Vika goes on as if we’re discussing flowers. “I got the children to him because that was the arrangement. He wanted Roman drawn out. That was the point of all of it in the end. Not the twins themselves. Not really. Roman.”
My skin goes tight all over.
“He knew Roman would come,” she says. “The second children were involved, he knew exactly what Roman would do.”
That makes sense in a sickening, immediate way. Of course it does. Roman would walk into fire for them. For me. For his own blood, whether Andrei was certain of it or not.
I say, “Andrei used my children to lure his son.”
“Yes.”
There’s no shame in her voice. No hesitation. Only a brittle, self-satisfied certainty that makes my stomach turn.
“But then,” she says, and now something in her face changes, something harsher and more private, “he ruined it.”
I blink at her. “What?”
“When Roman got there, Andrei stopped caring about the children.” Her voice turns brittle around the words. “That was the infuriating part. He looked at them, looked at Roman, and then told me to take them back.”
For one suspended second, none of it makes sense.
“Take them back?”
“Yes.” Her mouth twists. “As if they were parcels. As if I had gone to the trouble of removing them from that house just to carry them back in through the same door.”
My heart is hammering so hard I feel sick. “Where are they?”
She ignores me. “He said they had served their purpose,” she says. “He had what he wanted. Roman came. Roman walked in. Roman chose exactly as Andrei knew he would. And then he looked at me and told me to take the children away.”
Her eyes glitter strangely in the gray light. “And I thought, no.”
The word lands like a stone dropped down a well.
My mouth goes dry. “Vika.”
“No,” she says again, quieter now, and there is something terribly calm in her face. “I can’t do that. I can’t just put them back. I can’t watch you take them home and keep living inside that lie while Lev stays dead and I get nothing.”
Mikhail says, low and controlled, “Vika, think very carefully about what you say next.”
She doesn’t even look at him.
Her eyes stay on me. “If I couldn’t have Lev’s children,” she says, “then no one else can.”
For a second I don’t understand the sentence. Not really. My mind rejects it on instinct, refuses to build the shape of it.
Then it lands.
And when it does, it tears something open inside me.
“You’re insane.”
She laughs, and this time there is no prettiness in it at all. It’s flat. Wrong. The sound of something cracked too deep to mend.
“No,” she says. “I’m the only one who has been honest about this from the beginning.”
I stare at her. “Honest?”
“Yes.” Her voice rises, but not wildly. Sharply. Bitterly. “You never loved him. You tolerated him. You endured him. You let the whole family build that arrangement around you and still somehow came out of it with everyone wanting to protect you from the consequences. Even after he died, even after you came home pregnant, even after the whole city whispered, it was always you people looked at with pity.”
