Chapter 33 ANYA - Mansion Lab, 0314
The door isn’t locked anymore, and I don’t know when that changed, don’t know if he unlocked it an hour after he walked away or if he never locked it at all, if the whole thing was just the sound of metal clicking and my own assumptions filling in the rest.
I found out at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t stop staring at the ceiling. I got up because the walls were closing in and my skin felt too tight, and I needed to know if he’d caged me.
The brass turned under my palm, and the door swung open into darkness, and the hallway stretched empty in both directions, cold marble and silence and the faint smell of alcohol drifting up from somewhere deeper in the house.
He wasn’t there.
The floor where he’d been sitting when he closed the door, where I’d heard him slide down the wall and stay for hours while I lay in bed refusing to cry, that floor was bare and cold, and he was gone.
I stood in the doorway for what felt like forever, trying to understand why his absence made me want to scream louder than his presence ever had.
I should have run.
The front door was probably unlocked too, and there were cars in the garage, and I had Luka’s passports hidden in my bra.
I could have been gone before anyone noticed, could have disappeared into the night and found my brother and never looked back at this house or this man or any of the wreckage we’d made together.
I went to the lab.
* * *
The compound takes two hours to synthesize, and I have all night and nothing left to lose except the answer to a question I can’t stop asking myself: what is he, really, underneath all that violence and devotion and carefully constructed armor?
Monster or man.
Murderer or weapon.
The one who signed my mother’s death warrant, or just another tool, Vadim pointed at something soft.
Nothing exotic, just an MX-42 derivative because that’s the poison that runs through everything now. My mother’s poison. My husband’s whiskey. The loop closes tonight.
One point four milliliters into his favorite whiskey because the amber color will hide the compound and the burn will mask the bitter undertaste.
The second glass I fill with nothing but alcohol, clean and safe and indistinguishable from its twin.
Russian roulette. Two glasses. One ending.
The chess set is heavy in my hands as I carry everything toward his study, the board and the glasses, and the weight of what I’m about to do pressing down on my shoulders like the whole house is collapsing slowly around me.
Thirty-seven steps, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and then I’m at his door. He’s sitting behind his desk with his head in his hands, looking like something that crawled out of its own grave and forgot how to get back in.
The same shirt from yesterday, white cotton gone rusty at the cuffs where his violin strings sliced his knuckles. He must have played for hours after he walked away from my door, must have dragged that bow across the strings until his fingers bled.
An empty decanter on the desk and broken glass in the corner, and his shoulders hunched like he’s trying to fold himself small enough to disappear.
He looks destroyed.
He looks like I feel.
I hate how much that matters to me, hate the part of my brain that sees his suffering and feels something other than satisfaction, the part that wants to cross the room and put my hands on his face and tell him we’ll survive this somehow, even though surviving together might be worse than dying apart.
I set the tray on his desk, the glasses clink against the marble, and the chessboard lands with a sound like a judge bringing down a gavel.
“We’re going to play a game,” I say, and my voice comes out exactly how I practiced it in the lab, like the woman I used to be before Roman Volkov put a ring on my finger and tore my whole world apart. “One game of chess with real stakes and no mercy and no backing out once we’ve started.”
His head comes up slowly, and his eyes find mine. Confusion.
“What kind of stakes?” he asks, and his voice scrapes out of him raw and wrecked like it’s tearing his throat bloody on the way up.
I gesture at the two identical glasses, the amber liquid catching lamplight like trapped fire, death and salvation sitting side by side with nothing to distinguish between them.
“One of these contains an MX-42 derivative,” I say, and he understands exactly what I’m offering. “Enough to stop a heart in forty minutes. The other glass is just whiskey.”
His eyes drop to the glasses, and I can see him trying to tell them apart, trying to find some difference in the color.
“If I win,” I continue, “you drink the poisoned glass. If you win, I drink it.”
“You know.” His voice is quiet but certain. “You made them. You know which one kills.”
“I know which one I’ll make you drink when I win.
” I pull out the chair across from him and sit down, folding my hands on the marble edge of the board with a steadiness I don’t feel anywhere else in my body.
“I know which one I’ll have to drink if you win.
