For a moment, she looks like she might say something cruel enough to make me change my mind. Then she looks at my men. She understands. There will be no private exit. No dignified retreat.
Her voice lowers. “Your mother would not have done this to me.”
“No,” I say. “My mother trusted the wrong people too.”
I nod to Andrei. He steps forward. “Larisa Vasilova.”
She recoils slightly from his hand before he touches her. “I can walk,” she snaps.
“Then walk,” I say.
She looks at me one last time. For the first time, there’s something naked in her face. Not regret. Not apology. Something worse for a woman like Larisa.
Loss.
She wanted to be the last voice in my ear. The keeper of my mother’s wound. The one who shaped what I became.
I listen to the sound of her cane fade down the corridor, then the heavier steps of the men beside her. A door opens somewhere below. Voices murmur. Then the front door closes.
The house becomes quiet.
EPILOGUE
ANYA
The hospital releasesme four days later.
Not because the doctor thinks I’m perfectly fine. He makes that very clear. He says I’m stable, not recovered. He says I need rest, no stress, no unnecessary walking, no emotional shocks, and absolutely no arguments.
Yaromir listens to all of this with a face so serious the doctor starts repeating himself, as if he has found the one man in Russia who might actually enforce medical instructions like military law.
I sit on the edge of the hospital bed, dressed in a soft gray sweater dress Nina brought from home, and try not to laugh.
The doctor notices. “This is not amusing, Mrs. Volkova.”
“I know.”
Yaromir looks at me.
I stop smiling. Mostly.
By the time we leave, I’m exhausted from doing almost nothing. My side still aches under the bandage. My ribs hurt when I breathe too deeply. My body feels slower than it used to, as if it’s reminding me with every step that surviving is not the same as being healed.
Yaromir helps me into the car himself. He doesn’t let the nurse push the wheelchair past the entrance. He doesn’t let Viktor open the car door for me. He does everything with that silent, stubborn care that makes arguing feel ungrateful and accepting feel dangerously tender.
When he slides in beside me, I look at him. His side is bandaged too. He pretends it’s nothing. It’s not nothing. I saw the blood on his shirt. I saw him wince once when he thought I was not looking.
We are both stitched together badly.
“You’re staring,” he says.
“So are you.”
“I’m making sure you’re not in pain.”
“I’m always a little in pain right now.”
His jaw tightens immediately.
