KATERINA
The afternoon is almost peaceful.
That’s what makes it strange.
Sofia is on the carpet in the nursery, building something complicated and structurally unsound out of wooden blocks and two stolen hair ribbons.
She says it’s a palace. Nikolai says it’s obviously a fort.
They have been arguing about this for seven minutes without raising their voices, which is their particular talent as siblings.
Sofia wages war loudly. Nikolai does it like a diplomat with a grudge.
I sit cross-legged beside them and hand Sofia another block before she can climb over me to get it herself.
“No, not that one,” she says at once. “The gold one. This is the queen’s tower.”
“There is no queen’s tower,” Nikolai says, not looking up from his side of the structure. “You said it was a prison in case of invaders.”
“It can be both.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes royal sense,” Sofia says.
I laugh despite myself.
For a little while, I let the sound of them pull me into something softer.
Sofia’s chatter. Nikolai’s dry corrections.
The warm, familiar smell of the nursery.
The weak sun coming through the windows.
The simple fact that they are here, that I can see them, touch them, reach out and smooth a hand over Sofia’s hair when she leans too hard into me and nearly topples her own kingdom.
Then the nanny comes in and tells me Papa wants the children downstairs later for tea.
I say yes automatically, then regret it as soon as the door closes.
I don’t want them paraded in front of anyone. I don’t want them in formal rooms with formal voices and my father pretending everything is under control.
Still, I say nothing. I don’t have the energy for another fight before dinner.
When the children finally tire of their fort-palace-prison and move on to drawing terrible horses with too many legs, I leave them with the nanny and head down the corridor toward my room.
That’s when I hear voices in Papa’s study.
The door is not fully closed. Not open enough to invite attention, but not shut tight either. The sort of careless gap that tells me the conversation wasn’t meant for me, only hidden well enough that no one thought to check the hall twice.
I recognize Arkady’s voice first.
Thin. Nervous. Too eager even when he’s trying not to be.
“I’m telling you, I don’t want to be in the middle of this.”
I slow without meaning to.
Papa says something, he sounds displeased. But I don’t catch what he tells Arkady.
I go very still. A chair scrapes inside the room.
I barely have time to step back before the study door opens.
Arkady comes out first, and one look at him is enough to tell me something in there went badly.
He looks shaken. Genuinely unsettled. His face is pale, his collar is slightly off, and he stops short when he sees me in the hall.
For one second, we just look at each other.
Then he says, “Katerina.”
I study him. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
I tilt my head. “You don’t look all right.”
He tries to smile and fails. “It’s nothing.”
It plainly isn’t.
He glances back toward the study, then at me again. That one look tells me everything: whatever this is, it has to do with my father, and Arkady does not feel safe standing in the middle of it.
“What happened?” I ask.
He hesitates. That alone makes my pulse pick up.
“Arkady.”
He lowers his voice. “You should stay out of it.”
I stare at him. “Stay out of what?”
But he’s already pulling away from the conversation. He gives me one last look, oddly apologetic, then walks past me and heads down the corridor much faster than dignity would usually allow.
I turn just as my father steps out of the study.
He sees me standing there and looks annoyed. “What are you doing here?”
I fold my arms. “Walking through the house.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
I look past him into the study, but he shifts slightly and blocks the view without making it obvious.
“Arkady looked frightened,” I say.
“He’s dramatic.”
“No,” I say. “He’s weak. That’s not the same thing.”
“You’re spending too much time thinking about things that don’t concern you.”
I almost laugh. “Wasn’t I supposed to be getting married to that old toad?”
“Katerina,” my father sneers.
That warning tone would have worked on me once. Even now, some old part of me still reacts to it before the rest of me catches up. But I’m too tired, too suspicious, and too far past obedience to stop now.
“What did you tell him?” I ask.
“Nothing you need to know.”
“Then why does he look like that?”
His face hardens. “Let it go.”
I hold his gaze. “No.”
For a second I think he might actually answer me. Not fully, but enough to explain the strain I heard in his voice, the fear in Arkady’s face, the constant sense that the house is tightening around something no one wants to say aloud.
He doesn’t.
He only says, “Go back to your children.”
I glare at him for another second, then turn away.
The twins are exactly where I left them, standing beneath a horse portrait that does, admittedly, look slightly constipated.
