6. Sofia
SOFIA
The word home still tastes like ash on my tongue.
It’s been two weeks since leaving Italy, and every day this house feels like a museum exhibit of someone else’s life.
Russia is where I was born, but birthplace and belonging are not the same thing.
I’ve spent too many years collecting sunsets in Italy, too many nights laughing in languages that aren’t my native tongue, to walk these halls and feel anything but displacement.
Except when I’m with Ivan.
He’s confined to his bedroom suite per the hospital’s orders, though he grumbles about it like a caged wolf every chance he gets.
The room smells faintly of antiseptic and the cedar cigar box he keeps on the nightstand even though he’s been forbidden to smoke.
Today, the curtains are half-drawn from the windows, letting in warm light that turns the bandages across his chest a pale gold.
I sit cross-legged at the foot of his bed like I did when I was a small child.
Ivan leans back against a mountain of pillows looking older than I remember.
The silver at his temples is more pronounced, his skin drawn tightly over the sharp bones of his face.
But his eyes are the same as they’ve always been in my memories, dark and unyielding, seeing everything.
He’s been telling me stories more often than not when I come around to his room to visit him after the medical staff leave. It has become our strange ritual over the past few days.
They aren’t the same polished anecdotes he used to write about in the birthday cards he’d send me every year.
Those had always been fine-tuned and distant, written in his elegantly slanted handwriting, smelling faintly of expensive ink and whatever cologne clung to everything that came from him.
He would mention my mother in those cards sometimes, but only briefly and usually only to remind me that she would have wanted me to study hard.
These stories are different.
These are real ones that make my chest ache.
“Your mother used to braid ribbons into your hair every morning before you would go on your walks around the gardens. Red ones, mostly. She said they matched your temper.” A faint smile ghosts across his mouth.
“You hated sitting still for them. She’d sing to keep you calm, old lullabies our grandmother taught her.
Sometimes, you’d fall asleep halfway through. ”
I can almost feel the tug of fingers at my scalp, parting my hair into sections too neat for a restless child.
I can almost hear the soft hum of a voice I no longer remember the exact timbre of, floating at the edges of some distant memory like music coming from a room I’m not allowed to enter anymore.
I try to picture my mother’s face whenever he talks about her, and sometimes, I can almost manage it. But time has stolen most of what I could once recall, leaving me with only fragments of her that refuse to solidify into one whole picture no matter how hard I try.
Still, I keep coming back because he is giving me something I’ve been starved of for most of my life.
Not the dead woman whose name made adults go quiet whenever I was around, but the woman who sang old lullabies to me and braided ribbons into my honey-blonde hair before our morning walks through gardens.
His gaze drifts somewhere past my shoulder to where the windows are, his expression growing distant and soft. Rain patters against the glass, blurring the world beyond into silver and gray. For once, he doesn’t look as intimidating as he usually does.
“She would have loved to see the woman you’ve become,” Ivan murmurs after a long while. He looks like a brother remembering his beloved sister, not a man who barely has to lift a finger to force others to bend to his will. “She would have been proud.”
The words land like a fist against my sternum.
For a moment, I can’t breathe around the sudden weight of missing her.
It comes so fast that I have to lower my gaze to my hands before Ivan sees too much on my face.
My mother has always been a locked room in my heart, one I never visited much because there was never enough inside to hold onto.
Just a few soft impressions that grew faint over time, becoming part of the architecture rather than something fresh enough to hurt me in any real way.
I was six when she died. Old enough to remember the feeling of grief but too young to know what it really meant.
I remember crying at her funeral because everyone else around me was, and I remember tissues being pressed into my hands over and over again.
I remember Ivan standing over her grave once she was finally buried with his face fixed into a terrifying calmness, and I remember thinking if he wasn’t crying, then maybe the worst had not truly happened.
That is how children survive disaster, I suppose, by believing falsehoods to cope with concepts completely beyond their small, child-like worldview.
