Chapter Iskra
Iskra
Tau’s energy seemed different today.
I sipped my tea and contemplated it across the kitchen.
Olya was simply glad I had come downstairs for breakfast—she had been making her feelings about me staying in my room known through a series of pointed silences and strategic appearances at my door with increasingly elaborate food.
This morning she was whizzing around the kitchen with the energy of a woman who had decided that pastries were the solution and was not open to discussion on the matter.
The scent of them filled the room, warm and buttery, the kind of smell that belongs to a different kind of morning than this one.
You could never tell with Tau. Happy and sad occupied the same expression on his face—or rather, no expression at all.
Even anger only announced itself in the tightening of something around his jaw, the slight curl of his fingers toward his palm.
I had been learning to read him the way I had learned to read the house—in fragments, in small physical tells, in the things that changed by degrees so small anyone else would miss them.
Today something was different. I couldn’t name it yet.
“I’m getting a complex,” he said dryly, without looking at me.
He stood beside the window, hands clasped at the front of his trousers, gaze on the garden. The morning light found the slight scarring along his jawline and the stillness of him—the particular stillness of a man who has learned to take up exactly the space he needs and no more.
I grunted but didn’t look away.
Olya slid a plate in front of me and moved on, entirely unbothered by whatever was passing between us.
Tau glanced at me. That was when I saw it—the tips of his lips edged fractionally upward. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one.
I gasped at the near smile.
He rolled his eyes and shifted closer, dropping his voice.
“Today they begin the reckoning,” he murmured. “The man who caused everything.”
For a moment I forgot to breathe.
Then something moved through me that I hadn’t expected—not relief exactly, not grief, but something older and darker than either.
A bloodlust. The specific want of suffering inflicted on a specific person.
I wanted him to feel it slowly. Days of it.
Weeks. Blood ebbing away degree by degree while the pain kept his mind alert enough to understand exactly what was happening and why.
I wanted him to have time to think about the truck and the shadow and the rolling and everything that came after.
It wasn’t until I looked away from the wall that I realised my expression had shifted.
Tau’s near smile was still there.
Mine mirrored it.
I reached for my plate. Not from hunger—I hadn’t felt hungry in days—but from the first sensation of having felt anything at all. The pastry was warm under my fingers. I didn’t taste it.
It was enough.
Someone was suffering for what they took from me. That was enough to make my hand move toward food. That was enough to bring me downstairs.
“Keep me informed,” I said, reaching for my tea.
He nodded. Once. The way Tau did everything—precisely and without elaboration.
Vadim had taken Spartak away from me, but Tau was proving to be considerably more valuable.
The honey and sugar were doing their work—warming something back into life, clearing the fog that had settled over everything since the hospital.
I could feel my brain beginning to engage again for the first time since the loss.
Filing. Observing. Planning, perhaps, in the distant way of someone who has remembered that planning is possible.
Ruslan walked in, cheeks flushed from the morning chill, bringing the cold air in with him.
“How was your morning patrol?” I asked, nodding toward my plate.
He reached across without hesitation—the unselfconsciousness of a younger brother who has never fully accepted that other people’s food isn’t also his food.
Olya’s screech was immediate and absolute.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t argue. Simply turned to the sink and washed his hands with the unhurried compliance of a man who had learned that Olya’s kitchen had its own hierarchy and he sat at the bottom of it regardless of what the Brotherhood’s code said about his rank.
Olya made him a plate.
I observed my odd little family.
Odd or not, it was mine.
I bit into the fig-filled pirozhki.
It tasted better when someone else made it.
??
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The warmth of the sun through the window and the weight of the blanket lulled me into something between sleep and waking. The television was on. I stared at it without seeing it.
It was a cruel reminder—my belly still bulged outward, the shape of it unchanged, the body not yet catching up with what had happened inside it. I stroked it beneath the blanket anyway. The way I had been doing for months. The hand finding its way there without permission, the same as always.
Except now it was empty.
I blinked and registered what was on the screen.
A nappy commercial.
I had still been weighing the benefits of podguznik against pelyonka. Disposable against natural cloth. Reading about the importance of fabric against new skin, the chemicals in synthetic liners, the environmental argument versus the practical one. So important for the baby’s skin.
Such a specific and useless thing to still know.
Someone cleared their throat.
A man.
Men were the root of all the problems in the world.
I let the tears come. Didn’t wipe them. Didn’t turn away from the screen. Just let them run while my hand stayed pressed against the empty belly beneath the blanket and the nappy commercial played on and the sun stayed warm and none of it meant anything.
Vadim was occupied by vengeance. He had somewhere to put it — the rage, the loss, the need to make something bleed. I had nothing. No outlet. No normality. No job to dress for, no life that existed outside this room and this blanket and this body that still looked pregnant and wasn’t.
Just existing inside my prison.
I closed my eyes.
Someone sat near my feet. A gentle pat on my legs through the blanket—careful, deliberate, the touch of someone who understood that touch needed to be asked for right now.
It could only be my brother. No one else would dare.
I didn’t open my eyes.
Eventually the slumber came.
Restless, as it always was now.