Page 16 of Bred By the Tsar

Konstantin, at the mouth of the jet bridge, snow still melting on the shoulders of a coat he opened a parliament in four hours ago, his security strung out behind him and an entire airport bending out of his way like grass under wind. He's found me. Of course he's found me. There is nowhere in this country he cannot be, and I knew that, and I got in the car anyway, because I'd decided being the thing that ruins him was worse than being the thing that leaves.

“Hazel.”

He crosses the thirty feet between us without hurrying, which is somehow worse than if he'd run, and stops close enough that I have to tip my head back, and the boarding pass crumples smaller in my fist.

"You came," I say. Stupidly. "You're supposed to be in session?"

"My mother told you I can't love." He says it flat, in front of two hundred staring strangers, like they aren't there at all. "Didn't she?"

I can't answer. My eyes fill, which is answer enough.

"She wasn't entirely wrong." His voice doesn't soften. He’s telling me the truth. "For forty-two years I was certain I'd been born without the part that does it. I watched a good woman give her life for my son, and I grieved her exactly as she deserved, and I could not love her, and I made my peace with being a man built that way."

He takes the ruined boarding pass out of my hand, unfolds my fingers one at a time. "And then a girl with no last name walked into my study and looked at me like I was a person instead of a throne, and the thing I was sure didn't exist in me woke up — and it has not slept since."

"It's appetite," I whisper, because the Dowager's voice is still in me, gold and reasonable. "It'll pass. I'm — I'm a warm thing in a cold house, that's all, I'm weather—"

"You are the climate, Hazel." Fierce, now. "You changed what I am. That doesn't pass." His hands come up to my face, both of them, tilting it like the first night. "It isn't appetite and it isn't novelty and I have never in my life been wrong about what I feel. I love you. Moya dusha. My soul. I have never said those words to a living person, and I'm saying them in an airport in front of strangers because I would rather be a scandal with you than a Tsar without you. Now tell me to go to hell or tell me to take you home, but do not — do not — get on that plane believing you were ever a thing I could lose and survive."

"Lena," I get out, my last shield, my whole reason. "I left so she wouldn't — so she wouldn't learn that people who choose you leave—"

"She is sitting in a window seat refusing to be calmed because the person who chose her did leave." His thumbs catch my tears. "You didn't spare her that lesson, dusha. You taught it. The only way to unteach it is to come home and never go." A breath. "Both of them are asking for you. So am I. I have been asking for you, in one way or another, since you squinted at me across my own study and told me the truth about my children."

And something in me — the part that learned at seven to fold the wanting up small and sit on it until it stopped kicking, the part that has run every cost-benefit on every scrap of love I was ever offered and chosen no to get ahead of the no coming for me — that part finally lays down its arms.

I am so tired of leaving first.

"Okay," I say, and it comes out wrecked and laughing and certain all at once. I put both hands flat on his chest, over the heart he was sure he didn't have, and I use the word I've never once dared, the one the staff don't use and his mother won't and his dead wife did, the one I somehow always knew was the real name underneath all the titles.

"Take me home, Konstantin."

He goes utterly still. For one second the Tsar, the ruler, the whole terrible machine of him just stops, like I've reached into his chest and found the one switch no one else alive is allowed to touch.

Then he kisses me, in front of the gate and the cameras and the held aircraft and the entire watching country. The boarding pass drops out of my open hand and nobody picks it up.

***

The plane leaves without me. Let it. I was never cargo.

He takes me home in the back of the car with my hand crushed in both of his like he's afraid I'll dissolve if he loosens his grip, and he doesn't say much, and he doesn't need to, because every few seconds he lifts my knuckles to his mouth like a man checking that the thing he nearly lost is still attached to its hand.

The palace is blazing with light when we come through the gates, past the photographers who will have their headline either way.

The great doors aren't even fully open before a small body in a nightgown hurtles across the marble. Lena, who does not run, who does not show things, who has spent three careful years making herself small enough to survive being left and slams into me so hard I stagger, her arms locked around my waist, her face buried in my coat.

"You came back." Muffled. Furious. Crying. "You came back, you came back!"

"I came back." I'm on my knees on the cold floor with her before I've decided to be, both of us wrecked. "I'm sorry I left. I'm so sorry, solnyshko. I was being stupid about things."

She doesn't ask what that means. She just holds on, fierce and small, the way she handed me her favorite color across a window seat — here, I'll risk it again, even though you proved I was right to be afraid. And I hold her back and swear to myself I will spend the rest of my life proving her wrong.

Then Misha is being carried down by a nurse, sleep-creased and outraged to have missed something, reaching for me with both fat hands and then I have them both, an armful of the only family I have ever been allowed to keep.

I look up. Konstantin is standing over the three of us with an expression I've seen exactly once before — that first night, in his study, the look of a man watching the thing he was certain he'd never have walk into the room and switch on the light.

"Stay," he says. Quiet. Absolute. The first word he ever gave me.

It turns out to be the last one I needed.