Chapter 17 - Darya
For the first time since those two lines cropped up on the series of sticks that I’d lined up on the countertop of the atelier bathroom, one after the other, it finally sinks in: I’m pregnant. I’m six weeks pregnant. I’m going to be a mama.
A belated realization, to be sure. And it has to fight my processing this wherewithal in the face of it, right here, in this moment.
I’m stunned by how calmly the words come out of my mouth.
My voice doesn’t waver over a single syllable.
I’m as sedate and steady as the nurse who took my blood at the hospital two days ago.
Or maybe I’m steady the way Mother Earth is, knowing she must bear the impact of man’s choices, and is built to withstand that burden. To an extent, at least.
When all is said and done, it’s the notion of an extent that scares me the most. I’ve been aware of the baseline of any situation I’ve ever been in, be it by choice or circumstance, since I was a little girl.
On any occasion I haven’t been, I’ve worked to change that as swiftly as possible.
Gathering my bearings has always been important to me.
I’ve always had a plan, and the subsequent steps to achieve it within a reasonable time and plenty of fallback strategies.
But this? This situation isn’t one I ever foresaw for myself.
I’ve no more yearned for it with a palm cradling my aging womb than I’ve harbored any great, bristling contempt for the idea.
Family has always been a given to me. That’s the Yuri way. I’ve always known us to be a comically large brood. I suppose the if it happens, it happens approach has been fine for me.
Until now.
Now, I am scared. I know I am. I’ve known it since the answer appeared on that first pregnancy test, showing me my fate.
I understand that, because I can count on one hand the number of times in my life I’ve felt scared, most would assume it would be difficult for me to recognize the feeling.
They’d be wrong. It’s chillingly obvious to me that I’m scared the way little children are when they wake in the middle of the night, shaking, from a nightmare.
All week, I’ve been walking around full of this spiky fear in my chest, going through the motions of my days, and unable to sleep through the night.
I’m scared. There’s no parent to comfort me. I’m going to be the parent.
Me, and—
I stare at him. This man, who’s been trying to reel me back towards him all week, trying to catch my eye after every kiss he steals.
Going far enough to defend me to a man who isn’t just his uncle, but also his elder and pseudo-father and primary advisor, with more heat than I’ve heard him employ with another person before.
Let alone a person he admires. Whose opinion he respects, yet vocally rejected—to marry me, and now, to demand respect on my behalf.
It’s of little consequence whether or not I actually needed him to come to my defense. It’s the fact that he did it. He stood up for me. He’s tried to protect me. He likes to be with me. Maybe this won’t be as cataclysmic as I’ve been dreading all week.
Maybe it’s different now, between us.
“Anton?”
“What do you want to do about it?” he asks me, in the most hollow tone of voice I’ve ever heard from him. It kills me that that’s saying something.
No, I think. Please. No.
“‘It’?” I choke on a laugh, incredulity a rock in my throat. “Oh, you mean our baby. That it?”
As impressive as my propensity for calm was, it sure wasn’t a long-lasting affair.
Even the walls seem to back away from the dangerous edge of my voice, daunted by the challenge my soul dares the man in front of me with.
Maybe it had been a mistake to offer him the evening to get it together.
Clearly, it was a mistake. My teeth clench, eyes telling him to Do better.
He’s blind to it.
How is he blind to it?
“Yes,” he says, and his voice has an edge of its own. A strain.
I watch him down the drink he brought me as he’s already knocked back his own in one toss. His face is one big grimace.
“Is that all you have to say to me?”
“I don’t know what else you want me to say!” His response is muffled by the hand he buries his face into. He drops it right before he turns away from me once more. Like he can’t stand the sight of me. Or maybe the reality I’m confronting him with. Like he’s a fucking coward.
I’ve been here before.
I can’t believe I’m here again.
By now, I know that no one has ever made me angrier than Anton Zakharov.
But I’d thought, at the very least, I knew the worst it could get.
I thought I knew when he belittled the friendship that I’d extended to him the first time I walked right up to him, with a gala swirling around us, and he’d spit in my face.
I thought I knew when he tore me apart on our wedding night, only to deposit me in a bathtub like an afterthought, leaving me to fall asleep and awaken in his big, cold, strange bed.
Apparently, it can get worse. With him, it can always get worse.
“I know what I don’t want you to say,” I spit, shoving away from the couch and storming up to him. A furious hand grips his chin, yanking his face towards me. “I know I deserve to be looked at.”
His eyes still manage to evade me. “I don’t know how this happened,” he mutters as if to himself.
“We had sex!” I shriek, shoving his face away in disgust. “We had a lot of sex, and sometimes condoms don’t fucking work. And you came inside me that first night. Congratulations on the quality of your sperm, because that’s definitely when you knocked me up.”
