Chapter 32 ROMAN — Volkovskaya Mansion, Library, 3 January, 0317
My phone buzzes, and I look down at the screen because I’ve been checking it every thirty seconds since Mishka left with Kolya.
Boy secured. Safe house in Rotterdam. No complications.
I shove the phone back in my pocket and stand in the hallway outside my own bedroom door, listening to the silence on the other side.
The silence started in the car from Ghent when she pressed herself against the window and wouldn’t look at me.
It continued through the private jet, where she sat with her knees pulled up and her eyes fixed on nothing, lasted through the drive from the airstrip to the mansion, where she walked three steps ahead of me.
The lock clicks, and I step through the doorway, and there she is, exactly where I left her, spine pressed against the headboard with my jacket wrapped around her body because she still hasn’t taken it off.
She looks up when I enter, and her eyes find mine, and there’s no fear in them, just hatred, pure and clean and bright as a blade.
I haven’t slept in three days.
The scratches on my face are still bleeding at the edges because I won’t let anyone clean them, won’t let anyone touch what she left on my skin, the evidence that she fought and clawed and tried to tear me apart before her body went still in my arms on that broken doorstep in Ghent.
I look like a man who’s been gutted, and I don’t care.
“Get up,” I say, and my voice sounds wrong, scraped raw from the whiskey I’ve been drinking since I locked her in here, from the cigarettes I started again.
She doesn’t move.
She just watches me with those mercury eyes that used to go soft when I touched her, eyes that used to track my hands across her skin with hunger and curiosity and something that might have been the beginning of love before I salted the earth and poisoned the well and burned everything to ash.
“I said, get up.”
“I heard you.”
Her voice is hoarse from screaming or crying or both. She still doesn’t move, just sits there in my jacket with her bare feet tucked underneath her and her hair tangled from the pillow and her face pale except for the dark circles under her eyes.
I cross the room in four strides and grab the front of the jacket, my jacket, my scent on her skin, and I haul her off the mattress with hands that are shaking so hard I can barely keep my grip.
Just to make her look at me while I bleed out every truth I’ve been choking on since the day I signed that form.
She finds her feet, and she doesn’t fight yet.
“You ran from me.”
“Yes.”
“You took my passports, and you ran—”
“Luka’s passports.”
“He was preparing our escape.”
“Mmm.”
“You disobeyed—”
“Fuck your obedience.” She shoves against my grip, and I let her push me back half a step. “I don’t owe you obedience. I don’t owe you anything except the contempt you’ve earned with every lie you’ve told since the moment you forced that ring onto my hand.”
“You think I lied?”
“I think you married me knowing you signed my mother’s death warrant.” Her voice cracks on the word, and something shatters behind her eyes. “I think you touched me knowing whose daughter you were holding. I think you made me trust you, knowing exactly what would happen when I found out.”
“I knew.”
The admission lands between us, and she flinches like I hit her, actually flinches.
“I knew,” I say, and my voice breaks on the words. “Vadim showed me the file. I saw the name. And I married you anyway.”
“Why?” One word, barely a whisper. “Why would you do that?”
“I didn’t marry you because I wanted you.” The words come out harsh and ugly, and I hate every one of them, but she needs to hear this, needs to understand the timeline that led us here. “I married you because I was a coward. Vadim gave the order. I obeyed. I told myself you were just a contract.”
Her grip on my wrists loosens just slightly.
“And then I saw you. And you beat me at chess.” I step closer, and she doesn’t step back this time, just stands there with her chest heaving and her eyes locked on mine.
“And then you started to look at me like I was a man instead of a monster. And then I touched your skin, and something that had been dead inside me for twenty years started to wake up. The sin wasn’t signing the form.
The sin was falling in love with you after I did it. ”
“You’re trying to make me feel sorry for you.”
“I’m telling you the truth because you deserve it, even if it changes nothing, even if you still hate me when I’m done.”
“I will still hate you.”
“Then hate me with all the facts.”
She stares at me, and I can see the war happening behind her eyes, the part of her that wants to run fighting against the part of her that needs to know.
“Your mother worked for us,” I say, and her face changes, confusion flickering before she locks it down hard. “She helped develop the fentanyl before anyone understood what it would become.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s not.” I reach for her face, and she flinches back, and I drop my hand, curl it into a fist at my side. “Tatiana Nikolayevna Morozova. Recruited when you were eight years old. She worked in our labs for three years before the trials started.”
“I knew she worked for the Bratva, briefly, but she got out.” Anya’s whole body is trembling now. “She worked for the university. She came home smelling like antiseptic, and she helped me with my chemistry homework, and she was not—she was not—”
“She was also an addict.”
The words land and Anya’s face goes white, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, like a piece clicking into place she’s been trying to ignore for seven years.
“No.”
“She was using. Testing the compounds on herself. By the time the trials started, she wasn’t testing anymore. She was feeding a need.”
“Stop.”
“She volunteered for batch seven.” My voice cracks, and I have to force the words past the tightness in my throat. “Put her own name on the consent form. Said she wanted to test what she helped create. Said she understood the risks.”
“STOP.”
Anya launches herself at me. I let her hit me. I let her tear my skin. I deserve every mark. She screams and calls me every name in Russian and English, and the German she slips into when she’s too furious to think.
“You’re lying,” she screams, and her fist connects with my jaw, snapping my head sideways, reopening the scratches she already put there, and the pain feels right, feels like something I’ve owed her for seven years. “She wouldn’t—she was my mother—she wouldn’t volunteer for—”
“I signed the authorization.” I catch her wrists to make her look at me.
