I hate the softness. I want to tell her to get out. I want to snarl. I want to become something awful enough that she leaves, and I can keep breaking without a witness. Instead, the moment she says my name, another sob rips through me so violently I curl around it.
Tatiana crosses the room fast. She drops to her knees in front of me, but not too close, like I’m a wounded animal and she knows exactly how badly I bite when hands come too near the wrong part of the pain.
“Kolya,” Tatiana says again, her voice smaller now. “Brother.”
I shake my head hard, but I don’t know what I’m denying. Her presence. The grief. The ring. The body. The entire world.
“Go,” I manage.
“No,” she says.
“Tatiana,” I say, and it comes out broken enough that it doesn’t work as a warning.
“No,” she repeats, and then she does come closer, carefully, stubbornly, until she’s beside me against the bed. She presses her shoulder into mine and sits there.
That almost finishes me.
Because she’s twenty-one and lethal and still my sister. Still the child who used to climb into my bed after nightmares and kick me in the ribs because she refused to admit she was scared.
Now she sits beside me while I fall apart over the man everyone told me I should hate, and she doesn’t flinch from any of it.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
Tatiana’s breath shakes once. “I know.”
“No,” I say, turning my head toward her, vision blurred, voice tearing itself apart. “I can’t. I can’t do this. I had him—I fucking had him. He was here. He was mine. He was my husband.”
The last word breaks completely, and Tatiana’s face crumples. She suddenly looks younger. Too young for the blood she carries and the things she’s done with my permission.
“I know,” Tatiana says, and her own voice cracks. “I know he was.”
I clutch the ring so tightly my hand starts to tremble again. “He said we’d always have Isle Lucia. He said it like goodbye,” I whisper. “I told him no. I told him we’d go back. I told him I’d buy another island to piss him off. He said he loved arguing with me.” I laugh again, and it falls apart at once. “Then the line went dead while he was still speaking.”
Tatiana makes a small sound, like pain has caught in her throat, and she doesn’t know what to do with it.
I look down at the ring. “They said the tests confirmed.”
She doesn’t speak.
“Tell me they’re wrong,” I say.
Tatiana goes still.
I turn on her, desperation crawling up through the wreckage and finding teeth. “Tell me they’re wrong, Tanyusha,” I beg. “Please, tell me they’re wrong.”
Her eyes fill properly then, and that alone gives me the answer before she says anything.
“Nikolaj,” Tatiana says carefully. “The tests—”
“Fuck the tests,” I snarl, but the force dies immediately because my voice breaks under it. “Fuck them. Tell me.”
She reaches for my wrist. “I want them to be wrong,” she says, and she is crying now, quiet and furious about it. “I want that more than anything.”
It is not enough, but it’s the truth.
I collapse sideways before I can stop myself, and she catches what she can. I end up with my forehead against her shoulder, and one hand still closed around the ring between us.
She wraps both arms around me and holds on like she used to when she was little, and I pretended I didn’t need it as much as she did.
