Below us, the clouds stretch on like snow.
“All right,” I whisper.
Roman’s voice is low. “All right?”
“You can show me Moscow.”
For a moment, he says nothing.
Then I feel the back of his fingers brush mine on the blanket. It’s barely a touch, so light I could pretend it does not happen.
“Sleep now,” he says.
This time, I do not argue.
I close my eyes with the taste of chocolate still on my tongue and the promise of Moscow waiting somewhere beyond the dark.
7
KATERINA
Moscow isgray when we land.
Not ugly gray. Not the tired, dirty gray of rainwater on concrete. This is something colder, sharper, and almost silver. It sits beyond the airplane window in a pale morning haze, coating the runway, the service vehicles, the distant terminal lights.
For a few seconds, I forget everything else.
Then Roman reaches up to take my bag from the overhead compartment, and my body remembers him before my mind has the chance to behave.
I look away quickly.
He notices, of course. But he has the decency not to say anything.
The airport is warmer than I expect when we step off the plane, but the cold still finds me somehow. It slips in through the glass walls, through the seams of my coat, through the part of me that has never been this far from home.
Sheremetyevo is busy even at this hour. Signs in Russian and English hang above us. People move briskly through the terminal with coats folded over their arms and sleep still on their faces. There’s the smell of coffee, perfume, and aircraft fuel lingering somewhere beneath everything.
I’m here. I’m in Russia.
Not as Lev’s fiancée. Not as my father’s obedient daughter.
Just as me.
The thought is so overwhelming that I almost miss the way Roman watches me. Not openly. Never that. But I feel his attention the way I felt his hand on my waist last night. Quiet, constant, impossible to ignore.
At immigration, he stands close enough to make me feel steadier but not close enough to crowd me. My passport is stamped. My heart gives one strange, stupid leap at the sound.
After baggage claim, my phone finally finds service.
It begins vibrating so violently in my hand that I nearly drop it.
Papa. Mama. Papa again.
Unknown number.
Mama. Irina. Papa.
A string of messages pile onto the screen before I can read them properly. Missed calls, texts, voice notes, all arriving at once like my life has chased me across the world and finally caught up.
