The warehouse goes quiet again.
I reach down. I put my hand on the back of Theo’s head, this small dark head that has never been in my hands before tonight, and he’s still shaking slightly, still pressed against my leg, still holding on, and the thing that cracks open in my chest in that moment is not something I can close again.
I don’t try.
“I’ve got you,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine. “It’s done. I’ve got you.”
He doesn’t let go of my leg.
I don’t make him.
13
LENA
The first time I was in this compound, I was locked in the dungeon for days and tortured for answers, called a traitor’s daughter, and was given all the reasons why I would die.
Now, I’m in the east sitting room, surrounded by velvet and mahogany, and it feels exactly the same.
It still feels like a dream, a nightmare to be more specific.
What if he lied?
I get up, pace to the window and back. Sit down. Get up again. The chair is expensive, uncomfortable and I hate it, hate this room, hate that I know this compound, I hate everything.
What if he took Theo just to get me here?
I press my fingers against my mouth and breathe. That thought has been circling for three hours and I can’t make it stop, I can’t confirm or deny it and the not knowing is its own kind of torture. He said he’d bring Theo home. What if all of it, the school, the police station, the men in the car park, what if it was all just?—
Stop it.I sit back down.You’ll drive yourself insane. There’s no way he did this, he couldn’t find you, you made sure of that, this issue isn’t his doing and you know it.
And then there’s the damned marriage.
I put my face in my hands.
He wants to marry me. Razvan Volkov, Pakhan of the Volkov Bratva, the most feared man in Moscow, wants to marry me specifically so my life will be miserable. Not for love.
Not for Theo. For revenge. He said it himself, flat and bored, like it was the most reasonable thing anyone had ever proposed. And the worst part, the part that has been sitting in my stomach like a stone for four hours, is that I don’t see a way out of it.
I’ve walked back into prison, and this time I held the door open myself.
The heavy thud of the front doors echoing through the hallway hits me like a lightning strike. I’m moving before I can think, my injured ankle screaming as I bolt into the corridor.
“Mama!”
The sound of his voice, that high, bright, beautiful sound, nearly takes my knees out.
“Mama!”
Theo rounds the corner at a dead sprint. He looks so small against the towering marble walls of this place. I drop to my knees, my arms open, and he slams into me with enough force to rock me back on my heels.
His small arms wrap around my neck, squeezing with everything he has. I bury my face in the crook of his neck, inhaling him.He smells like sweat, salt, and the faint, lingering scent of the lavender soap from our bathroom in Budapest. A bathroom I’ll never see again. A life that ended the moment I stepped through that gate.
A sob breaks from me, ragged and ugly. Then another. I can’t stop them; the dam has finally burst. I hold him and shake, my tears soaking into his dark hair.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” I chant into his skin. It’s a prayer, a desperate, frantic mantra. I run my hands over his back, his arms, his legs, checking for breaks, for blood, for anything that would mean they hurt him.
He’s trembling, but he pulls back just enough to look at me, his eyes wide and shining with a strange, fierce light.