Page 19 of A Surprise Baby for the Russian

By seven o’clock, the domestic isolation of this place is driving me up the wall. To keep myself from pacing the floorboards like a caged animal, I take over the kitchen, throwing together a basic pasta dish out of the canned tomatoes, some dried herbs, and penne from the pantry. Yakov sits at the table, watching my every move. He’s still shirtless, all the time, the dark Cyrillic script along his left ribs flexing slightly every time he repositions to accommodate the medical sling. If he wasn’t shot, I’d swear to god he’s doing it with the sole purpose of driving me crazy.

I slide a heavy porcelain bowl of steaming pasta in front of him, dropping a fork down beside it with a loud clack against the wood.

“Eat,” I instruct, sitting across from him, pulling my own plate close. “And don’t complain about the lack of fresh basil.”

Yakov picks up his fork with his left hand, his movements slightly awkward but controlled as he stabs at the pasta. “We’re currently hiding from my father and your brothers in a safe house, Raya.” A slow, lazy grin spreads across his face. “I think I can handle a lack of fresh herbs. My culinary standards adjust to the threat level.”

“Good. Because if you criticize my sauce, I’ll take that sling off and strangle you with it, okay?”

“Hmm, I might enjoy that,” he chuckles, taking a bite. He chews slowly, watching me across the small table. “It’s actually good. Where did a Volkov princess learn to manipulate garlic this well?”

“Hardly a princess, Yakov. Everyone in the family can cook. If we ever have a drink, Sofie and I sneak into the kitchen and make a midnight feast out of leftover steak and stolen vodka. Feeding the hangover, Sofie calls it, so it’ll go easier on us in the morning.”

“Midnight larceny,” Yakov nods sagely, wagging his fork at me in approval. “Highly commendable. My dinners involved a lot more vodka and a lot less fun.”

“I gathered that from the Dostoevsky obsession,” I say, winding a tight cluster of penne around my fork. “You eat like a man who expects someone to pull his plate away at any second.”

His grin drops, a fleeting shadow crossing his eyes before his face locks back down. “Old habits die hard, malysh.”

We eat in charged silence for the next ten minutes, the only sound the scrape of silver against porcelain. But as Yakov leans back in his wooden chair, finishing his portion, I freeze.

There is a small, bright red smudge of tomato pasta sauce sitting underneath his bottom lip. It sits in stark, ridiculous contrast against his hard jawline and the serious shadow of his stubble. It makes him look almost... human.

Before my brain fully registers the madness of the decision, my hand moves across the wooden table. I lean forward, stretching my arm across the space between our plates, and press my hand against his face, smoothing the pad of my thumb directly against his skin.

Yakov goes still. His eyes widen in stunned disbelief as my bare skin makes contact with his mouth. I don’t pull away immediately. I swipe my thumb outward, wiping the red smudge cleanly away from his lip. His skin is hot, the texture of his stubble rough against my palm, and his lips are surprisingly soft beneath my touch. My fingers tingle as my eyes meet his. “You had—” I start, my voice cracking slightly in the quiet room.

“I know,” he says. “Thanks.”

I pull my hand back like I’ve touched a live wire, my thumb burning where his skin met mine. Then, the bastard has the absolute cheek to grin at me. It’s a slow, arrogant smirk that tells me he knows exactly how much that split-second touch unraveled me.

“You’re a menace, Mykros,” I whisper, picking up my fork with trembling fingers and giving my full, aggressive attention to the remaining pasta in front of me.

“I am an injured man receiving excellent spousal care,” he replies, his voice laced with an infuriating satisfaction. “Keep it up, Raya. I’m becoming addicted to your hospitality.”

One week in, I can’t even be bothered with the TV anymore, and the book I brought to bed with me has been open at the same page for half an hour now. “I don’t suppose,” I turn to where he is sitting beside me on his laptop, “that sneaking out to the movies is on the table?

“Nope.”

“Thought not.” I stare at the ceiling. “Do you ever have trouble sleeping? Generally, I mean. Not just—” I gesture vaguely at the sling.

He looks down at his arm; I think he’s considering whether to tell me the truth. “I’ve always struggled,” he eventually admits.

“What do you do?”

“When Yaroslav and I were small, we shared a bedroom. Our father didn’t like it, tried to split us apart even then, but our mother wouldn’t hear of it. She told him that to separate twins was to part two halves of the same soul. That it was a travesty against both God and nature. When it came to her, he’d do anything, so he let it stand. We’d make up stories while we lay there in the dark. Taking turns.”

I turn my whole body and lie on my side facing him, propping my head up on my hand. I find I really want to hear whatever Yakov has to say about his childhood. “What kind of stories?”

“There was one.” Yakov closes his laptop and hands it to me to put on my bedside table, as he can’t reach his on the right, then continues. “We called him The Skin-Stitcher. All our monsters were male, unsurprisingly.” He leans toward me on his left side to carry on. “We spent weeks building him, and even after we’d moved on to other monsters, we’d always revisit him every so often. He existed only because he had stolen the parts he needed from other people while they slept. If he caught you looking at him, he’d take your face, or whatever part of you he wanted next. Yaroslav decided he lived in the crawlspace under the stairs because he was a shit, knowing full well it was our father’s favorite place to lock me in as punishment. I decided he could only walk in the shadows where the floorboards creaked, as there was a particular closet in the basement our father also favored for locking Yaroslav in when it was his turn to be punished. Even then, especially then, he couldn’t bear the thought of us being together.”

He takes a slow, careful breath, his uninjured shoulder shifting against the mattress.

“We gave him all this power,” he continues, “we made him ten feet tall. We made him invincible. We did it because we were terrified, and we needed to feel that we could control that fear. And if we could do it with the scariest thing we could imagine, then we could do it with anything and anyone.”

The silence that follows is thick with the phantom weight of two little boys trapped in a house of horrors. I don’t move. I barely breathe. I’m trying, if I’m brutally honest, not to cry my eyes out.

“But you grow up.” Yakov’s voice takes on a razor-sharp contempt that makes my spine tingle. “You grow up, you look at the creature in the light, and you realize monsters only exist in the mind. The Skin-Stitcher wasn’t real. And my father? He isn’t a god or a ghost. He’s pathetic.”