“I’ll stand,” I say tightly, and he shrugs tiredly.
“Have it your way,” he says, his voice exhausted and hoarse suddenly.
“She got pregnant almost immediately,” he says, after a moment’s silence. “She was so sure it was a son. My heir. She spent every second in the latter half of her pregnancy making the house perfect, decorating it the way you saw it when you moved in, fussing over every detail. She had names picked out, a nursery decorated for a boy. And when it wasn’t, when she gave birth to Anika, she didn’t even want to hold her. She didn’t believe me when I said that it was fine, that we’d have more children.” Viktor lets out a long sigh. “I loved Anika from the moment I set eyes on her, but Vera couldn’t, not completely. She wouldn’t even redo the nursery. She cared for Anika, but there was always some distance. It was like Anika was her own personal failure. Things changed between us after that.”
“And Yelena?” I frown, feeling myself soften towards him just a little. I can’t imagine not loving a child that I bore, girl or boy, and my heart breaks for Anika, wondering if she knew how her mother felt, if she ever realized that she was a disappointment.
“Yelena came along after a while, although it took much longer than Vera wanted for her to get pregnant again. Sex was a chore by then, and all she could talk about was giving me a son, as if that mattered more than a happy wife, than having the woman that I loved and not this other person that seemed to have taken her place.” He sighs. “It got worse after Yelena. She wouldn’t nurse her. We fought—fights like we’d never had before. I said things that I should never have said to her, things that I’ll always regret.”
There’s a long moment of quiet, and I can see that regret in his face when he speaks again.
“I made her fuck me that night, before she was ready for it again. I’ll regret that for the rest of my life, too.” His jaw clenches as if he’s remembering something terrible. “She was never the same after that. She was happy, bright, bubbly, and beautiful when I married her. All she cared about was love, about laughing and having adventures and sharing a life with me. After that—she became obsessed with her body, with being thin and beautiful like the women other men wanted, terrified of getting older, of losing her figure to children. She became sadder and sadder with each month that passed, each month that she didn’t get pregnant.”
“That must have been hard,” I whisper, and I don’t know if I mean for him or for Vera—or maybe both.
“It was,” Viktor says quietly. “I wish I had known how hard it was for her. I wish I had known which night was the last one we would spend together. I wish that I’d done that last night differently.” His jaw tightens, and he looks up at me, some fathomless grief that I’ve never seen before in his eyes. “Do you know what the last thing she ever said to me was?”
“Of course not,” I whisper, my chest tightening despite myself at the look on his face. “But you can tell me if you want to.”
“She whispered to me, right before she fell asleep, that maybe we’d made a son. And then the next morning, I got up before she woke and left for a month on a business trip to Russia.” He takes a deep breath. “The day I came back, I went straight to the office. And when I came home—”
He swallows hard. “I saw the bloody water first, all over the floor. And then I saw her in the bathtub, her arms slit open from wrist to elbow on both sides, straight down. It wasn’t a cry for help. She wanted to die. Shemeantto die. And she meant for me to find her like that.”
His voice shakes then, breaking, and I want to go to him. I want to reach for him, hold him, comfort him, but I don’t. I feel frozen in place, watching my husband recount a story different from anything I had imagined. And I can feel my heart breaking for him—and for her too, the other woman who had loved this man and been destroyed by him.
“I screamed her name for what felt like forever. I tried to wake her up. I felt like I’d gone insane until the staff found me and called Levin, and he came and took me away from her and had it taken care of.” Viktor pauses, and something shifts in his face, his eyes hardening as he looks up at me.
“I didn’t find out the rest of it until the next morning when I went back into the bathroom. Everything had been cleaned, but they’d missed one thing.”
There’s a long silence, and I can almost hear the beating of my own heart.
“What?”
Viktor looks up at me, pain and anger in his cold blue gaze. “A pregnancy test,” he says simply. “My wife was pregnant when she killed herself.” He pauses. “And she knew.”
It takes a moment for what he’s said to sink in. I can’t find the words to say, my heart stopping in my chest. I can feel the pieces clicking together, the reasons why Viktor is the way that he is, the reasons for how he’s always been during our marriage. Why he treated me the way he did back home.
The pain that he’s never shared with me before.
I open my mouth to say something, anything. But before I can, we’re both startled nearly out of our skin by the rattle of gunfire.
It’s coming from inside the house.
Viktor leaps to his feet instantly. “Stay here,” he orders, turning to rush towards the house, but I can’t obey. All I can think about is Sofia and Ana, Anika and Yelena, Olga and Sasha, all in that house, where I can hear the gunfire like a bad dream.
I run after him without thinking, my heart pounding, blood rushing in my ears. I see his expression as I catch up to him, but he doesn’t tell me to stay again. He’s laser-focused on whatever is happening inside, and I can see the back door ajar, the security there gone, probably rushed in to deal with whatever is happening.
I burst in after him, my throat closing up as I smell the acrid scent of gunpowder. I hear shrieking, the sound of a woman screaming, and another shout, and more gunfire as Viktor pushes me aside, shouting at me to stay put again as he runs towards the living room.
“Luca! Liam! Levin!” I hear him shouting names as I lean against the wall, panic flooding me, and I hear the sound of Sofia’s voice, loud and frightened, and then a scream that makes my blood run cold.
“Anika!”
Someone shouts her name, and there’s a rattle of gunfire again, and a man’s voice loud above everything else, the words a flood of Russian that I don’t understand.
Another shot and a high, thin scream.
A child’s scream.