The Past
Svetlana
The bell over the tearoom door chimed loudly. Svetlana heard it, even in the kitchen.
She was preparing the last of her things.
She would say goodbye to her friends, take her baby from her crib upstairs, and leave the tearoom for good.
She felt a stab in her heart for Valya, her mother, but this was her life.
She just had to start living it. The gold ring glinted on her hand.
Leaving her mother, Samovar, Paris was the only way to have the future she wanted with Lucian, and for Zina to finally have a mother and a father.
To create her own family, her own home, here in this foreign land she had grown to love.
Svetlana glanced up at the cream-faced clock on the wall.
Who could be at the door? It was too early for her friends to arrive. And she had closed the tearoom, even for fortune-telling sessions. She carefully replaced her bags under the table before making her way to the tearoom with the stub of her candle in hand.
“May I help—?” A figure stood wrapped in deep shadows—Svetlana had turned off the electric lights.
It was a wisp of a thing, thin and gangly, on the cusp of adulthood.
The candlelight touched the still-porcelain features of the girl, more than a child but not yet a woman, and she knew. “Princess Olga?”
“Hello, Svetlana,” the girl said in her still-young voice. But it had a grown-up ring to it, her clothing something a much older lady would wear. Like a child vampire who had lived for hundreds of years.
Svetlana shook off the disturbing thought. “Hello.” She looked past the girl, out the window. “Is…your father here with you?”
“He is not.” Olga tilted her head, her blond hair shining like a halo over her head. But she was no angel—unless a fallen one sent by the devil himself.
Svetlana knew the girl was mad, had heard whispers of it from the mansion staff, including word of several stays in an asylum, though the Grand Duke refused to speak of it.
“I wanted to see you. You haven’t been by since I’ve been back.”
Svetlana hadn’t even known the girl was in Paris. She had done a few readings for her before, but the girl had scoffed at her cards, called them nonsense. “Is your family back, too?” Olga was always with her brother and mother, never alone with her father.
“No. We left them in Russia.” A baleful smile. “Father was most disappointed when I started a fire in Alec’s rooms at the Petersburg house.”
“Why would you do such a thing?”
“Alec called me mad when I did this—” Olga turned to show Svetlana her hair—in back, shorter than the rest, and uneven, as if hacked away. “I decided to teach him a lesson.”
“How naughty of you. Why would you cut your beautiful hair, Olga?”
“That’s Princess Olga to you.”
Svetlana brushed off the rebuke. She had grown used to those at the mansion, from the girl, the mother, the brother. She did not care; she was free from them now.
“I wanted to see what it would look like. I am so terribly tired of long hair and long skirts. I wish I could do away with it all. To be free.”
Freedom. It eluded every woman, it seemed, even a girl like Olga.
She giggled, then whispered, “He wants to take me back to that place.”
“The—hospital?” Svetlana was losing patience. “And you wish for me to read your fortune? Look at the cards for you? Is that what you want?”
Olga stepped toward her. Svetlana had the urge to step back, but she squared her shoulders and met the girl’s unsettling gaze.
Olga took another tiny step, until she was an arm’s length away.
She peered at Svetlana, studying her with those eerie citrus-flecked green eyes.
“Why you?” Her voice now was childish, petulant.
“What do you mean, Olga?” Svetlana purposely didn’t use the title.
She was tired of the brat, wanted her gone as soon as possible, or she wouldn’t have enough time to prepare to leave tonight.
But the thought of the Grand Duke being solely responsible for his daughter, a mad little thing, desperate and starved for affection, softened Svetlana.
“Why did he choose you? Father?”
“Choose me? He did no such thing.”
“He did, when he brought you into our house—like his second wife.”
So this was what the visit was all about.
Svetlana was surprised it hadn’t come up sooner.
She leaned toward the girl, who seemed younger than her sixteen or so years, more pitiable.
“You have nothing to worry about, Princess Olga”—she made sure to say the title this time—“I would never dream of replacing your mother.”
“You lie,” she said calmly.
“No.”
“You have a child, do you not?”
“Yes, but—”
“A new family,” she said to herself. “He will take me to that place and forget me. Then he will bring you back to our house, and he will live there with you and the child.”
