Roman
I wake up with my hand already reaching for a gun that isn’t there.
For one blind second, I don’t know where I am. The room is dark. My heart is pounding hard enough to hurt. I can still hear my mother screaming.
Then the dark settles into shape around me. The apartment. The low lamp near the door. The outline of the dresser. The soft warmth beside me.
My chest is still heaving. Sweat clings cold between my shoulder blades. I drag a hand over my face and sit up too fast, the sheets tangling around my waist.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
Even in the dark, I feel her looking at me.
It’s a lie, and not even a good one.
She sits up too, pulling the sheet over herself more from habit than modesty. Her hair is a mess from sleep, her voice rough with it when she says, “That didn’t sound like nothing.”
I don’t answer.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. I can feel the remains of the dream still crawling over my skin. My mother’s face. The hallway. The sound of wood splintering. The smell of blood and old cigarette smoke and fear so thick it seemed to have a taste.
But then that disappears, and is replaced by the smiling faces of the twins. My children. I never thought I would bring my flesh and blood into this world. I thought I would die alone, but there they are.
For one blissful moment, I allow myself to be happy.
Katerina touches my arm.
The contact should be easy to ignore. It isn’t.
“What did you dream?” she asks quietly.
I almost tell her it doesn’t matter.
I almost tell her she doesn’t want to know.
Instead, I hear myself laugh once under my breath, tired and ugly. “My mother.”
Her hand stays where it is.
I stare at the wall across from the bed because looking at her while I say any of this will make it harder.
“She used to sleep lightly,” I say. “I think when you live with a man like my father, that becomes instinct. You learn the sound of a bad night before it fully starts.”
Katerina says nothing.
I don’t think I could keep talking if she interrupted.
“I was twelve when he sent us away the first time. Just far enough to make it clear we had become inconvenient. My mother still thought that meant there was a chance he would come back for us if she waited properly. If she behaved properly. If she stayed quiet long enough.”
I let out a breath.
“She loved him,” I say. “That was her weakness. She kept believing there was a version of him worth waiting for.”
I feel Katerina’s fingers tighten slightly on my arm.
“She took me to a smaller apartment after that, nothing that looked like punishment from the outside. That was always his style. He didn’t like mess where other people could see it.
But the money got tighter. The visits stopped.
Then the calls stopped. Then even his men stopped pretending we still mattered.
She did love him. And that was the worst mistake she ever made. ”
Katerina shifts closer but doesn’t interrupt.
“I was fourteen when he had her killed. I woke up because she screamed my name. There were men in the apartment already. One of them grabbed me before I could get out of bed. The other went straight to her.”
I stop there for a second, because even after so many years, the memory is still overwhelming.
“My father sent them,” I say. “I know that as surely as I know my own name. He wanted her dead, and he wanted me alive to see it. He wanted me to understand what happened to people who became inconvenient to him.”
Katerina’s hand tightens on my arm.
“They killed her in front of me. He had her murdered in that room while I was held down and forced to watch.”
The words settle hard between us.
“I remember stupid things about it. The color of her nightgown. The sound of the radiator. The smell of cigarette smoke on the man holding me. I remember her looking at me while she was dying, like she was more afraid for me than for herself. I remember the man kneeling over her standing up afterward and telling me to remember it. After that, there was nothing left to misunderstand. My father hadn’t just thrown us away. He had finished the job.”
I lean forward and rest my forearms on my knees for a moment. The apartment is still dark, and outside the windows the city hasn’t started making noise yet.
“I buried her with borrowed money,” I say. “I would rather have owed strangers.”
“And that’s when you decided?” Katerina asks quietly.
“Yes.” I turn my head and look at her properly.
“That’s when I decided I was going to take everything from him.
Not quickly. Not in some fit of grief. I wanted him to lose it the way I lost her.
Slowly. Piece by piece. His money. His men.
His power. His name. I wanted him to watch his world come apart and understand exactly who was doing it. ”
Her face softens in a way that makes something in me pull tight. “So everything after that,” she says, “every move you made…”
“Was about revenge,” I say. “Yes.”
