“To bed?” I whispered.
He walked toward me. Slow. Deliberate.
I swallowed and stepped back without meaning to. He kept coming. I kept retreating, until my back met the door and there was nowhere left to go.
“Do you know how you can make amends, Iskra?” he murmured, lifting a strand of my hair and toying with it.
I shook my head.
“Give me back the time.”
Time?
“Pardon?”
His hand moved to my belly. His fingers spread slowly, deliberately, until his palm covered it entirely—the same gesture he had made a hundred times before, in a different life, in a different arrangement that had also not been my choice.
“The time this belly was full of Runa. The time she was due. The time she took her first breath of air in this world.”
“I—I have pictures,” I said, still confused, still trying to find the logic in what he was asking. How could anyone give that time back. It was gone. It had always been going to be gone.
“I want the real thing.” His fingers curled around my hip.“Another child. Another Runa. And this time I will be there from the beginning.”
I glanced past him.
The cot. The edge of Runa’s blanket visible above the rail. The small sounds of her sleeping.
Another child in his world.
I nibbled my lip.
“Or,” he said, his voice dropping to something conversational and therefore more dangerous,“once Runa is weaned, you can move back to your parents’house.”
I inhaled sharply and shook my head.
“You owe me a child.”
“An heir, you mean?” I said unable to keep the bitterness from my voice.
He shrugged.
“There is always Konstantin.”
This was something new.
My eyes found Runa again—the edge of her blanket, the small rise and fall of her breathing, the only fixed point in a room that had just shifted beneath me.
I was stuck. I had always known it, somewhere beneath the hope of Istanbul and the suitcase that was always packed. He would hunt us down no matter what corner of the world I tried to hide in. He had proved that already. And I could never leave her—not voluntarily.
“Would you bring other women here while your daughter watched?” I asked.
His fingers bit into my hip.
Then loosened.
“It depends on whether her mother is being a bitch or not,” he growled.
“I’m not being a bitch by asking,” I whispered, urgent, low enough not to wake Runa.“I want to protect her from that. From all of it.”
