Zoya
Mila’s bed is empty.
For a few seconds, I stand in the doorway and stare at the small hollow her body left in the blanket, because my mind refuses to understand what my eyes are seeing.
Nadia is still asleep in the other bed, curled on her side with one hand under her cheek, and the room is so quiet that the open window feels louder than a scream.
The window.
It’s pushed up from the bottom, the curtain moving gently in the cold air.
My whole body turns numb.
“Mila?” I say, but it comes out too soft, like my voice already knows she’s not here.
I cross the room too quickly, nearly slipping on the rug, and look under the bed, behind the door, beside the little chest where the girls left their socks and hair clips the night before. There is nothing there except the stupid, ordinary mess of children who were supposed to be safe.
Behind me, Nadia stirs. “Mama?” she mumbles.
“Stay in bed.”
She lifts her head, still half-asleep. “Where’s Mila?”
“I said stay in bed,” I say.
Her eyes open wider, and she looks from me to the empty bed, then to the open window. Her face changes before she speaks.
“Mama.”
I don’t answer her. I can’t. If I answer, I’ll have to admit what is happening.
I run out of the room. The hallway is empty. The spare bedroom door is open. The bed inside is rumpled and cold, blanket thrown back on Ruslan’s side.
Ruslan is gone too.
For one horrible second, the thought hits me wrong, brutal and stupid: he took her.
Then I reject it so violently it almost makes me dizzy.
No. Not him.
Not Mila.
Something is wrong.
I move through the cottage, checking each room with shaking hands and no plan. The bathroom is empty. The kitchen is empty. The front room is empty except for the blanket on the sofa and one chair dragged slightly out of place. The front door is not fully shut.
A thin line of dawn shows through the gap.
I pull it open. Cold morning air rushes in, carrying damp earth, rain waiting to fall, and something metallic I don’t want to name.
“Mila!” I shout. My voice tears through the quiet yard.
No answer.
I step outside barefoot, not caring about the wet grass or the stones cutting into my feet. The sky is just beginning to pale through the trees, gray and weak, the kind of dawn that makes everything look unfinished. Behind me, I hear Nadia crying my name, but I don’t turn around.
“Mila!”
This time, there’s an answer.
Not close. Not clear.
But there.
“Mama!”
I run toward the sound. Branches scrape my arms. Wet leaves slap against my face. I don’t feel any of it properly. I only hear her voice again, thinner this time, frightened and breathless.
“Mama!”
Then she appears between the trees. My baby comes stumbling toward me with her coat open, hair wild around her face, one yellow ribbon missing, mud on her knees, and tears running down her cheeks.
I drop to the ground before she reaches me, and she throws herself into my arms so hard that for a second I can’t breathe.
“Mama,” she sobs. “Mama, I ran. I did what he said. I didn’t stop.”
I hold her so tightly she squeaks, and then I force myself to loosen my grip enough to check her.
“Are you hurt?” I ask, touching her face, her arms, her shoulders, her hair. “Did they hurt you? Mila, look at me. Did anyone hurt you?”
She shakes her head, but she’s crying too hard to speak at first. Her hands clutch the front of my sweater, twisting the fabric like she’s afraid I will disappear if she lets go.
“The bad man took me,” she says. “From the window. He said I had to be quiet or Nadia would wake up.”
The world tilts.
I close my eyes for half a second, because if I picture it too clearly, I will lose my mind.
“Where is Ruslan?” I ask.
Her face crumples.
That’s the answer before she says anything.
“He came,” she whispers. “Papa came.”
Papa.
The word is small, wet, trembling, and it breaks something deep inside me, but I have no space for that pain yet.
“He told me to run,” she says. “There were very scary men there.”
My heart throbs faster. “What men?”
“I-I don’t know,” she hiccups. “There were so many of them.”
My hands tighten around her. “Where is he now?”
Mila looks over her shoulder toward the trees. When she speaks, her voice is barely there.
“He fell.”
I can’t move. For one second, I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t be a mother, can’t be anything except a woman standing in the wet dawn while her daughter tells her the man she loves fell.
Then Nadia’s voice comes from behind me.
“Mama?”
I turn and see her near the edge of the yard, barefoot too, crying silently with her blanket still clutched in one hand.
“Go back inside,” I tell her, but she shakes her head before I finish.
“No.”
There’s no time to argue. There’s no safe place anymore. I take Mila’s hand and reach back for Nadia with the other.
“Show me,” I say.