I had been told it was a car accident—a drunk driver, maybe, or a split second decision turned deadly.
Wrong place, wrong time was always the excuse.
During the years before I was sent off to boarding school, the details surrounding the accident always shifted depending on who was recounting them and if they thought being vague was more of a kindness to me than being honest about what really happened.
But even back then, I knew none of the stories made any real sense. Yet, I had no choice other than to trust the adults surrounding me. Later when I got older, I began to realize everyone had a secret, and most would rather take it to the grave than let it get out.
Even now it has always felt strange to me, the secrecy surrounding her death and my father’s disappearance.
I was told he had abandoned me not long after her death, though whether that was due to his intense grief or being unable to handle raising me by himself, I’ll never know.
No one said he killed her intentionally during the accident with his reckless driving, but the suggestion was always present underneath everyone’s refusal to speak about him.
Why else would he become such a taboo topic? If my father killed my mother, then at least the story of her death had a villain I could name.
Whatever the real story was, it’s always had me questioning why.
What could he have gained from killing her?
Money? He left with nothing as far as I know.
Power? That didn’t exactly fit considering he vanished from every circle that connected him to our family.
Freedom? Maybe… but there were easier ways, even back then, for a man like him to leave his wife and disappear from her family’s influence.
I lift my gaze back to Ivan.
He is still watching the window, but I know him well enough now to sense he isn’t completely lost in his own thoughts.
Ivan is always aware. Even while recovering and softened by his memories of my mother, there is still a cold interior part of him assessing the room.
It is one of the things that makes him feel both like a safe space and frightening.
“Uncle,” I say quietly.
His gaze returns to me. The softness does not leave his face all at once. It retreats by degrees, reminding me of light withdrawing from a room once the sun sets. “Yes?”
I press my fingers together in my lap until my knuckles ache. “What really happened to her? My mother, I mean… Was it really a car accident?”
Ivan looks at me then in a way I have never seen before. His expression doesn’t shift much, but I see the flicker in his eyes. The same one I used to see when I was little and asked about the men with guns who followed us around whenever we left the estate and ventured off into the city.
“We won’t discuss that,” he says.
The refusal is so unexpected that I’m momentarily speechless.
The silence that follows is not long, but it sends a chill rolling down my spine anyway.
I force myself not to look away. “Everyone stopped talking when I asked about her back then. About my father, too. It always felt like things were being hidden from me.”
“We were protecting you.”
I almost laugh. “From what?”
His jaw tightens slightly. “From pain you were too young to carry.”
“But I’m not too young anymore.”
For one wild, breathless second, I think he might actually tell me. The tension inside his room seems to tilt toward that possibility and I lean forward in anticipation despite myself.
Then Ivan looks away. “Some wounds do not need to be reopened. It’s best to leave them alone in order to heal properly.”
Disappointment hits first, then anger.
It rises hot inside my chest, burning through the tenderness that had been softening me only moments ago.
I hate how easily he does this, offering me pieces of my mother through carefully crafted stories, then locks the door the second I ask why she was taken from me.
I see, maybe for the first time, how love and control are twined together so tightly inside him that he may no longer understand which is which.
I open my mouth to argue—gently, of course, because he’s hurt and because I love him—but the bedroom door opens without a knock before I get the chance to.
Rowan steps inside.
The room shifts the instant he crosses the threshold. It’s not just his size that has my heart squeezing in my chest, though he fills the room without even trying to. It’s the way his gray eyes sweep the space—me, Ivan, the windows, the door—before settling on my uncle.
“Pakhan. Nikolai Malyshko is here to see you.”
I feel a ripple of unease move through the room as soon as the name leaves Rowan’s mouth, even though I don’t understand why it matters.
Ivan straightens against the pillows, ignoring the way the movement pulls at his stitches.
His face hardens into a familiar mask, one that belongs to the man who rules an empire, not the uncle who delights in telling me stories.
“I’ll receive him,” Ivan says.