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“Why not?” Milana demands. “Now, she’s our problem, not Ravil’s.”
“She’s still June’s sister.”
Milana raises her eyebrows and puts down her spent cigar. “Hm.”
I roll my eyes. “I hate when you do that.”
“Do what?” she asks innocently.
“When you ‘Hm’ at me instead of just saying what you’re thinking.”
“Ooh, testy tonight, are we?”
“With good reason. I shouldn’t have killed that motherfucker. He deserved it, but I should have held back,” I growl, reaching for the half-empty glass of whiskey in front of me.
I don’t even want a drink. I just want something that burns going down.
“You should have,” she agrees. “But you were hopped up on testosterone.Tarzan protects Jane, ooh-ooh ah-ah.That kind of thing.”
I drop the whiskey glass down on the table in disgust, ignoring how it sloshes over the rim and onto my hand. “She’s not my woman.”
Milana eyes me with a knowing smile, then shrugs. “Coulda fooled me.”
“This is about the child. The pregnancy. That’s all.”
Milana shifts in her seat, cocking her legs in the opposite direction. She doesn’t say anything, but I can practically feel her thoughts like a hailstorm, peppering me one after the next.
“You really think this baby is the answer?” she asks at last. The room feels stuffy and silent.
“Since I’m not planning on having children and my brother is dead—yes, I think this baby is the answer.”
She eyes me warily. Then her hand flickers towards her stomach like she’s cradling something. I follow the movement before bringing my gaze up to meet her own.
“I never thought I’d want children of my own,” she admits. “When that bastard had me sterilized, I was honestly relieved. Because it meant I would never bear a child that was a product of all that fear and hatred and ugliness. My children would never suffer because they’d simply never be born. A blessing in disguise.”
Her fingers twitch slightly, as though she’s trying to reach for something that’s no longer here. In the end, she just brushes a hand over her face, like she’s trying to brush the sadness from it.
It took her years to drop her mask with me. The mask she wears around men.
“But then again, what did I know?” she asks, meeting my eyes. I’ve never truly seen Milana cry. The closest I’ve come to seeing her that vulnerable is in moments like these, when her eyes get glossy. There’s the promise of tears, but I know I’ll never see them. She’d die before she let them fall.
“I was fourteen years old when he did it to me,” she whispers. “Fourteen years old. It wasn’t until recently that I started feeling a… a stirring.”
She gives me a self-conscious little laugh. I’m not sure which of us it’s meant to fool.
“Sometimes,” she says with a forced smirk, straightening herself up, “I forget I’m still a woman.”
I decide to let her get away with the faked nonchalance. “No one could ever forget that you’re a woman, Milana.”
She smiles tenderly. “You realize that the only time you ever flirt with me is when you’re trying to make me feel better?”
I run my fingertip around the damp edge of my whiskey glass. A high keening sound wails out into the room, ethereal and unsettling. After a while, I stop and fix her with my gaze again. “If you’ve had enough of this life… I wouldn’t hold it against you, Milana. You know that, right?”
She nods. “I know. But this is the only life I know.”
“Then we’ll figure something out. Everything can be fixed one way or another.”
“You don’t have to keep compensating for what happened to me, Kolya,” she tells me softly. “It wasn’t your decision. Or your legacy.”
