23 #2
"That's not fair, and I think you know it isn't." His voice sharpened, the first real edge I'd heard from him directed at me.
"This isn't Denis lying to you about who he was.
This isn't two strangers grabbing your arm in an alley.
I'm trying to keep you alive, Darina, and I don't have the luxury of a leisurely conversation about it while Bogdan remains unaware that anyone in this family has finally found him out. "
"You don't get to decide that protecting me means deciding things without me.
Not about this. Not about my own parents.
" My voice had gone unsteady, the grief and fury tangling together until I could barely separate them.
"Do you understand what you're actually asking?
You want me to disappear into your house, guarded, managed, while you and my brothers decide what justice for my own mother and father is supposed to look like.
I've spent fifteen years grieving them without ever once getting to be angry at an actual person.
I finally have a name, Rurik, and you want to tuck me somewhere safe while the men in my life decide what to do with it. "
"I want you alive to actually feel that anger once this is finished, rather than dead because you insisted on standing somewhere dangerous while it was still unfinished."
"That's not your choice to make for me."
"It is tonight." He said it with a finality that left no room for negotiation, and I felt something in my chest go cold and still, recognizing, with a clarity that frightened me, the specific shape of a man who loved me completely and had nonetheless just decided, unilaterally, that his love gave him the right to take my choices away from me regardless.
"I'm sorry. I know exactly how this sounds.
I'm not willing to risk being wrong about this, even if being right costs me your anger for a while. "
"A while." I laughed, the sound coming out brittle and entirely without humor.
"You don't get to put a timeline on how angry I'm allowed to be about being managed like a problem instead of consulted like a partner.
I told you once, in my own kitchen, that I needed this to be the one thing in my life that was actually mine to decide.
I'm telling you the same thing tonight, about something considerably larger than whether we keep this relationship secret.
This is my family's tragedy, Rurik. You don't get to protect me out of my own grief. "
"What would you have me do instead, Darina? Genuinely. Tell me the version of tonight where I sleep, knowing what I know about what Bogdan is capable of, with you sitting in an apartment with a single deadbolt and an alley door he already knows the layout of."
"You ask me. You sit across from me the way you did the night you told me your terms in my kitchen, and you say, I'm frightened for you, here's why, what do you think we should do — and you let the answer actually be a conversation, instead of arriving here with my own belongings already packed into your car like the decision was made before you ever knocked.
" I was crying now, the tears arriving somewhere in the middle of the sentence without my permission, and I let them come anyway, too exhausted to perform composure for either of us.
"I might have agreed to go, Rurik. I want you to understand that, because I think it matters.
I might have said yes to almost everything you're asking, if you'd only asked instead of decided. "
He didn't have an answer for that, or didn't trust himself to give one, and the silence stretched between us long enough that I understood, with a sinking, terrible certainty, exactly how this particular evening was going to end.
"I'm not going to your house tonight," I said, finally, quietly.
"I'm staying here, in my own apartment, above my own business, the way I've for five years without needing anyone's permission to feel safe in it.
If you want to post men outside my door, you can do that without my consent, the same way you apparently already collected my belongings without it.
But you don't get to move me, Rurik. Not tonight. Not like this."
"Darina—"
"I need you to leave. I'm not asking you to fix this tonight.
I don't think either of us is capable of fixing anything tonight, with everything else we just read sitting on that desk behind you.
I just need you to leave, and I need you to actually hear what I'm telling you instead of trying to solve it before you've finished hearing it. "
He left without arguing further, which somehow felt worse than if he'd fought me on it, and I stood alone in my own kitchen for a long time afterward, holding the specific, devastating knowledge of my parents' actual murderer in one hand and the wreckage of the first real fight I'd ever had with the man I loved in the other, with no clear sense, that night, of which weight was heavier.
I sat on the kitchen floor eventually, the same spot I'd sat in after the marshals took Denis, after the night Rurik first told me he loved me, the worn tile cool against my legs the way it had been cool a dozen times this year whenever my body needed to be lower to the ground than my own legs could manage standing.
I thought about my father's note, the one Gleb had carried alone for weeks.
I thought about my mother, who I barely remembered as anything beyond warmth and laughter and a particular way of humming while she cooked, robbed of thirty more years of being exactly that for all of us.
I thought about a photograph kept on a desk, examined, I imagined, by a man who told himself looking at it constituted some private penance, when it had only ever been one more theft — my grief, taken and repurposed for his own comfort, the same way everything else about that year had apparently been taken and repurposed to serve whatever Bogdan needed it to serve.
I did not call Rurik back that night, though some part of me wanted to, badly, the old instinct toward his steadiness still pulling at me even through my fury.
I let the anger have its full hour instead, uninterrupted, because I knew, even through the grief, that I owed myself at least that much honesty before I let comfort smooth over what had actually happened between us.
He had loved me enough to be frightened for me.
He had also, in that fear, done exactly the thing I had told him, months earlier, I could not survive a second time — decided, on my behalf, what my own safety required, without once asking me what I thought it required myself.
I fell asleep on my own couch sometime past two, still in my clothes, the confession's devastating details and my own fresh fury tangled together into a single, exhausting weight that followed me down into uneasy, fragmented sleep.