12. Zoya
ZOYA
Ruslan leaves before breakfast.
I’m sitting up in his bed when he gets the call, the sheet pulled to my chest, my hair tangled around my shoulders, still warm from his body.
The morning is gray through the windows, the sea restless beyond the glass.
For a few minutes before the phone rings, it almost feels ordinary.
Not normal, exactly. Nothing about this house or this man is normal.
But ordinary enough that I let myself sit there and watch him button his shirt like I have some right to the sight.
Then his phone lights up. He looks at the screen, and whatever softness was in the room disappears.
I hate how quickly I recognize it now. The small change in his face. The way his eyes go distant before he even answers. The way the man I sleep beside becomes the man other men fear.
He takes the call near the window. I don’t understand most of it. Names. A few Russian words. Stepan’s voice low and urgent through the speaker before Ruslan turns it off and holds the phone to his ear.
He asks two questions. “Where?” Then, after a pause, “Alive?”
My stomach tightens.
When he ends the call, he stands there for a moment with his back to me.
I already know he’s leaving. “What happened?” I ask.
He turns. His face is controlled, but his eyes are alert now, sharpened by whatever he has just heard. “We found the mole.”
The word brings the whole world back. The library. The gunfire. The closed doors. The reason I’m here at all.
He crosses the room and takes his watch from the table.
“How long will you be gone?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
That answer has become familiar too.
I watch him put on his jacket. “Are you going to be careful?”
His mouth moves slightly, not quite a smile. “No.”
“Ruslan.”
“I’ll come back.”
It’s the sort of thing he says like it settles everything. As if coming back is a decision, not a hope. As if bullets and betrayal respect his calendar.
I pull the sheet tighter around myself. “That wasn’t what I asked.”
He comes back to the bed then, one knee dipping into the mattress as he leans down. For one foolish second, I think he might say something different. Something honest enough to scare both of us.
Instead, he kisses me. It’s brief, but not careless. His hand cups the side of my neck, thumb brushing once under my jaw. When he pulls away, his eyes stay on mine longer than they need to. “Stay inside,” he says.
I should argue. Usually I would. This morning, I don’t.
Maybe because his hand is still warm on my skin. Maybe because the word mole has crawled into the room and made everything else feel childish.
“Come back,” I say.
His face stills. Then he says, “I will.”
He leaves after that.
Not while I’m asleep. Not quietly enough for me to pretend it didn’t happen. I hear his footsteps in the hall, the low voices downstairs, the front door opening, cars starting in the drive. I sit in his bed until the sound fades.
Only then does the house feel too big.
For a while, I try to behave like a sane person. I shower. I find my clothes. I ignore the fact that I still reach for one of his shirts because mine feel too much like another life.
I answer Karina’s messages with just enough detail to keep her from threatening to call every police station in the city.
Karina: You alive?
Me: Yes.
Karina: Emotionally or technically?
Me: Technically.
Karina: That’s my girl. Very haunting. Very concerning.
I smile for half a second, then lose it.
Everything feels suspended. Ruslan is out there following the first real lead they’ve had, and I’m in his house drinking tea I don’t want, wearing his shirt under my cardigan, wondering when exactly I stopped thinking of this as captivity and started thinking of it as waiting for him to come home.
That thought is dangerous enough that I get up too quickly and go to the bathroom for something to do.
I open the cabinet looking for a hair tie. Instead, I see the unopened box of tampons.
For a second, it means nothing. Then my whole body understands at once.
I should have needed them already.
My hand stays on the cabinet door. I stare at the box, then at my reflection behind it, as if the woman in the mirror might have a better explanation. Stress, obviously. Fear. Too much change. My body has had every reason to lose track of itself.
But another thought arrives anyway, quiet and terrible.
Pregnant?
I take the box down with numb fingers and sit on the edge of the bathtub.
No. It could be nothing. It’s probably nothing. Three or four late days do not mean my entire life has changed. Bodies are strange. Mine has never been perfectly obedient even under normal conditions, and nothing about the last two weeks has been normal.
Still, I count.
Once on my fingers.
Then again, because the first count feels wrong.
Then a third time, slower, with my phone calendar open and my breathing getting worse with every little square I tap.
The dates don’t fix themselves.
I press a hand to my stomach, then immediately pull it away because the gesture feels too real.
Too dramatic. Too much like accepting a possibility I’m not ready to hold.
There’s nothing to feel anyway. If anything is happening, it’s too early.
Too small. Too impossible to touch. But my mind is already moving without permission.
The first night. The next morning. The shower. That half-asleep, stupid, breathless time when we remembered protection late and pretended the timing was enough to save us from consequences. I had wanted him so badly that thinking felt optional.
Now thinking is all I can do.
I stand, pace to the sink, turn on the tap, turn it off again.
I need a test. That is the rational answer.
I think about Ruslan. Ruslan can be gentle with my hair and ruthless with the rest of the world in the same morning.
He can listen to me talk about my mother’s schoolchildren and then leave with a gun under his jacket.
I have seen enough now to understand that both versions are real, and neither cancels the other.
But if my period is late, if there is even a chance, he should know.