Mila doesn’t want to, I can see that, but she turns anyway and leads us back through the trees. She keeps looking at me, like she’s trying to make sure I’m still there, and every few steps she says things in broken pieces.
“He told me not to look back.”
“He hit the bad man.”
“Papa was bleeding.”
Each sentence lands inside me like a stone.
The trees thin out, and the ground starts to rise. I smell rain before the first drop touches my face. The path opens suddenly, and the old quarry appears in front of us, dark and wide and terrible beneath the morning sky.
The ledge is empty.
At first, that’s all I understand.
Empty.
No Ruslan. No one else either.
Then the details come into focus one by one, and each one is worse than the last. The mud is torn up with footprints. Gravel is scattered everywhere. A strip of cloth is caught on a branch. There are drag marks near the edge, broken roots, dark smears on the stone.
Blood. So much blood that the ground seems to have remembered violence even after the men are gone.
Mila pulls me closer, but I stop before we get too near the drop.
“Stay behind me,” I say, and my voice sounds strange, too calm for what is happening. “Both of you stay behind me.”
Nadia obeys immediately, gripping the back of my sweater. Mila stands pressed against my side, shaking so hard I can feel it through my clothes.
“He went there,” she whispers, pointing toward the ledge.
It has begun to rain, slow at first, then steadier, cold drops darkening the dirt and thinning the blood on the stone. I move forward on my knees because standing feels impossible, and because I’m afraid if I walk, my legs will carry me too close to the drop.
Below, the quarry wall disappears into shadow and broken rock. I can see scraped stone where something heavy went down. I can see blood on a lower ridge.
I can’t see him.
My hand goes to my mouth. The sound I make frightens both girls.
Mila starts crying harder. Nadia presses her face into my back and says, “Mama, don’t.”
But I can’t stop it.
For six years, I carried Ruslan like a wound I refused to treat.
I told myself anger was enough. I told myself distance was safety.
I told myself I had done the right thing, and maybe I had, but none of that matters now, because he came for our daughter in the dark and walked into a trap he knew was waiting.
He came because Mila was there.
I lower my hand and look at the blood on the ledge.
“I loved you, Ruslan,” I weep. The words come out broken and helpless, dragged from a place I kept locked for too long.
“I loved you then, and I loved you after, and I loved you even when I was furious with you. I loved you every time I hated you for leaving me alone. I should have told you. I should have told you before this.”
The rain runs into my eyes. I wipe it away, but more falls, mixing with tears until I can’t tell the difference.
Mila sobs beside me. “Mama.”
I pull her into my arms, and Nadia comes too, both of them clinging to me while I kneel in the wet grass at the edge of the place where their father fell.
Then Mila suddenly lifts her head. “Mama,” she whispers.
I close my eyes. “Baby, please don’t look down.”
“No,” she says, her voice changing. “I heard something.”
My heart starts pounding again, sharp and wild. “Mila, move back from there.”
She turns toward the side of the ledge, where the ground dips lower around a knot of exposed roots. “Mama, come help me.”
“Mila, I said move back.”
“But I heard him.”
The words stop me. For a moment, there’s only rain and my own breathing and Nadia crying softly into my sleeve.
Then I hear it too.
A scrape. A low, broken sound from below the side of the ledge, not from the deep bottom of the quarry but closer, somewhere hidden beneath the uneven lip of stone.
I crawl toward it with one arm stretched back to keep both girls behind me.
“Stay there,” I tell them. “Don’t come closer.”
Mila makes a small, terrified noise. “Mama—”
“Stay there.”
I lean over just enough to see the side of the drop.
A hand appears over the rock.
Bloodied. Muddy. Alive.
For one impossible second, I stare at it without understanding.
Then Ruslan’s face comes into view below the ledge, pale from pain and rainwater, his hair plastered to his forehead, one arm hooked around a thick root jutting out from the quarry wall. His other hand is gripping the stone so hard his fingers look bloodless.
His eyes find mine. “Zoya,” he says, and his voice is rough enough to barely sound like him.
I throw myself forward and grab his wrist with both hands. “Hold on,” I say, because panic has stripped every useful word out of me. “Ruslan, hold on.”
His mouth tightens, and he pushes with whatever strength he has left. The effort tears a sound out of him that makes my stomach twist, but I don’t let go. I dig my knees into the mud and pull until my arms burn, until my back screams, until the rain makes his skin slippery under my hands.
For one horrible second, he slips.
“No,” I gasp. “No, no, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare do this to me.”