Eventually I stopped fighting the sleep too. After everything—the gates, the rain, my family, the cell, the week of it—my body made the decision before my mind could argue. I succumbed slowly, knowing Runa was beside me, her breath warm against my skin, her fist full of my hair.
My Runa.
Chapter 64
Vadim
To watch Runa feed—really feed, with gusto—was something else entirely.
Her soft pink lips around her mother’s nipple, her hands gripping Iskra’s clothing with the focused determination of someone ensuring their food source was not going anywhere. The sounds she made. The vigour of it. Four days of formula rejected without ceremony and now this—the real thing, the right thing, the only thing she had been asking for the entire time.
Yeah. I wouldn’t want a plastic teat in my mouth either.
Runa paused, then latched again—four or five vigorous pulls before she relaxed, her body settling into the particular contentment of a baby who had finally gotten what she wanted and intended to make the most of it.
I toed off my shoes and silenced my phone before crossing to the cot to retrieve the chair. I set it on the rug and sat down.
And contemplated.
What I had missed in Runa’s earlier months arranged itself in my mind with the cold precision of an accounting I hadn’t asked for. The first breath. The first feed. The first time she had opened her eyes. All of it taken. All of it Iskra’s to keep and mine to be denied.
She would make it up to me. Every missed moment had a price and Iskra Kozlova knew better than anyone that I collected what was owed.
I looked at her.
Her bare breast half covered by her hair—Runa’s fist still clutching a handful of it, even in the depths of feeding, even now. The same fist that had gripped my lapel in Istanbul.
She was far more attached to her mother than I had realised.
I sat with that fact in the quiet of the room and let it complicate things.
The lack of sleep from Runa’s misery pulled a yawn from me before I could stop it. I shifted onto the mattress and lay down beside her—on the other side of Iskra, Runa between us, the three of us in a configuration that had no name in my vocabulary and that I was not going to examine too closely.
The relief of watching her feed was immense. Four days of it—the crying, the formulas, the nanny, the particular stress of a problem I couldn’t solve by force or by money or by any of the mechanisms I had spent thirty-seven years perfecting. Parenthood was a different category of difficult entirely.
Her dark head of hair blurred as my eyes began to droop.
They were going nowhere.
Ever.
??????
I woke ready for a fight.
But the slap to my face was from Runa.
She was gurgling happily, playing with her own saliva with the focused dedication of someone who had discovered something extraordinary. It ran freely—Chernograd’s river had nothing on a teething baby at close range.
She grabbed my nose and tugged. Her nails—still impossibly sharp despite my best efforts with the clippers—dug in with the cheerful indifference of someone who had no concept of causing harm and wouldn’t have cared if she did.
Her other hand still clutched a fistful of her mother’s hair.
I sighed.
She loved her mother.
I brought her chubby fist to my mouth and munched on it—the specific nonsense of a man who had never in his life made aeroplane noises or spoken in a high-pitched voice and was now apparently capable of both. She giggled. The sound of it landed somewhere in my chest and spread outward.
