Something cold starts low in my gut. “Hear what?” he tells me quietly that Cassie — his fiancée — is dead.
Suicide.
For a second, I just look at him, not because I don’t understand the words — because I do — but my brain still seems to think that if it waits a little longer, the outcome might change into something less impossible.
The officer says something else after that. About timings, arrangements, and how Niko's handling it. He tells me Niko's practically locked himself away with Vladimir since it happened, barely speaking to anyone unless he has to. Then he seems to realise there's no point carrying on because I'm not really hearing him anymore. Not past that first blow of it, at least.
I thank him, then walk out of the briefing room in a bit of a daze. The corridor feels longer than it did on the way in. I stop once with my hand against the wall, not because I’m about to keel over dramatically, but because my body has decided this is where it needs to catch up to the fact that while I’ve been halfway delirious with the thought of seeing Ari, Niko’s fiancée has died.
The officer told me where Niko is without me needing to ask, pointing me in the direction of the military housing — a flat next to the barracks. Cassie had livedthere with him and the baby. Toddler, really. Vladimir isn’t a baby-baby anymore. He’s bigger now, old enough to know familiar faces, and old enough that his mother’s absence will matter.
I get to Niko’s door and knock twice. The door opens slowly, and there he is. Niko looks... ruined, for lack of a better word. There isn’t really a nicer word for it, and he’d probably tell me to piss off if I tried to find one. His face is thinner, his eyes are red and unfocused in a way that goes beyond crying and sits somewhere in the territory of broken.
He stares at me for a second, then something in him gives. “Caiden?” he asks, but he doesn’t sound surprised.
He sounds relieved.
That nearly breaks me on the spot.
I step inside and pull him into a hug before either of us can make it awkward. He doesn’t hug me back at first, not properly. He... folds, the way men do when they’ve run out of energy to hold themselves up and someone else arrives at exactly the right moment.
Over his shoulder, I can see the flat is painfully orderly. Toddler things are lined up with the sort of precision that subconsciously suggests that if everything stays in the right place, maybe nothing else will fall apart.
Then I hear Vladimir making noise from the back room. It’s not a newborn baby scream. It’s a cross between a cry and a tired little grumbling that’s about three seconds from becoming a proper howl.
Niko doesn’t move; he stands there and hugs me. I let him for a few minutes, then I let him go gently and head through without thinking. Vladimir is in the cot, flushed and annoyed with life in the general way toddlers are when they’ve woken up and no one has yet arranged the world to their liking.
He’s bigger than the last time I saw him, obviously. It’s been almost a year. He’s got more weight to him when I lift him, all warm little limbs and offended dignity. He immediately twists round to glare at me as if this interruption had better be worth it, and I’d laugh under other circumstances because he has exactly the sort of face that suggests his uncle is not the only Zakirov born prepared to take issue with existence.
“All right, mate,” I murmur, adjusting him onto my hip.
He goes quiet almost at once, the grumbling dropping to small, suspicious breaths against my shoulder while he decides whether I count as acceptable. I rub a hand over his back and feel him soften by degrees, as if he’s familiar enough with me not to object for long.
Behind me, Niko sinks onto a chair and covers his face with both hands. “I don’t know how to do this,” he says into them. “She did everything right. I don’t—”
He doesn’t finish, but he also doesn’t need to. I stand there, with his son against my chest, and look at him properly. He’s not Senior Sergeant Zakirov, the officer version of him. Just Niko. Broken, alone, trying and failing to make any of this look manageable.
“I’m here,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think to say.
That gets us through the next few hours. I feed Vladimir when he needs feeding, which is less dainty than it used to be because he’s at the age where he wants to help, and his help is well... destructive. He nearly gets mashed potatoes in my hair and looks offended when I object. I wash his hands. I wipe his face. I walk him around the room when he gets tired and stubborn, then doesn’t want to admit he is either.
Niko dozes in short, ugly bursts on the sofa and wakes up looking guilty every time, as if sleep itself has become indulgent somehow. I make tea, but he doesn’t drink it. I stack dishes because they’re there. I move things from one side of the room to the other if it looks as though doing so might stop the place from grinding to a halt.
None of it is big enough to matter on its own, but together it keeps the evening moving.
At one point, Niko looks up from the sofa while I’m crouched on the floor trying to persuade Vladimir that my watch is not, in fact, his by right, and says, “You were just posted back?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to do this,” he says. The words are quiet, but I can hear the embarrassment behind them. That’s the bit I can’t stand.
“Yes,” I say, more firmly than he probably expects. “I do.”
He looks at me for what feels like minutes after that, then drops his eyes. Not in an offended way, in a way that says he’s too tired to keep fighting the offer of help now it’s already here.
Later, when the flat has gone quiet and Vladimir has finally worn himself out enough to sleep, I sit in the armchair by the window with him tucked against me and think about Ari.
I think about him still away on exercise, not knowing any of this yet, and about the fact that when I woke up this morning, the version of the world I was in still had Cassie alive in it and Niko functioning in something close to one piece.
