Iskra
The soft lavender fragrance rose through the steam.
I breathed it in slowly, bent down to test the water temperature with my hand, then added a little more cold before straightening.
When it felt right I stood and removed my robe.
After weeks I managed to look in the mirror.
I made myself stay there. The spotting had stopped.
The lactation was gone. My belly had reduced—not gone, not entirely, a small paunch remaining where something larger had been.
The body’s last record of what had happened.
The final physical evidence that refused to resolve itself back into the person I had been before.
I turned to the side and rested my hand over it.
The last sign that something had lived inside me for a few short months. That it had been real. That the hands becoming themselves on a screen had been real. That prosti, malyshka whispered into an empty corridor had been whispered to someone. My apology to my son, long before I knew his fate.
I blinked the tears away before they could fall.
Then I climbed into the bath.
The water received me and I lay back and let the lavender and the heat do what they could.
For a while the world contracted to this—the steam, the silence, the warmth, the particular quality of a room with a locked door where no one could find me or report back or clear their throat or need anything from me at all.
Just this.
Just silence.
The men were off searching for more men. As they always were. As they always would be.
Madame Popova had the right idea entirely.
She should have been given sainthood rather than executed by a firing squad.
There should be a shrine built for her in Saint Petersburg—flowers, candles, the quiet reverence owed to a woman who identified a problem and solved it with the resources available to her.
I would have visited it.
One day.
I sank deeper into the water until most of my head was submerged, the lavender warmth closing over my ears and muffling the world to nothing.
It was a good business concept.
Genuinely underserved market.
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My bedroom door opened when I was drying my hair in front of the balcony windows.
I flipped my hair back and held the towel.
Without a word or a sighting for weeks he had the audacity to simply walk in. No knock. No warning. The door opening the way doors opened for a man who considered everything in this house his by default—including the rooms he’d assigned to other people.
I held my tongue as his eyes moved over me.
Another tailored dark suit. Cold eyes moving with their usual lurking assessment, cataloguing and filing. His dark hair trimmed and styled to perfection. Every inch of him composed and deliberate and entirely at home in a space he hadn’t set foot in for weeks.
Click.
The door shut behind him.
“Where is he?” I rasped.
My hands were shaking. I forced them to grip the towel and hold.
His brow furrowed.
“Who?”
“My son,” I spat.
The word landed between us. I watched his face for the flinch of it and found something worse—surprise. Genuine surprise that I would ask. As though the question itself was unexpected. As though I had stepped outside the boundaries of what I was permitted to want to know.
My fingers curled tighter into the damp towel. My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.
“He wasn’t in a poor condition. I made the decision to—”
I scoffed.
He stopped. His face turned to stone—the specific stillness of a man who has had his authority questioned and is deciding how to respond to it.
“He was always mine, Iskra.” His voice was flat and final. “My son was buried while you were unconscious.”
I gasped.
The towel clutched to my chest. The lavender still in my hair.
The bathwater barely cold. And this—delivered with cold eyes—the confirmation that he had buried our son and not told me.
Had made the arrangements and the decisions and the choices and had come to my room weeks later to deliver it as a statement of fact rather than an explanation.
He was always his.
Even in death.
“Your obligation to me does not change,” he murmured.
He wanted his pound of flesh.
For a moment it felt as though there was no hot blood circulating around my body. Ice particles where warmth should have been.
“Fuck your obligations and fuck you,” I said, enunciating each word as carefully as I could. “Get out.”
“I’ll be back to breed you in two weeks’ time,” he said, turning to leave.
I stared at his back.
“If you don’t give me what I want, someone else will.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” I said through clenched teeth.
The door slammed shut, but not before I saw Radovan’s wide eyes.
Fuck them all.
It wasn't until much later that I realised I no longer felt sad.
I only felt fury.
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Three days later I stood in front of the tiny grave.
Damp dirt piled high. Fresh. The darkness of earth that hadn’t settled yet.
It made me want to claw it away with my hands. To see him. To have that much at least. Instead I crouched down until I was level with it and stayed there.
It wasn’t far from Lev’s grave. Unlike his—the marble, the photograph, the dates carved in stone, the full accounting of a life—my son had nothing.
No marker. No name. No record that he had existed at all outside of a scan picture in a purse and a whispered apology in an empty corridor and a small paunch in a bathroom mirror that was already fading.
I touched the cold soil.
The only thing left for me to touch.
Tau’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. He said nothing.
There was nothing to say and he knew it—not condolence, not comfort, not the careful words people reach for when the real ones don’t exist. Just the weight of a hand.
Solidarity from the only person who had called it a blessing when it was alive.
Nothing would have helped the desolation flooding through me.
Because it wasn’t just a contract now. It had never really been just a contract—not since the hand found the belly without permission, not since hearing the beat of his heart on a screen, not since the ache that greeted me every morning when I woke.
This was my baby beneath the earth.
Mine.
As if the universe understood what words couldn’t carry, it began to rain.
Soft at first, then heavier—weeping with me, or letting me weep with it, the distinction ceasing to matter.
The trees rustled and the sound moved through them like breath.
A gust of wind swept over me, low and deliberate, like an acknowledgement from something that had been watching.
I lay my head against the ground.
As close as I could get to him now.
Shielding him from the world the only way left to me.
Knowing how futile it was.
Staying anyway.