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What I want is to sleep next to my wife, butshe’snot in a condition for me to do that yet. The doctor cautioned against anything that might jostle her or disturb her healing process, and the last thing I want to do is make this harder for her. She needs to heal as quickly and efficiently as possible, especially because we can’t stay in this cabin for much longer. There are still people after her and us, and the longer we stay in one place, the more dangerous it becomes.
It takes a long time for me to fall asleep. When I finally do, my sleep is restless and broken, punctuated by dreams that I haven’t had in a long time.
Vera, on our wedding day, resplendent in silk and lace, her blonde hair cascading down her shoulders and her delicate heart-shaped face alight with joy. Her cheeks flushed, her hands gripping mine at the altar, both of us young and full of joy that we were allowed to do this at all, to make a love match when so many in our positions married for status, wealth, or power instead. Me, unable to believe that I had been lucky enough to win her love, this shining example of Russian grace and beauty, a wife that any man could be proud of.
Her body in our wedding bed, hands everywhere, too much of a rush to get her dress off. Hands, pushing it up above her hips, a tangle of lace, her head thrown back, her pretty rose-colored lips parted on a gasp as I thrust into her, groaning with satisfaction. My hand on her face, eyes locked together, bodies tangled in a passion that naively, youthfully, we had believed would never fade.
That nothing could ever come between us. We were young and in love.
We were invincible.
Vera, her smooth flat stomach beginning to swell with the child that would be Anika, her face alight with happiness, swearing she was going to give me a son. An heir, a child to carry on the Andreyev name. To carry on a business that she didn’t fully understand because I’d kept her in the dark. Because I didn’t know how to tell the woman I loved that I bought and sold other women, that it was what my family had always done, despite how I tried to justify it in my own mind.
Even then, I knew that my justifications were not enough.
But it was what we had always done.
I knew no other way.
My wife, radiant as a goddess in her pregnancy, though she hardly thought so. The images swirl past, the two of us not realizing what we were on the cusp of, rattling around my too-large house, making promises to fill it with children.Vera nesting, decorating. A new piece of furniture, art, or antique every day when I came home.
Anika, coming screaming into the world. The memory I despise, how my wife turned away from our daughter when she saw that she hadn’t given me a son, and how she refused to listen when I told her that it didn’t matter, that she could give me sons later, that our daughter was as beautiful as her mother.
The beginning of the end.
These are not the things I want to dream about. Not the things I want to remember. But caught in a restless sleep, they all come back to me anyway.
The first divide between us. The way Vera loved Anika, but from a distance, as if the girl was a sign of her own failure. The way sex changed between us, a dogged race to get pregnant again, instead of the passionate lovemaking that it was before. Vera, turning her face away from me when I try to kiss her as I hold her naked body in my hands. Vera, telling me that I can’t possibly forgive her that my firstborn was not a son. Vera, who won’t listen, no matter how often I coo over and spoil my daughter, no matter how often I tell her that I adore Anika because she is in every way a tiny replica of my lovely wife.
Vera, who can only think about one thing now, and that’s giving me a son.
The second pregnancy, and a lukewarm bed. My wife, cradling her belly protectively as if she could change the sex of the child simply by wishing hard enough.
My wife, who refuses to nurse the second daughter she gives me.
Our first real fight. Screaming, shouting, insults that I will carry with me to my grave. Things I said in fear for my children, worry that they would grow up without a loving mother. The night I dragged her to my bed and told her that if she wanted to give me a son so badly, she could take my cock again before she was ready for it.
A night that I will regret for the rest of my life.
My wife, a different woman from the one I married. Sadder, more selfish, materialistic, obsessed with her body and her beauty and keeping it despite her insistence on giving me more children. The son that even I would admit that I needed, no matter how much I loved my daughters.
Her love for me, fading even as she learned to love the children she hadn’t meant to give me. What little joy she still had, fading with each passing month that didn’t bring a new child. Her horror when some of the other Bratva women, Russian wives visiting from Moscow, slipped and told her more than I ever wanted her to know about my business.
The tears she had cried, the way she’d turned her face away when I’d asked, livid with fury, if she planned to give up the house and designer dresses and the jewelry dripping from every inch of her, since she hated all that I did so much.
The last time I ever took her to bed, and the way the light caught the jewels on her ring finger, the huge diamond that I had asked her to marry me with, and the two bands that I’d given her for our daughters’ births.
They’d made me angry. I’d held her hand down, wanting to rip the diamonds off of her finger. The roughness had fueled something in her, too, some emotion that I hadn’t felt from her in a long time, and she’d fucked me back in a way that she hadn’t before.
Grateful just to feel something besides languid sorrow or pouting fits from my wife again, I’d thought nothing of it.
I’d held her in my hands and reveled in the feeling of her body the way I used to. The sweet, hot clutch of her, the softness of her full breasts and lush hips, the curves that she hated so much and that I loved to feel beneath me, wrapped around me.
When we were done, she’d whispered sleepily beside me that perhaps we’d made a son.
And then I left for a month, on a business trip to Russia.
The next time I saw her, it was in the bathtub upstairs, bloody water spilling out onto the marble floor, her face pale and still, her arms laid open.
