I tried to open my eyes. Only one responded—fluttering before it opened to a glare of white light that made me close it again immediately.
My mouth was dry. Something held it open.
The accident.
I moved my hand. There was a pull from whatever was attached to it but I ignored it and pressed my palm flat against my stomach.
Softer.
The bulge was still there but it didn’t feel right. The weight of it was wrong. The presence I had grown accustomed to was gone.
I forced my eye open, desperate to find a face.
A nurse came rushing in.
Behind her—Vadim and Tau.
Tau had a dressing on his forehead, the white of it stark against his skin.
The nurse moved over me and blocked my view of them. Scrubs and equipment and the sharp efficient sounds of someone doing their job. More beeping. A strange cool sensation spreading from the back of my hand upward.
My eyes grew heavy.
The pain that had been waiting at the edges began to reach me—and then, as I recognised it, it began to ebb.
The nurse stepped back.
I saw their faces again.
The lifeless eyes.
And I knew.
My womb was empty.
Chapter 37
Vadim
Hatred was far easier to express than to acknowledge loss.
My father was old. It was his time—the kind of end that had been available to him for years and had finally arrived in the form of a parcel in a foyer. I could work with that. I had been working with that.
My child never got the opportunity to breathe outside air.
The trauma of the impact. The seatbelt. Things that happened in a fraction of a second that couldn’t be undone by any amount of money or retaliation or men sent to Chechnya. His tiny lifeless body, cold and bruised by forceps—the only way to deliver him once her body began to fail.
I had been told it was a boy.
I had been right.
The men responsible had tried to walk away from it. Tau crawled out of the wreckage and shot their ankles out before they got far. Radovan recounted cutting Iskra from the car—his voice flat and careful in the way of someone editing what they had seen before they said it.
Reinforcements came.
Too little. Too late.
I lost my picture in the blast. I kept the one from her car.