The question is whether you’re willing to play when you can’t control the outcome, when everything depends on whether you’re good enough to beat me at the one game where I’ve beat you already. ”
His jaw clenches so hard I can see the war happening behind his eyes.
“And if I refuse to play?”
“Then I drink both glasses myself, and you can watch me die knowing you were too much of a coward to fight for a different ending.” The words come out harder than I intended, and I see them land in his chest like bullets. “Your choice, Roman. Play the game or watch me end it on my own terms.”
“That’s not a choice,” he says, and something in his voice breaks open, something raw and desperate and terrified. “That’s fucking extortion.”
“Welcome to our marriage.” I move my first pawn to e4 and wait. “Your move.”
He stares at me for a long moment, his hands shaking, his chest heaving with breaths that sound too fast and too harsh, and then slowly, he reaches for his own pawn and pushes it to e5.
The game begins.
We’re already at move twelve. His hand shakes. Sweat beads on his temple. The glasses sit between us, sweating condensation onto the wood.
He’s not playing well.
He’s sloppy. He’s distracted. He’s not playing to win; he’s playing not to lose.
Move eighteen, and his queen is exposed.
Move twenty-two and I’ve forked his king and rook with a knight he should have seen coming three moves ago.
Move twenty-five, and his position is collapsing, pieces falling one by one while I build toward a checkmate he won’t be able to stop. The whole time, his eyes keep drifting to the glasses, to the amber liquid that might be salvation or might be death.
“You’re losing,” I say quietly, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears, distant, the scientist observing an experiment instead of the wife destroying her husband one chess move at a time.
“I know.”
“You’re not even trying anymore.”
“I know that too.” He looks up from the board, and his eyes meet mine. “I can’t focus on the game when all I can think about is which glass you’re going to make me drink. I can’t strategize when every move I make might be the one that kills you instead of me.”
“That’s the point. You have to play not knowing if you’re fighting for your life or fighting to end it.”
His hands flatten on the table, fingers spread wide against the dark wood.
“I’m done,” he says.
“The game isn’t over. You still have—”
“I said I’m done.” He reaches across the board and sweeps his arm through the pieces, scattering pawns and bishops and the black king across the marble floor with a crash that sounds like the end of something.
And then he reaches for both glasses.
“Roman, don’t—”
He drinks the first one in a single swallow, amber liquid disappearing down his throat while I’m frozen in my chair, unable to move or speak or do anything except stare at the empty crystal in his hand.
“Which one was that?” he asks, and his voice is perfectly calm, perfectly steady, like a man who’s already made peace with whatever comes next.
“Stop.”
“Which one, Anya?” He picks up the second glass and holds it up to the light, studying it like he’s looking for answers in the way the lamp catches the whiskey. “Which one did I just drink? The poison or the cure?”
“It doesn’t matter, just put it down and let me—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he repeats, and something in his tone makes me go still, makes me really look at him for the first time since he scattered the pieces across the floor. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter which one was which because I’m drinking both of them anyway.”
“No—”
The second glass empties as fast as the first, the dose in his bloodstream now lethal. He drank them both, not knowing, drank them both because—
“Why?” The word tears out of me raw and desperate, and I’m out of my chair before I realize I’m moving, my hands closing around his face, his jaw, anywhere I can touch him, forty minutes—
“I’m done.” He coughs, wipes his mouth. “I couldn’t watch you choose. I couldn’t risk you picking the wrong one.”
“You fucking idiot.” I’m crying now, tears I didn’t give him in the bedroom finally spilling over while my hands shake against his face and my mind races through the timeline, I have forty minutes to get the antidote, I have to move, I have to—
“Which one was poisoned?” he asks again, and his thumb comes up to brush tears off my cheek with a gentleness that makes me want to scream. “Tell me which one I need to worry about.”
“The first one.” The words rip out of me. “The first glass, the one you drank first, you have maybe thirty-seven minutes before cardiac arrest, and I have to—I have the antidote in the lab, I have to go, I have to—”
His hands close around my wrists before I can pull away, holding me there in front of him with a grip that’s already weaker than it should be, already showing the first signs.
“Why do you have an antidote?”