Chapter 23 - Darya
I’m not asleep when the tires screech up the driveway.
I’ve been trying to change that status of awakeness for the better part of two hours, but I’m not particularly keen on dozing my sweet fetus with over-the-counter sleeping pills either. I haven’t checked with Yulia or my OBGYN, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t be advised.
I’ve been lying in my childhood bedroom with its rosebud wallpaper and its window seat, watching the bare black branches of the garden trees move against a sky that can’t decide if it wants to be dark or just grey, and thinking about the Madonna in my atelier.
About gold leaf lifting away from a surface it was never going to be able to hold onto, once the adhesive beneath it had failed.
When the sound slices through the nighttime hush, my heart leaps to my throat.
The shriek of tires on the wet drive that registers first as a threat, the way every loud and sudden thing registers in this house, in this family, before it registers as anything else.
I’m upright before I’ve decided to be, my feet on the cold floor, my hand already reaching for the handgun I keep in the nightstand, because I am a Yuri and we don’t go to bed unarmed.
I’m at the bedroom door before I hear the voices starting up downstairs.
I recognize them immediately. I’d recognize them in a burning building, in a hurricane, in any state of consciousness or none at all.
That’s Trifon. That’s Valentin. That’s Iosif, who must have stayed the night again, because his voice doesn’t have the slightly delayed quality of a man who’s just been woken up and dragged into something.
A quality Trifon’s voice absolutely has when he grouses, stomping around.
But everyone else fades to the periphery in a flash of an instant, because there’s a man in the foyer whom I’ve been dreaming of for days—and I almost can’t believe he’s here, and he’s real.
Or I wouldn’t, if he didn’t look like hell warmed up.
Even his typically golden coif has been reduced to a limp, straw-colored mess.
I stop in the middle of the hallway. My heart stops in my chest.
“You have about thirty seconds to tell me what the hell you’re doing here before I shoot you myself,” Trifon growls, and I can hear from his voice that he’s in the entry hall, which means Anton has actually made it through the front door.
Or through a door. Knowing my brothers, they may have opened it specifically to have more room for what comes next.
They may not have been raining questions down on me, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have them.
Or that they don’t want a pound of flesh for the tears they’ve seen remnants of in my eyes.
“I’m here for my wife. Obviously.” Anton’s words are frank and matter-of-fact. Completely, almost insultingly casual.
“Your wife,” Valentin repeats, and the way he says it tells me exactly what expression is on his face. I suspect that click was from his gun.
“Yes.” A pause. “I’d appreciate it if you could lower that.”
“I’d appreciate a lot of things,” Valentin says. “Life’s full of disappointments.”
“Val.” That’s Iosif, and his voice has the particular quality it gets when he’s trying to be the reasonable one, which happens rarely enough that everyone always notices it. “Let him talk.”
“He can talk with a gun on him,” Trifon says. “No one’s put the barrel in his mouth.”
“Yet,” Valentin adds.
I cover my face with my hand, fighting a laugh despite myself.
“That sounds like a euphemism. I thought it was Leonid I was meant to be on the lookout for,” Anton says.
And God help me, there’s something about the fact that he’s cracking jokes—inside jokes, between us, with my brothers—that is infuriatingly sexy.
I have to press my hand over my mouth to keep the sound I make from being audible from the staircase.
There’s a beat of silence.
And then, “Darya’s not here,” Trifon lies through his teeth.
“Yes, she is,” Anton replies, as if disagreeing with an opinion.
“And you know that how?” Valentin challenges.
“Her security detail’s car is parked at the end of the drive with the lights off,” Anton says astutely.
One point for Zakharov. “She always keeps them close, but not visible when she’s somewhere she considers safe, even with the mole situation.
It’s one of the smarter protocols I’ve seen.
I’d have implemented it myself if I’d thought of it first.” A pause.
“I should also mention that I’ve been standing in your driveway for several minutes, and no one came out to meet me until I rang the bell.
Which means whoever’s on watch tonight is either very well-disciplined or very cold.
Either way, they let me ring the bell. I have to believe that means someone in this house decided to let this play out rather than have me removed at the gate. I’d like to think that was her.”
It wasn’t, actually.
It was Trifon, I’m almost certain, which means my eldest brother has more complicated feelings about this situation than he’s been letting on.
“What do you want?” Trifon asks, his tone anything but amused.
“I want to speak with my wife.” Another pause, and this one has a different quality—an earnestness that catches me off guard just hearing it. “I want to bring her home.”
“She is home,” Valentin says.
“Valentin.” Anton’s voice is still controlled, but it costs him more this time.
I can hear it. I’ve gotten very good at hearing the things Anton doesn’t say out loud.
Not that it was enough, in the end. “I understand that you love your sister. And I’m glad for it.
I don’t technically have a sister, but if I did, I’d want her to be this loved, which is how I understand that your instinct right now is to keep me on the wrong side of every door in this house until I give up and leave.
I want you to know that I’m not going to do that.
I can’t. I’m not leaving without her—or at least talking to her.
You can shoot me if you’d like. I’d rather you didn’t; mostly it will start a series of shit on top of shit to have a dead Pakhan amidst already raging discord and chaos. ”
Silence.
Then Iosif, quietly, says, “I kind of like him.”
“You’re fucking insane,” Valentin says. “We already knew that.”
“Darya?” Anton’s voice lifts, aimed now at the house rather than the men in it—at the walls, the ceilings, the dark hallways where a person could be standing and listening without committing to anything yet.
It’s shed almost all of its composure now.
There’s something raw underneath it, something that has climbed up past the control and is refusing to be managed back down.
Something that is searching for me. “I know you’re here.