Sofia runs toward me the moment she sees me. “You took forever.”
“It was two minutes.”
“To you,” she says solemnly. “To me it was years.”
I take her hand and look back once toward the study. The door is shut.
My father does not come out again.
Arkady is gone.
I take Sofia’s hand and start walking again, but my mind is nowhere near the hallway.
It’s back with Roman.
Not only because of my father and whatever game he’s playing now. Not only because Arkady walked out of that study looking as if someone had quietly shown him the edge of his own grave. It’s Roman himself, the fact of him, lodged in my head in a way I can no longer pretend is temporary.
I had not expected that to matter as much as it did. I had not expected the terrible tenderness of it, or the way it followed me afterward, sitting under my skin like heat I could not quite cool down. I spent years telling myself I ran because I was frightened of what he was.
Now I’m starting to understand that I also ran because I was frightened of what I might become if I stayed.
“Mama,” Sofia says, swinging our joined hands, “if the horse painting had a wife, would she be happy?”
“No,” Nikolai says before I can answer.
Sofia rolls her eyes. “You’re boring.”
Nikolai turns from the window and looks at me. “Mama?”
There is nothing unusual in his tone.
That’s what makes my stomach tighten.
“Yes?”
He hesitates just long enough to tell me this matters. Then he asks, “Do we have a father?”
The room goes still. Even Sofia looks up from the rug.
I don’t move.
For one second, maybe two, I just sit there looking at him, and the question opens something in me I have been holding shut for almost five years now.
I always knew this moment would come. I just never imagined it would be so simple. As if he has already noticed the shape of the absence and is only now checking whether it’s real.
My mouth goes dry.
Sofia gets to her feet slowly. “We do?”
There is no fear in either of them. Just curiosity. That’s somehow worse. I look at my children and feel the truth pressing at the back of my teeth.
For years I told myself I would never reveal it. Not to my father. Not to Vika. Not to anyone in this house. I thought if I kept it hidden long enough, it would become something fixed and manageable, some sealed part of my life that no one could touch unless I let them.
Now my son is standing in front of me, waiting for an answer, and I can already feel that silence breaking whether I want it to or not.
I make myself breathe. “Yes, you have a father.” My own voice sounds distant.
Sofia frowns. “Then where is he?”
I rest my hands in my lap because if I reach for anything right now, they will see them shaking.
Nikolai asks the next one more quietly. “Does Grandpa know him?”
My heart stumbles. Children should not be this perceptive…
But mine always are.
I look at him and see too much of Roman all at once. Not the face. Not exactly. The stillness. The watchfulness. The way he waits through silence because he knows people reveal themselves if you let them keep talking.
“I’ll tell you,” I say.
“When?”
“Soon,” I say, “That’s all I can say for now.”
“I wish Mr. Roman was our father,” Sofia says nonchalantly.
I turn to face her. “Why would you say that?”
She looks unfazed and just shrugs. “Because he’s so cool. He’s like Superman, but old.”
“I see,” I laugh shakily. I thought my secrets were out, but fate still has a little mercy on me. “Well, your father didn’t know about you.”
Sofia’s eyes widen. “How can someone not know about their own children?”
The bluntness of it almost makes me laugh, which would be hysteria and not humor. “Because sometimes grown-ups make very bad decisions.”
Nikolai lowers his gaze for a second, thinking. “Do you know where he is now?”
That question goes straight through me.
Because now I do. Or close enough. Closer than I ever expected to be again.
I look away toward the window because if I keep looking at my son, I might tell him everything just to stop carrying it alone.
But I can’t. Not yet. Not here. Not while my father is still in this house and the walls still belong more to him than to me.
So I look back at them and say, very gently, “Yes.”
“You know and you didn’t tell us?”
“Sofia.”
“Well,” she says, arms still folded, “that seems rude.”
Under any other circumstances, I might have laughed.
Nikolai stays quiet a little longer. “Are you going to tell him?”
I look at my son and feel the whole shape of my life pressing in from every side.
Five years ago, I thought I could bury the truth and keep it buried.
Now I can’t answer a child’s question without feeling the ground shift under me.
And somewhere beneath the fear, beneath the guilt, beneath every reason not to, one impossible certainty is rising anyway.
Yes.
I’m going to tell him.