I set down my empty glass and turn toward the doors just as another family arrives.
For one split second, my body reacts before my mind does.
A woman in black enters first, dark hair pinned back, posture controlled, one hand resting lightly on the shoulder of a little boy in a formal jacket. A little girl in white tights clings to her other side, already trying to look everywhere at once. Behind them, an older man follows with the expression of someone accustomed to people moving aside.
Sergei Markov.
The room narrows.
Then I see her.
One second I’m watching the doors, counting absences, measuring who came without my father and who came becauseof him. The next, the entire room disappears behind one dark-haired woman stepping into the light with a child at each side and Sergei Markov half a pace behind her.
Katerina.
My hand tightens around the glass hard enough that the cut crystal bites into my palm.
For four years, she has existed in fragments. A photograph in the snow. A voice in the dark. A mouth against mine in an airplane seat, in a warehouse of memory, in every stupid hour I let myself think of her when I should have been thinking of war. I have imagined seeing her again a hundred different ways. At an airport. In a street market. At the door of my office with fury in her eyes and my name in her mouth like a wound.
Not like this.
For one raw, disorienting second, I think I have made her up again.
That this is another trick of wanting her too long. Another punishment for all the nights I have gone back to that one photograph and called it enough.
Then the boy looks up.
And the world stops.
He cannot be more than four and half. Maybe a little older if he’s quiet by nature. Dark hair. Small shoulders in a formal jacket. Stillness in the middle of all this light and noise, as if he already understands what kind of room he has been brought into and dislikes it without having words for why.
But it’s not the stillness that hits me.
It’s… It’s his eyes.
My blood goes cold.
I have seen that face before.
The girl beside Katerina shifts impatiently, all movement and bright curiosity, but the boy does not. His hand stays against Katerina’s side with a quiet claim that nearly drops me to one knee.
No.The word does not leave my mouth, rather it detonates inside my skull.
Katerina turns slightly to say something to him, and I see the shape of her profile, the line of her throat, the controlled grace she’s wearing like armor. She looks older, yes. Softer in some places, sharper in others. More woman than girl now, more mother than anything else.
And still, I know her instantly.
My body knows her.
My lungs forget how to work. The room recedes. The orchestra becomes distant and useless. Every polished face around me, every handshake waiting, every calculation I was making about my father’s men and the council upstairs, all of it falls away.
There is only Katerina.
I take a step without meaning to.
Mikhail reaches me before I take a second step.
He does not touch me. He knows better than that when I’m looking at something too hard. He only comes close enough to speak without anyone else hearing.