Arseniy drags a hand over his mouth, and for one second, he looks exactly like Ruslan. That old exhaustion. That terrible knowledge that love creates more ruins than enemies ever manage.
“Kolya,” Arseniy says, quieter now. “You go there alone, you will die there.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t say that!” Tatiana snaps.
I look at her. “I’m not going there to kill myself.”
No one believes me, and that’s fair. I’m not sure I believe me, not in the way they want me to. But there are different kinds of dying, and I have been doing one of them in my office for a month.
Isle Lucia may not save me. It may only give me a better view while I rot. But it is the only place left where Vincenzo is not ash, not a report, or a ring recovered from a body.
On that island, he is in the villa window trying to learn calm. He is laughing in the bath. He is calling me ridiculous for buying land because I missed him too much to keep using hotels. He is sitting at dinner under an open sky.
He is alive in every room because the island was built from the insane belief that we might get time.
I want to be where he is still alive. That is the only truth left.
“I can’t stay here,” I say, and my voice is quieter now. The room leans toward it because I never saycan’t, not unless it’s already killed something in me. “If I stay here, I will turn into something none of you can follow. And I am tired. I am so fucking tired of becoming worse just because the world keeps taking things and waiting to see what I do with the hole.”
Arseniy looks at me for a long moment, then he looks down at the papers. I hold them out, but he does not take them.
“You hated me for leaving,” he says. “And now you’re doing the same.”
“No,” I say. “You left because I took something from you. I’m leaving because there is nothing left of me to give this place.”
His eyes close briefly, but when they open, something in them has changed. Not acceptance. Nothing that generous. But recognition. He understands grief enough now to know when it has stopped being a storm and becomes a climate.
He takes the papers.
Tatiana makes a broken sound. “Arseniy.”
He doesn’t look at her; he looks at me. “If I take this, you live.”
I almost laugh. “That’s not a condition you can enforce.”
“It is the only one I have.”
I think of Vincenzo’s ring in my pocket. I think of Tatiana on my bedroom floor telling me not to decide how to live that night. I think of Kai in the car shouting,“Stay useful,”while the line was dead. I think of Vincenzo saying, “No matter what happens, we’ll always have Isle Lucia.”
“I’ll try,” I say.
Arseniy’s jaw tightens, but he nods because he knows that is the only honest promise I can give.
Kai looks like he wants to argue another hundred points and knows all of them are already dead. “I’m coming with you,” Kai says.
I shake my head. “No.”
His eyes flash. “Nikolaj—”
“No,” I say again. “You stay with Arseniy for the transition.”
“Maksim, then,” Kai says.
“No.”
Tatiana wipes angrily at her face. “Me.”
