“What are these?” I ask.
“House records. Renovations. Garden plans. Staff events.”
“Does Yaromir know you’re showing me these?”
“No.”
That gets my attention.
Nina’s face remains composed, but there’s a tiny spark in her eyes now.
I sit slowly. The first album is mostly photographs of the house before restoration. Broken windows. Overgrown gardens. Rooms stripped bare. Dust on staircases. It looks abandoned, nothing like the controlled, severe place it is now.
In one photograph, Yaromir stands in the main hall, younger, maybe in his late twenties, sleeves rolled up, face harsher somehow without the silver in his hair. The scar is there already. He’s looking at the floor, not the camera, surrounded by men carrying out broken furniture.
I touch the edge of the photograph. “He looked angry even then,” I say quietly.
Nina looks over my shoulder. “He was.”
“Is he ever not?”
She thinks about it. “With the horse.”
That surprises a small laugh out of me.
Then the laughter fades. Because I imagine Buran in the stable, Yaromir feeding him apples from his coat pocket, and suddenly I want him back so badly it frightens me.
Not because I need protection.
Not because he’s my husband.
Because somewhere between his bloody knuckles and his hand at my waist, between the white sheet and the fireplace, between his anger and the rare moments when he stops hiding the man underneath it, something has changed inside me.
I care in a way that makes waiting feel unbearable.
I sit there for another hour. Maybe more.
Time becomes strange. Nina pours more tea. The guards change once. Someone speaks urgently in the hallway, and I stand so quickly the album slides from my lap.
Still nothing.
Then the front door opens downstairs.
I know because the whole house reacts. A shift. A movement through the walls. Men speaking. Footsteps. The library guard turns his head toward the hall.
I’m already moving before anyone tells me.
“Madam,” Nina says.
I ignore her.
The guards outside the door move to stop me, then seem to think better of it. Maybe they see my face. Maybe they value their lives. Either way, they step aside.
I run down the corridor.
Not gracefully. Not like a wife of a Volkov should.
I run like a woman who has been sitting for hours imagining the worst and cannot bear one more second of not knowing.
