Outside, Moscow hits me with wind and snow and the smell of wet pavement. The men near the entrance look at me, but I keep my head down and push past before anyone can decide whether I’m allowed to leave.
Only when I reach the corner do I break.
And Irun.
My heels slip on the icy pavement. My breath tears in and out of my chest. Tears blur the streetlights until every gold lamp becomes a streak across the dark.
I don’t know where I’m going.
I only know I have to get away from that club.
From the Morozovs.
From Roman.
The man who showed me Moscow with snow in my hair.
The man who might burn the whole city down to finish his revenge.
13
KATERINA
Five Years Later
My life has becomequiet in all the ways that matter and dangerous in all the ways that don’t show on the surface.
From the outside, nothing looks wrong.
We live in my father’s house again. The twins have a bright nursery on the second floor, though they are much too old now for anyone to keep calling it that. My mother has moved back into the center of the household without ever formally reclaiming the place she lost years ago.
My father has become gentler with me in public, softer with the children, more attentive to my mother than he has been in years. At dinner, the staff stand straighter when Sofia laughs. Men lower their voices when Nikolai enters a room, as if even at four years old they can already sense something in him worth watching.
That’s the part I hate.
Not the comfort. Not the stability. Not the fact that the children have grown up in warm rooms instead of rented apartments and hiding places.
What I hate is the watching.
By nine in the morning, the twins have already torn through the breakfast room like a storm.
Sofia leaves jam on the edge of the tablecloth and tells everyone she did not, even while the spoon is still in her hand. Nikolai carefully separates the berries from his porridge and lines them up in a perfect row before eating them one by one. He’s neater than Sofia, quieter than Sofia, and entirely too observant for his age. When something is wrong in a room, his face changes before mine does.
This morning, it changes when Papa walks in.
He enters the breakfast room in a dark suit with the newspaper folded under his arm and every conversation in the house shifts a little around him, as if the air itself has learned to make room.
Sofia shouts, “Deda!” and throws herself at him without hesitation.
Nikolai does not run. He slides off his chair and waits.
My father notices that too.
He bends to kiss Sofia’s head first, then rests a hand on Nikolai’s shoulder. It should be ordinary. Grandfatherly. Sweet, even.
Instead, something inside me tightens.
Because it’s never just that with Sergei Markov.
