Iskra
After pouring my heart out to my son I lay on his grave, sobbing gently into the cold earth.
I had thought his loss had broken me. A double loss was incomprehensible—a word I had never expected to need twice.
My breasts ached against the cold ground. A cruel and indifferent reminder that somewhere across this city Runa was missing every timed feed, her small body searching for something that wasn’t there, her mouth finding nothing familiar.
When everything felt hopeless this was where I came. But today there was little peace here—only a brief window of something close to comfort in being beside my son again before the events of the last two days came crashing back down.
I would beg him.
Agree to anything.
He couldn’t do this.
He couldn’t be this cruel.
But deep within me I knew he was capable of so much worse. He had never fully directed his malevolence toward me. Not like this. Not with this precision and this patience and this complete indifference to what it cost.
He had always had a reason before—the contract, the hierarchy, the heir. This was something else. This was punishment.
I had to try. I wouldn’t give up.
My eyes closed as silent tears rolled down the side of my face and dripped onto Makari’s grave.
The peace came.
But at a cost.
I knew what I had to do.
I turned and kissed the grass that had grown since I had left him, then sat up to say my final words to Makari.
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I heard the car before I saw it—the low growl of an engine and then the slow groan of the gates beginning to open.
I tried to run through before they parted wide enough.
The men grabbed me, dragging me back, pushing me to the side as the SUV nosed its way out.
Black, sleek, tinted windows that gave nothing away.
I scrambled to my feet as it turned onto the road and ran after it, screaming his name, begging for Runa, my voice breaking apart in the cold air. The vehicle picked up speed. I couldn’t reach it. I couldn’t reach it.
My knees hit the tarmac.
The cold of it bruised through my jeans as I collapsed.
I stayed there until I could breathe again.
Then I stood up and ran back to the gate.
Closed.
The men had retreated from their post—a deliberate absence, a message of its own.
I sat down on the cold ground and pressed my face against the painted metal bars, peering through them, trying to see the house, trying to see any movement, trying to work out whether Runa was still inside or whether he had taken her away while I was at the cemetery talking to her brother.
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The shivers wouldn’t stop. The canopy of trees could only hold off so much of the rain and the wind had begun driving it sideways, finding me regardless.
The car returned. Men held me back as it passed through the gates without slowing. I watched the taillights disappear up the drive.
Time passed.
No one came.
They stayed away from the gates entirely—a wall of deliberate absence that communicated everything without a single word.
Rain trickled down my face. I raised my head to the camera anyway.
I wasn’t going anywhere without seeing Runa.
Darkness came. I didn’t move.
Another car approached, its lights cutting through the rain, and I gripped the iron bars and hauled myself upright.
The cold had locked into my joints and muscles, stiffening everything, the kind of cold that stops feeling like cold and starts feeling like nothing at all.
A shadow emerged as the door opened. A man. Drawing closer.
Ruslan.
I staggered toward him and he caught me, wrapping his arms around me before I could fall.
“He has Runa,” I sobbed into his chest.
“Sestra, you must come away from here. We will try to sort this out,” he said, his hand moving in slow circles on my back.
I shook my head.
“He won’t. I have to make him see,” I said, gripping his shirt with what was left of my hands.
“It’s two in the morning. You will freeze out here,” he said, pulling me gently toward the open car door.
I dug my heels in.
“Nooo.” The sound that came out of me wasn’t a word. It was something older than words, something that came from the same place as the howling in the Istanbul apartment, the animal sounds that had no language in them. Again and again and again.
It made no difference.
My father climbed out of the car. Between them they lifted me—not unkindly, but without hesitation—and folded me into the back seat.
I lay there and cried.
All the way to their home.
Back to where it all started. Back to the table where they handed me over and called it family duty. Back to where I signed my fate away with a pen someone else had chosen and ink that had never dried.
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They came. They talked and they went away again. I didn’t acknowledge them or their platitudes. Or their food.
I waited until the house was still. Until I was certain. When the first light began to creep through my old bedroom window I took my heavy blanket and crept downstairs.
The old brass lock was still the same. I had turned it a million times.
My fingers knew it before my mind did. I wasn’t the same—my heart and soul hollowed out, the person who had last turned this key a stranger to the one turning it now.
I held my breath as the loud click rang out into the silence.
No one came.
I left.
The familiar street in the grey early morning. The neighbours I had forgotten about—the same way Runa would forget me if I let this go on long enough. The thought arrived like a fist and I walked faster, pulling the blanket tighter, the cold finding every gap.
I wasn’t going to let it go on long enough.
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When the police car rolled to a stop I didn’t move.
The first man climbed out—bought and paid for, almost certainly, the Pakhan’s reach extending as far as it always had. I watched the second one follow, the radio crackling briefly before he shut the door behind him.
“We’ve had a complaint. You’re going to have to move on.”
“This is my marital home,” I said, jerking my thumb toward the gates. “He has my daughter in there.”
“That’s a matter for the courts. It has nothing to do with the complaint we received,” the second one said, his voice carrying the flat indifference of a man reading from a script someone else had written.
“How much is the Pakhan paying you, musor?” I spat, calling him the garbage that he was.
The word landed. Their demeanour shifted—the professional neutrality dropping, something harder replacing it—and they moved toward me in unison.
I gripped the iron bars. It was useless with both of them.
One pried my fingers away while the other yanked at my arms. I kicked out, trying to find purchase, until one of them grabbed my legs and pulled hard enough that my head came down against the brick driveway.
“Blyad.”
I lay there for a moment, the cold of the ground against my cheek, the throb of it spreading across my skull.
“What should we do?”
I groaned and tried to push myself up.
“Take her in.”
Someone crouched over my back and tugged the blanket away to get to my wrists. The handcuffs clicked into place. I could feel the burn where my skin had been scraped raw against the brick. My lip was swollen. I could taste blood.
“That wasn’t what we were supposed—”
“Shut up, fool.”
They hauled me up by my arms. My legs wouldn’t hold and they dragged me to the car.
I began to laugh.
Even as the tears ran down my grimy face—the blood and the cold and the three days of it all mixed together—I laughed. Because this was only day three. Because I would never stop. Because he could buy the police and close the gates and drag me away from the bars and it would not matter.
I stared at the gates as one of them reached across to secure my seatbelt with the bizarre courtesy of a man who had just bounced a woman’s head off a driveway.
Doors slammed.
Engine started.
The gates vanished.
I would be back.