I curl onto my side, hand on my stomach. “What do you think, little one? Is your daddy a monster or a man?”
Again, no answer. It’s just a cluster of cells right now, barely there at all. But already, it’s changed everything.
I must drift off, because when I open my eyes, it’s fully dark outside.
I sit up, disoriented. The tray is gone, the crumbs swept away. And someone has pulled a blanket over me, tucking me in on all sides.
Like a mother loving the daughter she never got to have.
4
STEFAN
The cemetery sprawls before me in the pre-dawn darkness, headstones jutting from frozen earth like broken teeth. My father’s grave sits in the corner, far away from the ostentatious mausoleums of Boston’s elite. It’s a simple black granite marker with equally simple text:Matvey Safonov, 1965-2009.
No “beloved husband.” No “loving father.” Just a name and dates. Even in death, he gets the unvarnished truth and nothing more.
I crouch beside the stone as my breath mists in the November cold. My head is in a thousand places at once—here in the graveyard, back in the mansion, out wherever the fuck my mother is hiding.
Taras wants me to seduce Mikayla, to weaponize her feelings against her. The thought makes bile rise in my throat. Not because Mikayla doesn’t deserve it—fuck knows she does; she betrayed me, endangered Olivia—but because it feels like becoming the very thing I’ve spent fifteen years trying not to be.
My mother, the manipulator.
“I need your clarity tonight, Papa,” I tell the stone. “Preferably without the weakness that killed you.”
But even as I say it, I know I’m lying. I already have his weakness. It’s five-foot-six with amber eyes and carries my child. And now, my mother has her.
An unwelcome memory crashes over me without warning, dragged up by this place, this moment.
I’m sixteen, home from a friend’s house. The house feels wrong—too quiet, like it’s holding its breath. I find my father in his study, eyeing a glass of vodka that stands untouched on his desk.
“Stefan,” he croaks. “You should not be here.”
“Why? Is something—” It’s then that I see the gun, laid out on the leather desktop alongside the liquor. “Papa?—”
“Your mother thinks I’m stupid.” He laughs, but never in my life have I heard such a horrible, grating sound. It’s the opposite of laughter.
“What’re you?—?”
“She thinks I don’t know. About him. About the baby.”
I freeze one step inside the doorway. “What baby?”
“The one she carries. It sure as fuck is not mine. Could not be mine—I had a vasectomy years ago, after you were born. You were enough. You were everything.” He picks up the gun, weighs it in his hand, looks down the sights, exhales. “But for her, nothing is ever enough.”
“Papa, put the gun down. We’ll figure this out?—”
“She’s upstairs with him now. In our bed.” His eyes meet mine, and I see he’s already gone, already decided. “Your uncle. My own brother.”
The sound of laughter drifts down from above. My mother’s tinkling laugh, then a deeper rumble. Uncle Vasily.
“Leave, Stefan. Take the car, go back to school. Forget this family.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Then you’ll watch me die.” He raises the gun to his temple. “Because I will not live as less than a man.”
“Papa, please?—”
