Page 14 of Bred By the Tsar

"He did." For the first time something almost like pity crosses her face. "Child. Let me tell you about my son, because he will never tell you himself. Konstantin has not loved a single person in his life. Not me. Not his father. Not Tatiana — a finer woman than you'll ever be, who gave her life for his children, and whom he could not love even as she died for him. I watched him try. I watched him fail. He is not built for it."

She sets down her glass. "What you have is a man who was frozen for three years and has mistaken the thaw for love. It is not love. It is lust. It is appetite, and novelty, and the relief of feeling anything at all. And it will pass and when it does, you will have cost him an alliance, cost this house its standing, and made those two children the punchline of every paper in the country."

It is an appetite. It will pass. Every cold 2 a.m. fear I've ever had, recited back to me in a kind voice.

I want to scream that she's wrong. The trouble is I have no proof. He's never said the word. Mine, he says. Stay, he says. He is generous with everything except that one word, and now I know why.

"And Lena," she adds, soft, and that's the blade going in, because she's seen exactly where I'm soft. "Do you imagine you're helping her? A little girl who has already lost one mother. How kind, to let her get attached to a second, knowing what you are and how this ends. How loving." She lets it land. "If you cared for those children at all, you would already be reaching for your coat."

And that's what does it. Not the contract. Not the money. Not even what she said about him.

Lena. Green, the dark kind, like the trees in summer. A key handed across a window seat. Here, I'll risk it, I'll let it matter. I swore I'd burn the world down before I let her lose one more person — and what if the person she shouldn't lose is the one teaching her it's safe to love things that leave?

I think of myself at seven, learning that lesson the hard way, again and again, until I stopped offering my favorite color to anyone.

I will not do that to her. I will not be the one who teaches Lena that hands reaching down to choose you are a lie.

So I will be the lie that leaves first, cleanly, before it can cut deep. I will give them their stable, sensible future. I will love them by subtracting myself from the equation, the way no one ever loved enough to spare me anything.

"I'd like to say goodbye to them," I say, and my voice doesn't shake, which is its own small horror.

"Better that you don't." She's already standing, already gentle, already steering me toward the door with a hand that doesn't quite touch my back. "Clean is kinder. They'll be told you had to go home. Children are resilient."

Children are not resilient, I think. That's a thing people say so they can do the thing anyway. As a foster case, I am severely familiar with that sentiment.

But I'm already walking, already numb, already folding the wanting up small and sitting on it the way I learned before I learned anything else.

My bags are by the front doors. One sad suitcase and three new ones I didn't pack, full of soft expensive things in exactly my size, and the sight of them nearly takes my knees out from under me.

Outside, the snow is coming down in big slow feathers that don't melt, patient, in no hurry, exactly the way it was the day I arrived, like the country knew all along I was only ever just passing through.

The car door is open. A driver waits. The gates stand ready beyond the white garden where we had the snowball war, where a man who runs a country watched us from a window with a look on his face I'm not sure he knew he was making.

I get in the car.

And somewhere across the city, in a chamber full of men deciding the fate of a nation, the one person who told me I was his is reaching the end of a session, checking his phone for the first time in hours, and not yet knowing his house is one daughter's heartbreak and one empty side of the bed lighter than he left it.

11

Konstantin

The session runs four hours and eleven minutes, and I feel every one of them, because that is what a man in love turns out to be: a creature made entirely of the time until he can go home.

The gavel falls. The chamber rises. I am already moving up the aisle while the last of the formalities die behind me, shrugging off the ceremonial weight of the thing, reaching into my coat for the phone I am not permitted to look at while the session sits.

It lights up like a struck match.

Eleven missed calls. Grigor, my head of security, who does not call me eleven times for anything short of nuclear war. A string of messages I read while walking, and the corridor goes strange and narrow around me as I do.

Sir, the Dowager has dismissed the nanny.

Sir, she's been removed from the residence. Vehicle en route to the airport.

Sir, the Princess is asking for her and will not be calmed. Please call.

Sir — international departure, 18:40. I can hold nothing without your word. Call me.

I stop walking.