There is no point dressing it up. That has been the center of my life for too long to pretend otherwise.
Katerina is quiet for a moment. Then she asks, “And now?”
The question lands differently than it would have a year ago. Maybe even a month ago. I know what I would have said then. I would have told her it ends when he’s dead and buried and forgotten. I would have said it without hesitation.
Now I look at her sitting beside me in my bed, her hair loose, her face still soft from sleep, and I think about the children sleeping somewhere under her father’s roof.
I think about the way she came to me anyway.
I think about how badly I wanted revenge when I was younger and how badly I want something else now, something far more dangerous because I never planned for it.
“I still want him ruined,” I say. “I’m just starting to understand that I may not survive getting exactly what I wanted.”
That’s as close to honesty as I can make it.
Katerina moves closer and puts her arms around me. She doesn’t say anything clever or soft or unnecessary. She just holds me.
I let her. And for the first time in years, I feel how tired I really am.
“But,” I continue. “After what you told me…”
Katerina holds her breath. I cannot bring myself to finish the sentence. The children must be kept safe, no matter what.
“I wonder what they will think of me as their father?”
“Believe it or not, but they like you very much,” she says then slightly winces. “But they also think you’re pretty old.”
I roll myself towards her, so my cock is digging into her hips. “Do I feel like an old man to you right now?”
She giggles as an answer, and I kiss her mouth.
Morning comes slowly.
I wake with her still wrapped around me.
For a few seconds I don’t move. I just lie there and let myself feel the weight of her arm across my stomach, the warmth of her thigh over mine, the quiet sound of her breathing against my shoulder.
The room is pale with early light. Nothing is urgent yet.
No phone calls. No names. No blood. No fathers.
Just this.
Katerina stirs first. She lifts her head, blinks sleep out of her eyes, and for one unguarded second, she looks at me with such softness that it nearly undoes me all over again.
“Hi,” she says, voice rough from sleep.
I touch her face, brush my thumb under her eye. “Hi.”
She smiles a little, then seems to remember herself and tries to hide it. Too late. I’ve already seen it.
There is something different between us now. Not simpler. Nothing about us is simple. But the walls are thinner after the night. After what I told her. After the way she held me when I finished speaking, without questions, without pity, just her arms around me and her body warm against mine.
She traces a line over my chest with one finger, absentminded at first. Then not absentminded at all.
I look down at her hand. Then at her. “You’re starting something.”
“I might be.” Her voice is still sleepy, but there’s color rising in her cheeks now, and that alone is enough to make me hard.
She feels it almost immediately.
Her eyes lift to mine.
I expect a joke. A dry comment. Some attempt to cover the moment with sarcasm.
Instead, she pushes herself up and kisses me.
Slowly this time.
Not the frantic heat of last night. Not anger, not relief, not all the things we tore through in the dark.
This is softer and more dangerous because of it.
Her mouth lingers on mine. Her hand slides into my hair.
I roll us carefully, easing her onto her back, and she opens for me without hesitation.
I kiss her again and again, letting it build at its own pace. My hand moves down her side, over the curve of her waist, her hip, her thigh. She shivers when I touch her, already warm, already wanting, and the quiet sound she makes into my mouth feels more intimate than anything we did last night.
“Katerina,” I say against her lips.
She answers by pulling me closer.
I kiss down her throat, over her collarbone, lower, and she arches under me with no self-consciousness left. That’s what gets me. Not just that she wants me. That she’s not fighting it now. Not making it harder than it already is.
Her fingers drag down my back. “Roman.”
The way she says my name this morning is different too. Less like surrender. More like trust.
I lift my head and look at her.
She’s watching me with too much in her face. Too much tenderness. Too much feeling. It’s there for one bare second before she tries to pull it back, and I know exactly what almost came out of her mouth.
She knows I know. Her breath catches.
I kiss her hard before she can retreat into herself, before she can turn it into silence and shame and all the things she’s trained herself to live inside.
My mouth takes hers with enough force to make her gasp, and then I’m over her fully, my weight between her thighs, my hand sliding down to part her.
She’s already wet.
I groan against her mouth.
She laughs softly into the kiss.