“They had a baby,” he continues, glancing down before our eyes meet. “Four months old.”
I don’t know if I like where this is going.
“He brought the baby home and handed him to me…” Bitterness creeps into his tone. “Told me it was my responsibility now. My job.”
My arm tightens around him without thinking, like some part of me needs to hold him closer through this.
“I didn’t know anything about babies. But my father told me to do it, so I did. I fed him. Changed him. Carried him around the house. For months.” His gaze turns distant. “Even my brothers liked him.”
My heart aches, because I can already sense where this is going, and I don’t want it to.
“I grew to care about him. But that was the point. That’s what my father wanted. He needed something to destroy.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
“For my father, nothing was worse than weak sons.” His expression hardens. “And if we loved something, anything—even each other—he would kill it.”
“Oh, no…” Grief rips through me, right alongside that thirteen-year-old boy who had to hear those words. I can’t even begin to imagine it.
He nods once. “He told me to kill him.”
My hand flies to my mouth.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “Please tell me you didn’t.”
He shakes his head. “No. Of course not. I couldn’t.”
Relief crashes through me so fast, it almost leaves me dizzy.
Then he says, “So my father killed the child right in front of me.”
The relief vanishes just as quickly as it came. Nausea rolls through me instead, hard and sudden, and the room seems to shrink around us. I press my palm harder over my mouth, trying not to be sick.
“I’m so sorry.” Tears spill faster now. “Your father was a monster.”
A humorless sound leaves him. “That’s actually a kind way to describe him.”
For a second, I think that must be the end of it. But I’m wrong.
“After he killed the baby, he punished me for not being able to do it myself. Locked me in a pitch-black cellar for a week. Barely any food or water.” He says it so casually that it doesn’t even sound real. “No one could get me out. He would’ve killed my brothers if they tried.”
The air in my lungs grows too thin.
“He beat me every time he came down there. That’s where some of those scars came from.”
My fingers spread across his back, holding him more tightly now, each raised line beneath my hand feeling unbearable in a different way.
“Thank you for trusting me with this.” I press my palm to his cheek, forcing him to look at me. “You are nothing like him. I want you to know that. Look at how you are with your son. Look at the way you love him. The way you protect him. You are a good man, Kirill.”
And as I say it, as I trace the line of a single scar, I realize that somewhere between his darkness and mine, I’ve fallen in love with the parts of him that survived it.
“Say that again.”
Before I can react, he flips me beneath him in one swift motion, his mouth brushing over my lips, staying just close enough to make my pulse stutter.
“Tell me I’m a good man, detka.”
His body arches into me, his hardness pressing into my core, and I cry out, unable to stop.