I know you can hear me. And I know you well enough to know that you’re making me work for it, which is fine.
I’ll work for it. I’ll work for it forever.
And I’m going to start by continuing to talk until you come down, or until your brothers actually do shoot me, and even then I’ll probably keep talking on the way to the hospital because I have things to say to you, things you deserve to know, and I have been—”
I don’t plan to move. Of their own accord, my feet race towards the top of the staircase before I’ve made the conscious decision to be there.
The entry hall comes into view incrementally as I descend. I’m surrounded by the three broad silhouettes of my brothers, and between them and across from them, there he is: Anton.
My husband.
He looks terrible. That’s the first thing I notice, and the thought arrives with a tenderness I resent deeply.
He looks like a man who hasn’t been sleeping, which I know a little something about.
His hair is slightly disheveled, which, for Anton, is roughly equivalent to another man walking in with his shirt inside out.
He’s in his coat still, the collar turned up against the late February cold.
His eyes latch onto me the moment I clear the last step. They pore over me.
“Hi,” he says, sounding ragged.
“You look terrible,” I tell him.
“I know.”
“You drove here at two in the morning.”
“Yes.”
Trifon turns to look at me. His expression contains approximately fourteen different questions, none of which he’s asking yet, which is its own kind of love.
On the other hand, Valentin’s gun hasn’t moved.
Iosif’s has, and I can feel it as he looks between Anton and me with the expression of a man watching something click into place that he’d been handed the pieces of separately.
I can’t handle thinking about either of their reactions too deeply. I already feel undone.
As if he can sense my knees threatening to pleat beneath me, Anton takes a step toward me.
Without any preamble or posturing, he just says it outright: “Please come home,” he says.
The words are stripped of everything except their heart, bleeding over each syllable, soaking them all the way through.
“It isn’t home without you. I’ve been walking through that house for a week, and none of it—not our library, our dining room, or our bedroom—is a place for solace without you in it to be it.
I know I don’t deserve to say that to you right now.
I know you hate my fucking guts, and I haven’t earned the right to stand here and ask you for anything. I’m asking anyway.”
The bare branches outside the window move in the wind, smacking against the glass. The house seems to hold its breath.
I’m aware of my brothers watching me. I’m aware of Valentin’s gun and Trifon’s hand on his own and the cold that’s come in with Anton through the front door, and the way my heart is conducting itself with absolutely no regard for my dignity or my carefully maintained position of moral authority whatsoever.
“I’m not coming home because you showed up,” I say, forcing the words out past my heart, lodged firmly in my throat. “I want to be clear about that. I’m not a woman who rewards a grand gesture for its own sake. I’m not some girl you get at the end of the movie with a speech.”
“I know.”
“I have things to say to you. And most of them aren’t nice.”
“Understandably.”
“And you have things to say to me. Real things. Not—what was it you called it once? Rose petals and sweet nothings?” I hold his gaze.
“If I come home, Anton, it’s because we’re going to have an actual conversation.
One where you don’t shut down. And until I’m satisfied, I’m not there to stay.
And the fate of this situation isn’t decided—definitely not your part in it—until… Until you deserve it.”
“Yes,” he says. Simply. Completely.
“I’m not—” I stop because Trifon harshly clears his throat.
Oh shit..
“Darya,” Trifon says. He’s gone gimlet-eyed.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Are you—”
“Trifon—”
“Are you pregnant?” Valentin’s voice cracks through the room, and then everyone is talking at once.
Iosif says something that gets swallowed by something Valentin says, and Trifon’s voice rises over both of them, and then Anton steps forward with the expression of a man fully prepared to put himself physically between me and whatever comes next.
Men, I think. Fond and disturbed.
“Yes,” I admit, a little sheepishly. “I’m pregnant. I’m also not a public noticeboard, and this is not how I intended for any of you to find out. And I would appreciate it enormously if everyone could take approximately one large step back from whatever they’re about to do.”
Nobody moves.
Predictable.
I look at Trifon. “You knew something was wrong.”
“I knew something was wrong,” he agrees. His voice is careful. Controlled, the way it gets when he’s feeling something large enough to require containing. “I didn’t know it was this.”
“Well.” I pull my cardigan tighter around me. “Now you do.”
It’s Iosif who speaks first, characteristically. “How far along?”
“Nearly two months.”
I watch them do the math. It’s mortifying. And gross.
Valentin looks at Anton, and I swat at his arm. “Knock it off,” I warn.
Anton looks back at him without flinching. He’s smart enough not to speak for me, at least.
My brother? Not so much.
“If she goes home with you,” Valentin sneers, polishing his gun on the hem of his t-shirt, “and something goes wrong—”
“Nothing is going to go wrong,” Anton says.
“That isn’t a promise you can make.”
“No,” Anton says. “But I can promise you that I will spend the rest of my life making sure the conditions for it are as impossible as I can manage. That’s all I’ve got. I know it isn’t enough for you right now. I’m asking you to let me prove it anyway.”
Valentin looks at me.
I look back at him, at this brother who has been one of my closest confidants and one of my most persistent headaches for my entire life, and I give him the smallest nod I can manage that still constitutes a nod.
He exhales. He steps back.
Trifon looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at Anton with an expression that doesn’t need words and doesn’t use them.
Anton receives it without looking away.
“Go,” Trifon says finally. To me, not to Anton. Which is exactly right.
I turn to get my things. My coat is on the hook at the bottom of the stairs, my bag on the table beside it. I take my time with the coat, turning each button deliberately, because my hands want to shake and I’m not going to let them.
As if I were ever not going with him.
But it was nice to pretend.