Eight months since the wedding that never happened.
Since the gunshots, the hospital, the kidnapping, and the night Viktor carried me back with blood on both of us and a silence in him I didn’t understand until much later.
He told me some of what happened to Maksim.
Not all.
Only that Maksim had hurt me, had crossed a line there was no coming back from, and Viktor had dealt with it. He said it simply, one night when I woke shaking from another nightmare and asked whether Maksim could ever come for us again.
No,Viktor had said.He’s gone.
I didn’t ask how. Part of me already knew.
And all I felt was grateful. I still don’t know whether that makes me weak or wise.
Viktor gets up from the rug and pulls on his trousers. “Stay there.”
“I’m not lying naked on the floor when you bring Mila down.”
“Mila is a baby. She has no opinion on nudity.”
“I have an opinion.”
He gives me a faint smile and heads upstairs.
Mila.
Our daughter’s name still does something soft to me every time I hear it. Mila Sokolov. Tiny, fierce, impatient, and far stronger than anyone expected when she came into the world too early and too loudly.
She spent six weeks in the NICU.
Six long weeks of alarms, tubes, doctors, weight checks, whispered prayers, and Viktor standing beside her incubator like he could threaten death itself into keeping away from her.
When we finally brought her home, she was still small enough to scare me, but she looked at the world with the same severe little frown as her father.
Yuri’s around less now, at least physically. He calls twice a day, sends men I pretend not to notice, and has opinions about the mountain cabin’s security that he expresses with deep personal suffering. He doesn’t trust quiet places. He trusts controlled places. Viktor lets him complain because Yuri has earned that much.
Camille disappeared from our lives almost completely after the wedding collapsed. London, last I heard. Maybe Paris. Maybe some carefully managed version of exile paid for by her family.The official story became mutual incompatibility, which is a polite way of saying too many people knew too much and nobody wanted the full truth printed anywhere.
Ethan went away too. Rehab first. Then somewhere private. Not prison, not freedom either. Viktor never discusses the arrangement in detail, and I don’t ask often. Ethan wrote me one letter months ago, full of apologies that sounded half-sincere and half-coached. I haven’t answered it.
Maybe someday I’ll be kind enough to.
Not yet.
As for Alina, she’s not in our life.
I don’t know where she is now. Europe, probably. Somewhere polished and expensive, with enough distance to pretend she chose it. I don’t hate her. That surprised me at first. I thought I would.
Mostly, I feel nothing.
Maybe that’s worse.
Anna is gone too, and I don’t know the full story there. Viktor never told me all of it, and I learned not to ask questions he wasn’t ready to answer. All I know is that she left with Mikhail Voronin, his rival, the day of the wedding, or close enough to it that the difference doesn’t matter.
I don’t think he has forgiven her. Sometimes her name comes up in a call, or Yuri mentions something in Russian and Viktor’s face goes still in that particular way of his. Not angry exactly. Worse. Closed. Like a door he refuses to open because he already knows what’s behind it.
But he hasn’t gone after them. That surprised me more than anything.