“Did you—” He doesn’t finish the question. But he doesn’t have to.
“Are you—” My voice cracks. “Are you honestly implying it could be someone else’s child? Really? You’d rather be a cuckold than a father?”
My insides are a vicious, stinging red. My vision is a haze of it, too. It threatens to pour out of my ears in place of smoke. Out of my eyes, in lieu of tears. I hate him.
“I wish I could tell you that. You have no idea how much I wish I could tell you that right now,” I force out, the words scraping past the tightness in my throat. “But you’re the only man I’ve been with since long before you proposed to me.”
“This is not why I proposed. We just,” Anton rasps out.
“That doesn’t matter. It stopped mattering the second we consummated this marriage.
There’s been nothing politically motivated about the way you—” The way you have my coffee waiting for me by the time I’m finished getting dressed, even though you wake up after me.
The way you talk to me for hours. The way you tell me about your childhood.
The way you want to know everything about me.
“I care about you.”
“But not this baby, right?”
Anton frowns at the wall, his forehead creasing. “How far along are you?” He has the audacity to reach for the bottle this time, forgoing the glass completely. Like I’ve made him need copious amounts of liquor to swallow down a bitter pill.
You know who doesn’t get a drink? With a cinematic sweep of my arm, I send crystal flying off the surface.
Debris crunches beneath my heels, reduced to glittering dust, and I shove him with all my might, choking on my faltering breath.
“Six weeks, I told you. Can you do math? Our wedding night.” I’ve turned into a banshee.
I didn’t know my voice could shriek to this tenor.
I hope the pitch cuts him.
I hope he bleeds, so he feels the way I do now.
He just takes the blow, absorbing it. “Please calm down,” Anton bites out through a clenched jaw.
How many times have I meditated on the perfection of this jaw? How many times have I traced its shape while he slept—cupped it when I’ve kissed him? I’ve thought it was chiseled like stone. Like marble. But his jaw isn’t the only part of him that’s cold, hard, and devoid of a soul.
Calm down.
It rips something in the fabric of my might.
Every bit of the wind in my sails escapes through that tear.
I’m left deflated and raw. “You know what you could’ve said?
” I ask. “You could have asked me how I feel. If I’m okay.
Whether I’m—” I hate the way my voice breaks.
Everything inside me smarts, an open wound he shakes salt on with every look that passes over his face.
Every word he dismisses me with.
“You’re a goddamn coward.”
“Darya.”
“You are. You are a coward. You’re not worthy of leading anyone or anything. You have no heart and no spine. You can’t fuck me without being goaded into it, so of course it shocks you that you managed to knock me up. You’re—”
“Stop it.”
I won’t. I’ve never wanted to hurt someone more.
“You’ve asked me before why I think Viktor did what he did.
I think this is why. Because you aren’t worthy of respect.
You are not worth following. You’re a failure as a Pakhan.
Even worse, you’re a failure as a man.” The stones I cast, pelting him, one after another, bring vindication.
It’s close enough to relief to see him flinch.
He should. “Don’t bother worrying about what I want to do about it.
I’m ashamed enough to have let you breed me with your spawn to get rid of—”
“Get out.”
There is no anger in the words. He sounds as calm as I had, breaking the news to him. The door behind his eyes is closed. There’s nothing there. I can see it. I look into his eyes, and all that awaits me is an abyss.
“You don’t want to watch me abort your baby and free you?” I snarl.
He looks at me. No. He looks through me. “If you can’t calm down and behave like a person, I would like you to please go. Calm down. We will discuss this later.”
It. This.
It’s too soon to tell, but I think it’s a boy.
I don’t say the words to him. There’s no point. He’s already turned away, unwilling as ever to reach back out. To clasp my hand. To do something—say something. Give me something solid to hold between my hands. He doesn’t. He won’t. Maybe he can’t.
What else is there to do?
I do leave.
I walk out, knowing he won’t turn around to watch me leave, and carry the shards of my heart down the hall. I don’t bother going to the bedroom first. My phone is in my pocket. The keys are with the guards in the garage.
For as much as it feels like an eternity, I doubt it takes me longer than five minutes before I’m in my car. But I have to sit there and wait. I have to wait behind the wheel for my vision to clear, for the tears streaming down my needling cheeks to relent so that I can drive.
Time doesn’t matter. I know where I’m going: the place I can always, always go home to. Home. The Yuri estate, where home and family mean love and warmth—not the cold, dark cockles of a cruel man’s heart; a heart that I’d begun to mistake for a safe place to land.
A mistake I’ll never let this baby make.