Chapter 23 #2
Kirill’s leg bounces with anxiety as he watches my mother slip back inside the hospital.
And the second the doors slide shut behind her, he’s on me.
He lifts me into his lap like I weigh nothing, his hands desperate, his mouth everywhere.
My cheeks, my forehead, the corner of my lips, anywhere his lips can touch, as if kissing me is the only way he knows how to breathe again.
“I was so worried. So fucking worried,” he rasps, the words scraping out of him. His fingers thread into my hair, holding me against him. “Why didn’t you answer my calls? My texts? I’ve been going out of my mind, Stella.”
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
A cold, creeping numbness starts in my toes and moves slowly, mercilessly upward, freezing me from the inside out.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I whisper, barely recognizing my own voice. It sounds hollow. Detached. Like someone else is speaking through me.
“What?” He pulls back just enough to look at me, confused, still trying to kiss the corners of my mouth, my jaw, anything he can reach.
“I said…” My throat tightens, my chest feels like it’s collapsing in on itself. “I can’t do this anymore.” But my words are swallowed by another kiss, forcing me to repeat them. “I can’t do this anymore,” I say, the words flat and empty, falling out of me like glass.
Kirill freezes in place, his tender kiss no longer warming my face.
For a heartbeat, he doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t blink. His hands are still tangled in my hair, his forehead pressed to my cheek as if he didn’t hear me right.
Then his grip tightens.
“What do you mean?” His voice cracks. Actually cracks. “Milaya… look at me.”
I don’t.
I can’t.
The numbness is spreading, turning everything inside me to cold stone.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I say again, staring past him at nothing. “I’m done.”
Something inside him snaps.
“Stella.” His hands move to my shoulders, shaking me lightly at first, then harder when I don’t react. “Stella, no. No. Don’t say that. Don’t you fucking say that.”
But the words keep coming, slow and hollow, like they’re stuck on a loop I can’t break.
“I can’t do this anymore… I can’t… I’m done.”
His breath rushes out in a pained, strangled sound. He cups my face between his palms, forcing my eyes toward his. His thumbs swipe at tears I didn’t even feel fall.
“Dusha moya, please. Look at me. Just look at me.” His voice is pleading, frantic, roughened by fear. “You’re scaring me. Stella, you’re scaring the shit out of me.”
But I stare straight through him.
“I can’t do this anymore… I’m done.”
“Stop.” He presses his forehead to mine, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Stop saying that. You don’t mean it. You don’t.
You’re in shock. That’s what this is. Right?
Just shock. Tell me what’s wrong. Just stop saying those…
those words. I can’t bear them.” His hands move again, gripping me tighter, shaking me like he’s trying to rattle the life back into me.
“I won’t lose you,” he growls against my cheek.
“Do you hear me? I won’t. Not like this. Not ever.”
But the numbness has drowned out everything—every heartbeat, every thought, every reason.
All that’s left is fear.
And the single sentence that keeps escaping my lips, soft and broken.
“I… can’t… do this… anymore… I’m… done.”
Kirill’s breath breaks before the rest of him does.
At first, it’s just a tremor in his hands where they grip my waist. Then his shoulders shudder. Then his forehead drops against my chest like he can’t hold himself up anymore.
And then he crumbles.
“Stella… please…” His voice is wrecked, strangled, torn from somewhere deep and desperate. “I love you. I love you, Stella… don’t do this. Don’t leave me. Don’t—”
His words disintegrate into quiet, broken sobs that shake straight through me.
His tears fall hot against my skin, each one like a tiny stab to my heart.
A heart that can’t seem to beat.
A heart that can’t seem to feel.
A heart frozen by fear.
He wraps his arms around my middle, burying his face against me like he’s trying to hold himself together, or maybe hold me together.
But I’m already unraveling.
“Don’t do this,” he whispers again and again, voice raw. “Don’t do this, dusha moya… please…”
I want to answer.
I want to fold into him and let his arms thaw the numbness away.
I want to tell him the truth, that I’m so terrified of losing him more than I was ever afraid of losing myself.
But I can’t speak.
Can’t breathe.
I’m just numb.
So with whatever strength I have left, I place my hands on his shoulders and push myself off his lap. He tries to hold on, his fingers tightening around my wrists, but I gently untangle myself, one finger at a time.
I stand up. Barely. While Kirill falls to his knees in front of me, broken, his hands half-reaching, half-falling. His face is wet, eyes red, chest heaving like the air is a commodity he’s not permitted to have anymore.
“Stella…”
Just my name.
A prayer.
A plea.
A wound.
I look down at him, and I whisper the only truth I can force out. “It’s too late.” My voice barely exists. “It’s done now.”
And then I turn away.
I walk back into the hospital on legs that feel like they might give out any second. The lobby doors slide open and there’s my mother, waiting exactly where she promised. The moment I cross the threshold, my knees buckle, crashing to the floor. My tears fall freely now, soaking into the cold tile.
My mother kneels beside me, pulling me into her arms, but I barely feel it.
Because the words I speak next fall like a broken whisper, meant for a man who will never hear them.
“I love you too.”