Vadim
To watch Runa feed—really feed, with gusto—was something else entirely.
Her soft pink lips around her mother’s nipple, her hands gripping Iskra’s clothing with the focused determination of someone ensuring their food source was not going anywhere.
The sounds she made. The vigour of it. Four days of formula rejected without ceremony and now this—the real thing, the right thing, the only thing she had been asking for the entire time.
Yeah. I wouldn’t want a plastic teat in my mouth either.
Runa paused, then latched again—four or five vigorous pulls before she relaxed, her body settling into the particular contentment of a baby who had finally gotten what she wanted and intended to make the most of it.
I toed off my shoes and silenced my phone before crossing to the cot to retrieve the chair. I set it on the rug and sat down.
And contemplated.
What I had missed in Runa’s earlier months arranged itself in my mind with the cold precision of an accounting I hadn’t asked for. The first breath. The first feed. The first time she had opened her eyes. All of it taken. All of it Iskra’s to keep and mine to be denied.
She would make it up to me. Every missed moment had a price and Iskra Kozlova knew better than anyone that I collected what was owed.
I looked at her.
Her bare breast half covered by her hair—Runa’s fist still clutching a handful of it, even in the depths of feeding, even now. The same fist that had gripped my lapel in Istanbul.
She was far more attached to her mother than I had realised.
I sat with that fact in the quiet of the room and let it complicate things.
The lack of sleep from Runa’s misery pulled a yawn from me before I could stop it. I shifted onto the mattress and lay down beside her—on the other side of Iskra, Runa between us, the three of us in a configuration that had no name in my vocabulary and that I was not going to examine too closely.
The relief of watching her feed was immense.
Four days of it—the crying, the formulas, the nanny, the particular stress of a problem I couldn’t solve by force or by money or by any of the mechanisms I had spent thirty-seven years perfecting.
Parenthood was a different category of difficult entirely.
Her dark head of hair blurred as my eyes began to droop.
They were going nowhere.
Ever.
??
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I woke ready for a fight.
But the slap to my face was from Runa.
She was gurgling happily, playing with her own saliva with the focused dedication of someone who had discovered something extraordinary. It ran freely—Chernograd’s river had nothing on a teething baby at close range.
She grabbed my nose and tugged. Her nails—still impossibly sharp despite my best efforts with the clippers—dug in with the cheerful indifference of someone who had no concept of causing harm and wouldn’t have cared if she did.
Her other hand still clutched a fistful of her mother’s hair.
I sighed.
She loved her mother.
I brought her chubby fist to my mouth and munched on it—the specific nonsense of a man who had never in his life made aeroplane noises or spoken in a high-pitched voice and was now apparently capable of both. She giggled. The sound of it landed somewhere in my chest and spread outward.
My daughter was happy.
For now, that was enough.
I glanced at Iskra.
Even in sleep her hand had found its way beneath Runa’s back, fingers curling around her shoulder—the instinct operating without her permission, the body keeping watch even when the mind had finally surrendered to exhaustion.
The shower had cleared most of it, but what remained told the story clearly enough—scratches, early bruising settling into the skin, the specific damage of a face that had met a brick driveway. She probably hadn’t recovered from the pistol whipping Bogdan gave her in Istanbul.
I wondered if my mother had fought for us before Lev got rid of her.
The thought arrived uninvited and I let it sit for longer than I intended.
My eyes dropped to her bare breast.
Runa claimed it before I could form another thought—latching on with the possessive efficiency of someone who had decided the matter was settled and was not interested in competition.
I scratched my head.
Having a half-naked woman in my bed wasn’t what it used to be.
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The time I spent at home became more pleasant. Runa was considerably happier now that her favourite food source had been restored—a fact she made known to everyone in the house through the simple mechanism of being audibly miserable without it and audibly content with it.
Slowly more of my men began coming to meet her.
Konstantin needed no invitation—he doted on Runa in the specific way that only he could, which was loudly and without dignity and with complete indifference to what anyone thought about it.
Even Bogdan had taken to lingering in doorways longer than strictly necessary.
The only one who held back was Tau. I observed him when he came—and it wasn’t indifference or malice that kept him at a distance. Something else. Something closer to nostalgia, or a grief I didn’t have the information to name.
It wasn’t long before he was called away again, this time to New York—an unusual destination for his particular skill set, but none of my business.
With most of my work now conducted from home, I kept a close eye on Iskra. Close enough that I eventually had to tell my byki not to follow me around the property, which prompted looks I chose not to acknowledge.
She had a rigid schedule for Runa.
Feeding time. Garden time. Play time. Nap time. Bath time.
Every single day. Clockwork. The kind of consistency that couldn’t be faked or rushed or substituted with money or authority—the kind that simply required showing up, the same way, every day, without fail.
She was rewarded by a baby who slept well and was more content than the nanny or I had managed to keep her in four days of trying.
Olya made approving sounds and kept Iskra supplied with food she claimed was good for milk production. It may have worked. Her breasts pushed against her clothes with a persistence that occasionally strained at buttons.
I wouldn’t know.
I didn’t look too closely.