More than that, I want him to know. That’s the part I can’t look at directly.
I want him to come back, find me in the sitting room, and notice something is wrong before I say it.
I want to say, “My period is late,” and watch him go still.
I want him to ask the right questions in that blunt, practical voice.
I want him to send someone for a test, then sit beside me while we wait, impatient and calm because he’s always calm when I’m falling apart.
Maybe he will say, “We handle one thing at a time.”
Maybe I will believe him.
The hope is so fragile it embarrasses me.
By noon, I still haven’t eaten. By two, Anya brings soup and pretends not to notice that I only move it around with the spoon.
By four, the sky has darkened, and I’ve nearly called Karina twice.
I stop myself both times because Karina will hear one tremor in my voice and come here with a tire iron, pepper spray, and absolutely no survival instinct.
So I wait.
I wait with a possible-pregnancy-shaped hole in my chest. I wait with my phone in my hand. I wait with all the foolish things I might say arranged and rearranged in my head until none of them sound human.
When the cars finally come through the gate, relief hits first. It’s so strong I almost have to sit down.
Then Ruslan steps out, and the relief dies before it reaches my lungs.
There is blood on him. Not a little. Not the neat, controlled kind from a split knuckle or a cut lip. It stains the side of his shirt and darkens one sleeve. There’s a smear near his jaw, and more across his hand, drying brown-red against his skin.
He walks steadily, so maybe it isn’t his.
That doesn’t comfort me.
I’m already moving before I decide to move.
Down the hall, past the sitting room, toward the front entrance as the door opens and cold air pushes into the house.
Men come in around him, faces tight, voices low.
Dima’s arm is wrapped. Pavel is limping.
Stepan looks like he has not blinked in an hour.
Then Ruslan enters. He sees me, and for a second, everything stops between us.
All afternoon I imagined telling him. I imagined fear, maybe anger, maybe practical questions and his hand steady at the back of my neck.
Now I can smell blood from where I stand.
“What happened?” I ask. My voice sounds thin even to me.
Ruslan looks at me as if he has to pull himself back from somewhere far away. “We got the mole.”
The sentence should bring relief. Instead, it brings nothing I know what to do with.
I look at his shirt. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Then whose blood is that?”
He doesn’t answer quickly enough.
My stomach twists.
Behind him, Stepan speaks to one of the men, and the house starts moving around us like this is a familiar routine. Someone shuts the door. Someone goes toward the side hall. Anya disappears into the kitchen and comes back with towels. The whole place knows what to do with blood except me.
“Ruslan,” I say.
His eyes return to mine. “He’s dead,” he says.
“What happened?” I ask without thinking.
“This is not your concern,” he says. The sentence hits exactly where he aims it.
I take a step back.
Not because I’m afraid of him. Not exactly.
Because a few hours ago I was sitting on the edge of his bathtub with my hand on my stomach, thinking maybe we could become something that required the truth.
Now he’s telling me where the line is.
Not your concern.
The words I meant to say press against my throat.
My period is late.
I’m scared.
I might be pregnant.
They stay there.
I can’t give them to this version of him. Not to the man who has brought death into the hall and then decided I belong outside the door of it. Not when I don’t even know if they’re true.
Ruslan looks at me for another moment, and something flickers in his expression. He has noticed. Of course he has. He notices everything, even when he understands nothing.
“What?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
“Zoya.”
“No.” I fold my arms around myself. “Don’t.”
His eyes move over my face. He’s tired, but not softly tired. There’s too much blood on him for softness. Too much unfinished violence still clinging to the room.
Then he says, “You’re free to leave.”
For a moment, I don’t understand the words. They’re too practical. Too clean. Too cruel in their timing.
“What?”
“The immediate threat is reduced. I’ll have Stepan arrange a car. You can go to Karina, your parents, a hotel. Wherever you want.”
I stare at him.
Two weeks inside this house. Two weeks in his bed. Two weeks of him learning how I take my tea and where I’m ticklish and which memories make me quiet. Two weeks of letting myself believe that temporary had started to mean something else.
And he’s offering me transport.
“That’s what you came home to say?” I ask.
His jaw moves. “It’s safer.”
“For whom?”
His silence is long enough.
I nod once, slowly, because I understand. Maybe not all of it, but enough.
He thinks sending me away is protection. Or punishment. Or self-control. Or all three wrapped in the same cold logic he uses for everything else. The worst part is that he may even believe he’s doing the decent thing.
He walks past me without saying anything else.
The house settles around me. Men murmur in the distance. Water runs somewhere upstairs. Someone starts cleaning blood from the floor near the entrance, though I hadn’t noticed any had fallen there.
I look down. A faint red mark stains the tile near where Ruslan stood.
For some reason, that’s what finally breaks me.
Not loudly. I don’t sob. I don’t fall apart in the foyer like a woman in a bad melodrama.
I just stand there with one hand pressed flat against my stomach, staring at the blood he left behind, and understand that whatever I thought I was going to tell him today will have to stay inside me a little longer.
Because this morning I was afraid I might be pregnant.
Tonight, I’m afraid of what it would mean if I am.