Svetlana shook her head, suddenly desperate for this sad girl to understand that what she was saying was impossible.
That she was trying to do the exact opposite.
But hadn’t Svetlana been guilty of something like it before?
Yes, the Grand Duke had forced himself on her, had pressured, controlled, and tried to possess her.
But she had gone along with it and gone through the motions—for financial security, for the future she was about to seize, for her freedom.
She had pitied herself, her lack of power and independence, but not once had she thought of the girl.
“I am sorry,” Svetlana said out loud. “I don’t intend to take away your father or replace your mother. I have no wish whatsoever to live in your house. I only wish to leave. You will never see me again. And he will never leave you. Never. I promise.”
“No, he will not,” Olga agreed, her gaze cutting back to Svetlana.
Suddenly, Svetlana felt a piercing, stinging pain on the inside of her right wrist. She hadn’t even noticed the glinting blade in the girl’s hand, the handle with the silver bolt and the starlike ruby.
It looked like the dagger that had killed her father.
Svetlana peered at her wrist, mesmerized by the red line now blooming on her skin.
But the fascination turned into confusion too quickly.
“What—?” she was able to push out before her tongue started to tingle, then burn, then turn completely numb.
She swallowed, realizing her throat was numb also.
The slash on her wrist was swelling into an angry, virulent welt.
Bleeding. “What did you do to me?” she demanded. Though she knew.
The girl watched her steadily. “I have wanted to try that.”
Panic was setting in, wild and boundless. “Try what?” Svetlana couldn’t feel her face, her wrist now bleeding insistently. The blood streamed down her hand and fingers, bathing them a bright, terrible red.
“I love Hamlet, but I have always wondered why Laertes poisoned his blade. Why not deal a lethal blow instead? Now I understand.”
Poisoned? Hamlet? Child! A wave of weakness and nausea caught Svetlana up. She felt herself crash to the floor, vomit spewing everywhere, mingling with the blood. There was so much of it. Was it just the wound, or was she also vomiting blood?
“Laertes was not in his soul a murderer,” Svetlana heard Olga say through her daze.
“He could not do the deed, could not deal the deathly blow. I am the same. I could not thrust this blade into your heart, through skin and muscle and organ. Unbearable! No, a slash to the wrist, to throw people off my scent. To raise the question whether it was self-inflicted. And if a vein is missed, poison to finish the deed. Poison is always the answer. ‘I’ll anoint my sword,’ so that it will ‘be death’—to my father’s whore. ”
Dimly, Svetlana heard a cry from upstairs. Zina. No.
Olga stilled. “Ah, the child. Maybe I will touch this blade to her soft baby skin…like mother, like daughter, together in death.”
“Don’t—” Svetlana’s vision blurred, worriedly twisting yellow green. Though her wrist was still bleeding, she barely felt her body. Only a stab in her chest, the slow pulse. Then only the ice, shooting through her veins.
Suddenly, voices, outside in the street. Her friends.
Her heart, barely beating now, flooded with hope.
Olga looked up; the dagger clattered to the floor, echoing against the hard wood.
“Help,” Svetlana rasped out with the last of her voice. She felt an excruciating pain somewhere in her body. The last thing she saw of the girl was her black skirts as she whipped around and sprinted into the bowels of the tearoom, away from the entrance and the people there.
Svetlana heard the wail of her child, safe from that monster—for now.
In her mind’s eye, she saw Lucian, her mother, her daughter.
She saw the life she wouldn’t get to live, the freedom within her grasp slipping through her fingers like grains of sand.
The life she would never see her daughter live.
Neither would she get to be Lucian’s wife for real or say sorry to her mother.
For not being the daughter Valya deserved.
But now Zina would take Svetlana’s place and be the daughter Svetlana could never be.
Svetlana drew what she knew was her last breath.
She saw blood and darkness, the last things she would ever see in this world.
She felt the ice in her veins, the last thing she would ever feel.
She heard the cry of her daughter, her Zina, healthy and strong and alive.
It was the last sound she would ever hear.
And what a lovely sound it was. Then Svetlana heard and felt and saw no more.