Chapter 18 - Anton
It never fails to confound me how the world can keep spinning madly on after it’s already ended for me.
I haven’t died—but parts of me have. They’ve been killed, buried, and even mourned in some cases.
It’s almost funny, the way I’m always left sitting here, in this fucking chair, staring at the clock tick-tick-ticking the seconds, minutes, hours passing me by.
That’s the thing about the sands of time: they are too fine not to slip through your fingers once you’ve smashed the hourglass.
Shattered glass glitters all over the rug.
I’ve thought about calling on someone to clean it up.
I’ve considered cleaning it up myself. It’s a hazard out in the open.
It’s evidence of bedlam, of pain turned outward.
Darya’s pain. In my mind, I kneel on the ground and drag my palms across the debris, letting it pierce my flesh and punish me in a thousand cuts.
An act of penance, since I can’t offer her anything better.
Because I can’t do this again, I can’t. I fucking can’t.
It doesn’t fucking matter how much I’ve researched—just like it didn’t that night twelve years ago—there are no guarantees.
To create a life is no easy task. It costs a person, sometimes their life.
Who knows that better than I do? She’s been pregnant for almost two months now.
She was pregnant when I poured her the drink on the plane back to Boston.
Hell, she’d been drunk off her ass when I’d fucked her in New York.
The numbers on the clock blur.
Somewhere, buried beneath this avalanche, is the awareness that we’re in the middle of a fucking crisis.
There’s a mole coming after us all. An ‘us’ that now includes a fucking baby.
In the wake of this news, it isn’t as if the suspicious gap in shipment records this morning ceases to exist. Whoever is selling our information is still out there, patient and evasive, watching this alliance buckle beneath its own weight. Watching me buckle.
How long before they know about the baby, too?
Till this baby is something else to target.
My gaze drops down to the desk, to hands that shake in useless fists in front of me.
Hands that can kill but have never been able to save.
I want to wrap them around my own throat and wring the life out of myself.
Even for this, I can’t seem to move. It’s a cruel fucking paradox—a body that won’t move, and a mind that won’t still.
A mind that won’t stop replaying the look on Darya’s face, while I stood trapped behind that glass wall, not just unable to reach her, but unable to be reached.
Her words, sharp as knives, are in me now.
I can’t un-absorb them. I’m a man trapped in a block of ice; the words rattle inside of me.
Coward. Unworthy of following. Ashamed. Failure, failure, failure.
Every word is true, and I’m not even man enough to fucking stomach them.
When I do, at last, manage to move, it’s to grasp blindly for a bottle that’s no longer there.
Of course not. Darya smashed it all, and now the reek of liquor emanates from the hardwood floors, the fibers of the rug, and the walls she had plastered with a hideous fucking wallpaper I haven’t gotten around to getting rid of.
Maybe I knew an end was coming all along.
That’s why I let myself be reckless with her—why I let myself have her, over and over again, drunk on impulse and the warm, sweet smell of Darya’s skin and the soft, breathy spill of her laughter.
And I should have known better. A portal through which life-giving passion can pour, and through which self-preservation and survival instinct can pour back out.
It’s like Schrodinger’s cat, dead forever once it’s been found dead.
I don’t hear my cousin come in. When I look up, however, she’s standing in front of me. Her vivid red hair is a halo of fire, puffed out and all over the place like a lion’s mane. “You should knock,” I say dully, voice devoid of any feeling.
It’s ironic, given the tornado tearing me apart on the inside.
“You should answer the door when people knock,” she counters pointedly, heavily setting down a tray in front of me.
It is laden with a pot of what I assume is tea and a cloche she lifts to unveil ptichye moloko.
What about my state makes her believe I’m in the mood for fucking dessert stupefies me.
She meets my dark glower with a decisive yank of a chair, and she turns around with one hand and straddles.
“I’m not in the mood.”
“I don’t give a fuck.”
“Anastasia.”
“Anton.”
I’d been avoiding looking right at her, assuming I’d find a gratuitous helping of sadness in her eyes. Pity, even. Look at poor fucking Anton. What a sorry piece of shit. What snaps my gaze to her face is the note of anger that catches me off guard.
Her face is flushed with it, too.
“What” is the best I can articulate, it appears.
