Page 39 of Bred By the Tsar

13

Hazel

Five Weeks Later...

It's the coffee that gives me away, in the end.

Five weeks of being his, openly his, the ring already on my finger and the wedding three weeks off, and I've spent them learning a life I never let myself draw on paper because wanting it felt like tempting fate.

Mornings with the children. Afternoons with a tutor the palace hired to teach me which fork and which curtsy and which fork the curtsy comes before. Nights that still wreck me, every one. Even the Dowager and I have arrived somewhere — not warmth, never that, but a frozen scrupulous courtesy between two women who both know exactly who won, and who has started, grudgingly, to let Lena visit her without a chaperone.

It's a truce. I'll take a truce.

Then one ordinary morning the smell of his coffee hits me across the breakfast table and my stomach turns straight over, and I have to put my napkin down and breathe through my nose and pretend, very hard, to be fascinated by the window.

He notices. The Tsar notices everything. He notices when I change which side I part my hair on.

"You're pale," he says, low, his hand already on my wrist, two fingers at my pulse like a man who has never trusted a doctor to do anything he could do himself. "You've been tired."

"I'm fine."

"You ate nothing yesterday that didn't come back up." Not a question. He misses nothing; it's exhausting. I love him so much it frightens me. "I'm calling Dr. Volkonskaya."

"It's probably just," And then I stop.

I am three weeks late.

I have never in my life been late. Not once, not through hunger, not through grief, not through the worst years. My body has been the one thing that kept its appointments when nothing else in my life would.

"Hazel." His voice has changed. He's watching my face do the arithmetic and I can see him arrive at the answer a half-second behind me, can see it hit the cold careful machinery of him like a stone through ice. "Hazel."

"I need —" I'm already standing. "I need to go check something. Alone. Please. Just — give me ten minutes, I can't — I can't say it until I'm sure, I can't survive saying it and being wrong—"

He lets me go. It costs him visibly, every protective instinct he owns straining at the leash, but he lets me go, because he has learned that the surest way to keep me is to let me choose my own feet.

***

I take the test in the enormous bathroom off our rooms with my hands shaking so badly I nearly drop it. Then I take a second one, because I don't trust the first, because I have never once trusted good news to be true.

And then I sit down on the cold marble floor with both little white wands cradled in my lap, and I wait. I think about a nineteen-year-old who stepped off a plane into a cold that took the breath out of her, who arrived in this country owning one sad suitcase and exactly two wishes she was sure the world would never grant a girl like her.

Somebody to choose me.

A family of my own to love.

I got the first one in a study, in the snow, from a man who was certain he'd been born without the part that chooses anyone.

The second one comes up, while I'm sitting on the floor crying too hard to hold the things steady, as two pink lines.

Two of them. On both tests. Twice sure.

I press my hand flat to my own stomach and I make a sound that's half sob and half laugh and entirely disbelief, because I am going to have a family, a real one, one nobody can sign away or fly out or decide I'm not good enough to keep, one made out of him and me and the impossible warm luck of being chosen back.

The door opens. He gave me ten minutes and lasted maybe six.

He takes one look at me on the floor — at my face, at the tests, at the way I'm holding my own belly — and reads the whole answer before I can shape a single word. Then, the most powerful man in Russia crosses his own bathroom and drops to his knees in front of me like the floor is an altar and I am the only thing on it worth kneeling for.

"Hazel."