled in her eyes before she could stop them.
I pulled away from her grip and stepped back, putting distance between us.
“You weren’t a very biddable wife for someone in my position,” I said, pacing around her—keeping moving, keeping the upper hand, keeping everything at the temperature I needed it to be.“Runa is settling in well. She has no need of you.”
Her head fell down.
“But I need her,” she whispered with the pain and desperation clear to hear.
“Hm,” I said, and left it there.
I circled around her and considered options that hadn’t occurred to me on the drive over—possibilities assembling themselves now that I could see her, now that the variables had shifted.
“You had the status of being my wife. You lived under my roof,” I said, the anger rising again despite my efforts to keep it at the temperature I needed.“And what did you do? You destroyed the better part of my home and stole my child.”
“I’m sorry. I didn't know that I was pregnant,” she cried, turning her head to follow my movement.“I won’t do anything like that again.”
“You didn’t tell me once you found out. Or once she was born,” I snapped, then paused.“I don’t trust you near my daughter.”
“Vadim, please—” She reached for my trousers. I stepped back.
I looked at her on the floor of the cell. The bruises. The hollowness. The whisper that had said I need her and meant every word of it.
“You’ll need to prove yourself,” I said, as though the thought had only just occurred to me.
She swallowed.