“She told you, didn’t she?” she asks.
She doesn’t specify beyond that. Because she knows she doesn’t have to. “You knew?” I demand in return, and it’s like she’s jabbed a button. I roar back to life. It doesn’t feel like a relief. It’s just a different kind of punishment.
“I wouldn’t be much of a brigadier if I couldn’t even keep tabs on your wife going to the gynecologist, would I?”
“How long have you—?”
“Two days.”
“You’ve known for two days, and you didn’t fucking—”
“Oh, fuck off, no,” she scoffs, holding a hand up to my face.
Evidently, it isn’t Brigadier Zakharov reaming my ass now.
This is all Stasi. “That girl deserved to give you that news herself when she was ready to. I needed to know because I’m on high alert for security, not so I can stalk your wife and dish on her secrets.
And, besides, I wanted to see how you’d handle it. ”
The disappointment shrouding her expression chafes at me. It feels a lot like dragging my palms through the shattered glass she eyes with disgust. “Clearly, not well.”
“Clearly,” I echo bitterly.
“I’m guessing this is about Irina.”
Stasi just throws the name out there, like it’s any other name on any other day. It costs her nothing to utter it—like it doesn’t evoke everything that haunts me, and has haunted me, for the past twelve years.
“Don’t,” I warn, my throat tight.
I look away from her, swallowing thickly, and the next thing I know, her palms slap down on the desk with such force that the cup trembles atop its saucer.
“Oh, come on. Are you fucking kidding me? This, still? You’ve been so happy, I’m not letting you sabotage the possibility of a full, gorgeous life so you can worship at the altar of a woman who died—”
My body surges out of my chair with such fury that it tips right over. Its wheels jab at my calves. But I don’t care. “I said don’t.”
“I forgot,” Stasi sighs sourly. “No one is allowed to talk about her.”
“You’ve got that fucking right,” my mouth goes off like a machine gun. “You didn’t know her the way I did. No one did. So, no, you can’t talk about her. You don’t get to. No one does.”
“Do you hear yourself?” she asks.
I stare at her in grim, furious silence.
There’s that disappointment again, splashing over me like water shaken from a dog’s fur. “Fine. I can shut up and let it go. But know that, while I’m doing that, you’re going to lose the wife who stormed out of this place four hours ago. She’s gone, Anton.”
Gone. She’s gone where?
“And I doubt she’s coming back, if the words she was shouting were any indication.”
You don’t want me to abort your baby and free you? Darya had spat in my face. I wonder if that’s what my cousin refers to. I can’t bear to ask, either way. I’m too winded, stumbling backward until my back hits the wall. Even that doesn’t feel solid enough to hold me up.
“I’m not trying to talk shit about Irina.
For one, I’d never speak ill of the dead.
And she may not have been my favorite person, but she was someone you cared about.
And she died. And that’s so fucking awful.
It’s a fucking waste. But so is what you’re doing.
” When did she round the desk? I don’t know.
Her hands cradle my face like a mother’s.
“You made a myth of her when she was just a person. And you lost her, tragically, and lost a baby, and you’ve been using it as a cautionary tale to keep yourself in line or something.
And it’s fucking sick. And it’s unfair.”
“Stop it,” I say. It comes out pleading. Stop. Stop it.
“Irina is dead. And Darya isn’t. Irina is a person you grew to love, in a marriage you were intent on honoring because you don’t want to be like your papa.
It was noble of you then, but it isn’t now.
There’s nothing noble about sacrificing the woman you’re falling in love with because you’re not done punishing yourself for a tragedy you had no control over. ”
Arguments fill up and clog my throat, crashing into each other, one atop another, like a five-car pile-up.
I shouldn’t have taken her home. I should’ve kept a closer eye on her pregnancy.
I should’ve gone to every doctor’s appointment.
I should’ve known about the thrombophilia—should’ve been her advocate when she was tearing her body apart for our daughter.
Should’ve made sure she took her supplements instead of worrying about making sure there was a prosperous fucking kingdom for my child to inherit one day. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep.
I should’ve, I should’ve, I should’ve.
“You have to forgive yourself.”
“Please go,” I croak.
“How can I?” Anastasia asks, with heartbreak and devastation in her almost black eyes. “You’re in pieces, Tosha.”