“I was twenty-five years old. Vadim put the paper in front of me, and I signed it the way I signed everything back then. Because saying no meant dying. Because I was a coward who did what he was told instead of asking questions about who I was killing.”
“Let go of me.”
“I didn’t remember her name until your file came on my desk.
” My grip tightens, and she’s still fighting, still pulling, still trying to tear herself free.
“Didn’t know she had children until I was reading your file before our wedding.
Didn’t know she was your mother. None of that absolves me.
I still signed. I still let it happen. I still benefit from the world that ate her. ”
“LET GO.”
“I married you knowing what I did.” Tears are running down my face, and I can’t remember the last time I cried in front of another person, but I’m crying now.
I don’t care, I don’t care about anything except making her understand.
“I touched you, knowing. Fucked you knowing. And every single time, I hated myself more, because wanting you was the one thing Vadim never ordered. He told me to marry you, told me to use you, told me to extract what the Bratva needed from your brilliant fucking mind—but he never told me to love you. That was my sin alone.”
She stops fighting.
Her whole body goes still, and she stares up at me with those mercury eyes swimming with tears and hatred and something else, something I’m terrified to name.
“Love,” she whispers, and the word sounds like poison in her mouth.
“Yes.”
“You don’t get to call it that.”
“It’s the only word I have.”
“Then find another one.” She’s shaking in my grip, but she’s not pulling away anymore, just standing there trembling with tears streaming down her face. “Because love doesn’t look like this. Love doesn’t feel like being gutted and filled with glass. Love isn’t something you build on a grave.”
“You’re right.”
“I know I’m right.”
“But it’s still true.” I release her wrists and cup her face instead, my thumbs brushing away tears that won’t stop falling, my forehead dropping to rest against hers the way it has a hundred times before.
“I love you. I’ve loved you since the first time you looked at me.
I’ll love you until they put me in the ground.
And I know—I know—that loving you is the worst thing I’ve ever done to you.
Worse than the signature. Worse than the lies.
Because the signature was Vadim’s order, but the love was mine. ”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Ya lyublyu tebya,” I whisper against her lips. I say it in Russian because English feels too clean for a confession like this. “Ya lyublyu tebya i ya nenavizhu sebya za eto.” I love you, and I hate myself for it.
She laughs.
The sound of it makes my blood run cold.
“You love me.” She says it back in English, flat and mocking, and her laugh builds into something wild and terrible.
“Roman Volkov loves me. The man who signed my mother’s death warrant, who married me while the ink was still wet on her grave, who made me come screaming his name while he was keeping this secret—that man loves me. ”
“Anya—”
“You know what the worst part is?” She’s still laughing, but tears are running down her face, and her hands have come up to grip my wrists where I’m holding her face.
“I can feel myself still wanting you. Even now. Even knowing what you did. I look at you, and I hate you, and I want you, and I don’t know how to make those two things exist in the same body without tearing myself apart. ”
“You don’t have to figure it out right now.”
“Don’t tell me what I have to do.” But her voice is softer now, broken, and her body is swaying toward mine even as her words say the opposite. “Don’t touch me like you’re allowed to touch me. Don’t look at me like I’m still yours.”
“You are still mine.”
“I’m not. I’m not anything that belongs to you anymore.”
“Then why are you still wearing my jacket?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers, and for the first time since I walked through the door, she sounds like the woman I married, confused and angry and wanting something she can’t admit to herself.
“I don’t know why I can’t take it off. I hate that I feel safe in this jacket.
I hate that it smells like you. I still—”
She stops.
“You still what?”
“Don’t.”
“Tell me.”
“I still feel you,” she says, and the words come out like they’re being torn from her chest. “In my body. In my skin. Everywhere you’ve touched me, I still feel your hands. And I hate it. And I want it. And I don’t know how to make it stop.”
I lean down to kiss her.
My hand slides into her hair, tilting her head back, and my mouth hovers over hers, close enough to feel her breath, close enough to taste the salt of her tears. This is the only thing I know how to give her that doesn’t require me to be better than I am.
“Glas.”
I freeze.
“Glas,” she says again. “Stop.”
“I was just going to kiss you.”
“I know.”
She used the safeword to stop tenderness.
“A monster I can fight,” she says, reading my face. “A monster I can hate. But a man who loves me? A man who kisses me with my mother’s blood still on his hands?”
“That’s the thing that will destroy you.”
“Yes.”
I look at my hands. Shaking. Large. Covered in blood from where she scratched my arms.
They look exactly like my uncle’s hands.
“Be the monster,” she says, and her voice is almost gentle now, almost kind, and that’s the worst thing she could possibly give me. “Be the thing I can fight. Don’t stand there crying, telling me you love me like that’s supposed to fix what you broke. Don’t try to kiss me into forgetting.”
“I wasn’t trying to make you forget.”
“Then what were you trying to do?”
I don’t have an answer.
I don’t have anything except the hollowed-out shell of a man.
“Get out,” she says. “Sleep somewhere else tonight. We’ll figure out the rest in the morning.”
I can’t speak.
I walk to the door on legs that don’t feel like mine, and I grip the handle.
I look back at her one more time because I need to see her, need to remember the way she looks standing in my bedroom wearing my jacket with my blood under her fingernails and my love rotting between us like a corpse neither of us knows how to bury.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
I step through the door and close it behind me, and I stand in the hallway staring at the wood while my chest heaves and my hands shake and my whole body comes apart.
Then I lock the door from the outside.
Not to keep her in.
To keep the monster away.
I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold marble floor with my back against her door and my head in my hands.
Inside the room, silence. She’s not crying. She’s not screaming. She’s not doing anything at all.
I sit there in the dark.
And I listen to my wife not crying.
And I understand, finally, what it means to destroy something you love.