Vadim
I tried to push the nipple into her mouth. She pushed the bottle away again.
This was the fourth formula and she wouldn’t drink more than a quarter of a bottle of any of them—a quarter being a generous assessment. She turned her face away from each one with the focused determination of someone who had decided and was not interested in further discussion.
“Be a good girl for Papochka,” I crooned, sliding the rubber nipple over her lips.
She pursed them tighter. Her face scrunched up with the specific outrage of a person being offered something entirely unacceptable.
She was as stubborn as her mother.
“I did warn you, sir,” the nanny said, wringing her hands from the doorway.
“You’re fired,” I said pleasantly. “Bogdan, see her out.”
Milk had gathered in the creases around Runa’s mouth and was beginning to drip. I grabbed the muslin and wiped her face with more care than the situation perhaps warranted.
“Milk is milk,” I muttered, studying her. “What is your problem?”
She stared back at me with those pale blue eyes—my eyes—and said nothing.
I knew what she wanted.
Four days of fighting with my five-month-old daughter had defeated me. She needed milk. The specific milk she had been drinking since birth—the one made for her, the one that smelled right and tasted right and came from the one person she wanted and wasn’t getting.
I winced as the crying began again.
Slow at first.
Then uncontrollable.
Then the particular exhaustion of a baby who had cried herself empty and still couldn’t stop.
Then a restless, broken sleep before it all began again.
I rocked her. Paced. Talked low. Did everything that had worked before and found that none of it was enough—because none of it was the thing she actually wanted.
She had defeated me.
As soon as she was asleep I needed to call the police station.
I stared down at my impossible child. She stared right back and screamed louder.
She might be more similar to me than I’d like to admit.
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The officer opened the cell door and nodded.
“Just knock when you are finished.”
The cell was small and cold. It smelled of damp and the bleakness of a room that had held many people and cared about none of them. A single bulb overhead. A cement bed with a state-issued blanket.
Her eyes peered out from beneath it. They darted behind me—checking for Runa, hoping—as the metal door slammed shut and left us alone.
“Runa?” she croaked, sitting up slowly.
Her forehead, nose and lip were bruised, grazed and cut. I had watched her cling to my gates on the camera footage—had watched and done nothing, told myself it was what she deserved—and the evidence of it was written across her face in a way that was harder to look at in person than on a screen.
“What do you want?” I asked her.
“My daughter,” she said, her voice stronger this time than it had any right to be.
“You know you can’t have her,” I said, shaking my head.
I looked at her properly for the first time.
Her cheeks were sunken. Dark circles beneath her eyes that went deeper than tiredness—the specific hollowness of someone who had not eaten or slept in days.
The vibrant glow she’d had in Istanbul, the warmth I had studied in photograph after photograph on a private jet, was gone entirely.
What remained was this—a woman in a police cell wrapped in a state blanket who had come back to Chernograd for one reason and had not stopped trying to get to it for four days.
She flew off the cement bed. I stepped back instinctively. But she didn’t come at me—she crouched at my feet and held onto my ankle, her fingers curling around it with what strength she had left.
Not a threat. Not a performance.
Just a woman holding onto the only thing she could reach.
“Vadim.” Her voice cracked on the single syllable—my name in her mouth carrying the weight of everything that had happened in her apartment, everything since, everything before. “She is our daughter. I need to be with her.”
I remained silent. Shocked, though I wouldn’t have admitted it.
Processing what my fury had kept me from seeing clearly while she was at the gates—the desperation that wasn’t strategy, wasn’t manipulation, wasn’t another plan being assembled.
Just a mother. Four days outside in the cold and the rain, even put in the back of a police car, and still here.
Now the cogs turned. Runa’s needs on one side. My retribution on the other.
Her head rose. She stared up at me from the floor of a police cell with my handprints on every bruise on her face.
“Please.” Her voice dropped to almost nothing. “After Makari—”
The name landed in the room.
Tears welled in her eyes before she could stop them.
I pulled away from her grip and stepped back, putting distance between us.
“You weren’t a very biddable wife for someone in my position,” I said, pacing around her—keeping moving, keeping the upper hand, keeping everything at the temperature I needed it to be. “Runa is settling in well. She has no need of you.”
Her head fell down.
“But I need her,” she whispered with the pain and desperation clear to hear.
“Hm,” I said, and left it there.
I circled around her and considered options that hadn’t occurred to me on the drive over—possibilities assembling themselves now that I could see her, now that the variables had shifted.
“You had the status of being my wife. You lived under my roof,” I said, the anger rising again despite my efforts to keep it at the temperature I needed. “And what did you do? You destroyed the better part of my home and stole my child.”
“I’m sorry. I didn't know that I was pregnant,” she cried, turning her head to follow my movement. “I won’t do anything like that again.”
“You didn’t tell me once you found out. Or once she was born,” I snapped, then paused. “I don’t trust you near my daughter.”
“Vadim, please—” She reached for my trousers. I stepped back.
I looked at her on the floor of the cell. The bruises. The hollowness. The whisper that had said I need her and meant every word of it.
“You’ll need to prove yourself,” I said, as though the thought had only just occurred to me.
She swallowed.
“How?”
“You do everything I ask. Not one hesitation. Not one complaint,” I said, my voice hardening to the register that communicated finality rather than negotiation. “Everything. Without question.”
Her eyes found mine.
Her lips parted.
The pause before she answered told me everything about what it cost her.
“I agree,” she said.
“This is a trial run,” I said, walking toward the door.
I knocked.
“Clean yourself up before you see Runa. I’ll be waiting in the car.” I paused with my hand on the frame. “Collect your things and get outside.”
I didn’t look back as the door opened.
Behind me I could hear her scrambling—the blanket, the movement, the urgency of someone who had been waiting for days for this and was not wasting a single second of it.
It was only then that I smiled.
This is what they called two birds with one stone.
I whistled all the way to my car.