Iskra
The woman was attractive, even with last night’s makeup smudged beneath her eyes. Her hair was a few shades lighter than his—not blonde, I noted, not even close—and her eyes sat somewhere between hazel and green with small black flecks. Interesting eyes, on another morning, in another life.
She didn’t like being called a whore.
And yet here she was, cosying up to him, her hand on his arm, laughing at things that weren’t funny.
Hm.
Not a whore then.
The only whore at the table was him.
She was something else. Opportunistic. Hopeful, perhaps, in the specific way of a woman who had been brought home by a powerful man and was calculating what that might be worth.
A gold digger, then. I couldn’t fault the instinct.
My attention drifted back to where it had been since I sat down.
The headstones.
Makari Kozlov-Dragunov.
But I would amend it. Makari Kozlov. Because fuck him and his name and his claim and his here is your replacement.
Makari meant blessed. No matter how brief his time was—how few months he existed, how little of the world he ever saw—he had been my blessing.
He deserved to be named. He deserved the name I spent days mulling over.
But now at the kitchen table with his father’s companion laughing too loudly beside me, it felt tainted.
The woman laughed again.
I winced. The pitch of it.
When I glanced toward the door Tau was there. Leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, watching the room with the unhurried attention of a man who had already assessed every exit and found them all satisfactory.
He had become my substitute company since Vadim dismissed Ruslan from the house.
“It was lovely to meet you,” I said to the woman, and stood.
The flash of anger from Vadim was delicious.
I smiled—the real kind, the one that had nothing to do with him—and lifted my dishes. Olya appeared immediately and took them from me with a small firm shake of her head that communicated several things at once.
I strode across the kitchen floor. Tau stepped back from the doorway and fell into step beside me without being asked.
I could show him the headstone design I had chosen during my morning walk. The marble. The lettering. He had already approved the name—that small nod in the corridor two days ago that meant more than any formal agreement could have.
Makari.
I said it again in my mind. Turned it over. Let it settle.
It soothed me the way almost nothing else had.
Makari.
My son.
??
??
??
The banging woke me.
I sat up immediately, heart already moving, the part of my brain that had been living in a house on lockdown for months reading every unexpected sound as threat first and everything else second.
Then I heard him groan.
My stomach turned.
The third woman in a week. Or thereabouts. I had stopped counting with any precision and started counting in spite of myself anyway.
The dull thuds against my door. Her moans carrying through it with the specific clarity of sounds that were meant to be heard.
I turned onto my side and shoved a pillow over my head.
What a pathetic piece of shit.
Even as I thought it I couldn’t deny the other thing sitting underneath the contempt. The stab of it. Jealousy—ugly and unwanted and entirely present regardless of what I told myself about contracts and functions.
He was escalating deliberately. Letting them into the room he had denied me from the first day of our marriage. The room at the end of the east corridor that had always been closed. Using the door between us as an instrument.
I tightened my grip on the pillow.
It didn’t help.
The thumps increased. Her moans. And then him—the sound of his orgasm carrying through the door with the same deliberate clarity as everything else.
Bastard.
I lay there in the dark with the pillow over my head and the jealousy I refused to name sitting in my chest like a stone.
The worst aspect wasn’t the sound. It was knowing that every person in this house could hear it too.
The humiliation delivered not just to me but witnessed—Olya, Radovan, Spartak wherever he’d been reassigned, Tikhon, Tau, Bogdan.
All of them aware. All of them filing it in whatever way people file the things they witness and can’t speak to directly.
Vadim had made it a ritual. A performance with a specific audience of one.
What he didn’t know—what he couldn’t see from behind his own ego—was that the majority of his household had quietly chosen a side. And it wasn’t his.
Olya was the most vocal about it, but only when she was certain he had left the building. The muttering. The cupboards. The particular energy she brought to making my breakfast versus his.
Even Radovan had started bringing me freshly baked pies and pastries.
Radovan. Who used to smirk at me on staircases and face the wall on Vadim’s instruction. Leaving food outside my door now like a man settling a debt he hadn’t known he owed.
I raised the pillow and listened.
Silence.
I exhaled slowly and lowered it. Turned onto my back.
My hand found my stomach in the dark—the paunch smaller now, the body continuing its quiet work of resolving back to what it had been. I stroked it anyway.
I fell asleep imagining what Makari looked like.
Whether he had my hair or his father’s dark wavy hair.
Whether he would have been loud or quiet.
Whether he would have liked pirozhki.
??
??
??
The weight on my chest was restricting my breathing.
I pushed at it in the dark, still half asleep, the instinct arriving before the understanding.
It didn’t budge.
The scent of his body wash reached me a second later and my eyes snapped open.
Vadim.
I placed my hands flat against his chest and pushed with everything I had.
He didn’t move. Dead weight—the specific heaviness of a man who had drunk enough to make gravity personal.
He mumbled something unintelligible and I turned my face away from the smell of stale tobacco and alcohol that came with it.
“Get off me,” I hissed.
“I’ve come to collect my debt,” he said.
The words were slurred. The entitlement was not.
“No. You’ve been happy enough trialling other women for the past three weeks,” I hissed, pushing at him again.
His hands found my top and pulled. The buttons gave way one after another until the cool air settled over my bare skin.
His head bobbed up.
“Oh, hello,” he said, staring at my chest. “I missed you.”
I glanced past him. He had opened my curtains enough for the moon to witness this madness.
I bucked my hips and pushed at his chest again.
That’s when I felt it. The hefty length of him nestled between my legs with only my thin cotton shorts between us.
I squeezed his chest.
Yes. He was naked.
I hissed in rage.
He laughed—his head tilting back with the specific abandon of a man too drunk to manage his own volume.
I wrapped my hands around his neck to choke him.
I couldn’t even get my fingers to meet around it.
He began to grind against me.
No. No. No.
Oh. Fuck.