Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Yarik
You’ll be happy to know that I’ve two soldiers under me now. Daniel Beck is the first—I think you know him, or at least know of him? Mid-twenties. Red hair. He’s a God, Kiryusha.
No, don’t laugh. Because I know you are.
Bloke is downright mental. Looked Father right in the eye and practically told him to fuck off. So, yeah. That makes him a God in my book—albeit a God who doesn’t give a rat’s arse about pleasantries, and if I ever catch him on his knees, it won’t be on account of him praying.
Anyway.
Eren Do?an is the other. He’s quieter than Beck but not as quiet as you. He’s intense like you, too. Focused.
Deleted Yarik Text:
When are you coming home
Yarik
His Russian isn’t that great. English is his second language, after Turkish. I won’t deny that I was being selfish when I picked him. I like the idea of being surrounded by people who don’t fit Father’s little vision of what it means to be attached to the Volkov name.
Deleted Yarik Text:
I wish that I wasn’t a Volkov
I wish that I could run away to wherever you are
Yarik
Do you ever think of me?
Fuck
wrong text
Deleted Yarik Text:
I didn’t mean
stupid bloody fucking vodka
I hate vodka
I also hate Russia or Moscow or wherever it is that you’ve been sent to
are you in Yakutsk?
is that what happened, Kiryusha? Are you frozen to death, maybe? So numb that you can’t pick up your bloody phone and send me a text that says
I AM ALIVE
see? three words? not that hard. then I’d know you are, in fact, breathing
are you still breathing?
Yarik
Sorry about last night. Had one too many with Beck.
Eren gave me judgmental looks from across the table, though, so it was almost like you were there.
Also, vodka is the devil. I’m never drinking it again.
Deleted Yarik Text:
I went down to our spot by the river last night.
I’m not sure when I started thinking of it as that—our spot. Laughable, really. Like it’s not where I almost killed you and you almost killed me but
It was raining, you know. The sky felt positively wounded. Battering cries and trembling earth and black, menacing clouds that split in two only long enough to let through a blade of light. I ended up under the big oak tree, the one with the branches that hang so low, you can walk right on up. The tree you once said belonged in Lord of the Rings .
I couldn’t see worth a damn.
I was soaked to the bone, shivering my arse off, thinking bloody stupid stuff. Fanciful, really. Things like, maybe you’ve been taken. Maybe I’ve been sitting here for months, angry that you’re gone, when you’ve been made a prisoner. I imagined you locked behind bars, desperate and hurting and hungry, and that
That broke something inside me, Kiryusha.
How I could be so self-centered to think, for even a second, that you wouldn’t come back to England if you were given the option. Of course there’s no option. Of course something’s gone wrong.
I sat there in the rain, huddled under the tree, sobbing from the thoughts racing through my head. That you might never find your way home. That, wherever you are, you must be left to darkness with no stars to guide you back to me like Ptolemy and his queen
then the sun came out this morning, like the storm never happened at all, and I overheard Artem tell my father that you’d been at a party in Moscow last night, socializing with oligarchs, with some pretty girl on your arm, and I
I want to hate yo u
I just want to HATE you
And I do, Kiryusha. I hate you for leaving. I hate you for making me think, for even one second, that I might matter to you as much as you matter to me. I hate you for every minute of the last eight months of silence but I?—
I hate that I love you so much, I write you these stupid fucking texts just to pretend that maybe you might write back one day and tell me that you love me too