Ivan Press

Ivan

Like gravity, she holds him. Lets him spin out to that farthest point, only to arrest, only to return. He tugs her as she tugs him, firmly, the space between diminishing. He wraps his arm around her this time when he kisses her, his body pressing against her knees, her shins,

and then between her thighs and against her torso as she opens for him. She is wearing skirts that seem to be made of a thousand diaphanous layers, rustling softly as they stir. He wraps both arms around her, lifts her, picks her up and shifts her up one step, two, sets her down and comes down over her. Her skirts are everywhere. Her hair is everywhere. His hands are everywhere, grasping at the fabric, sweeping them up, pulling them up in great handfuls, over and over and over until his hand contacts her ankle, her knee, her thighs.

They are on the second-floor landing. The stairs go up another flight, up to the attic where they have their own apartment with its modern furnishings, its stark contrast to the warmth of wood and age. The hall extends both ways -- one room in the front and three in the back. The doors are open. The inhabitants are gone. The lamps are off. The house is silent,

filled only by the hush of their breathing, the soft sound their mouths make. He is kissing her with a quietly desperate fervor: like she was lost for ages, lost at the bottom of an ocean, and he has only now found her again. He is kissing her as he rucks up her skirts and spreads hands over her skin; as he pulls her neckline awry and pulls down her bra to get at her breasts. He is hungry, starved, eating at her mouth and eating at her breasts,

pausing to press his face to her breastbone, kiss her there too; close his eyes and breathe her in, the smell and purity of her.

"I love you," he whispers; says it like an incantation as he swims through her clothes and discovers her skin. "I love you. I love you, Hilary. I love you."

Of course her hair isn't everywhere, Ivan you mad thing. It's bound up neatly, tightly, smoothly, sleek as a if she were on stage. It will not stay that way. Not with Ivan leaning over her, kneeling down to her, pressing to her, shifting her clothing out of his way, moving her body to -- literally -- the nearest flat surface available to them. Not with the way he likes to pull at her, destroy her, scatter her finery and her fineness across the floor.

Hilary spreads her legs for him. The way she's sitting, her knees are together. She's perched so elegantly on those steps. But she pulls him, and he comes, and covers, and as his body presses to hers she opens those thighs, hands grasping at him, pulling him between her legs, urging him there, there, home, there. When he lifts her and sets her down again she is already starting to lean back, lie back, lifting her hips as he pushes her skirts up so he can get to the slip of underwear beneath, hooking his fingers under it or running his hands over it.

And she is reaching for him, pulling his shirt from where it is tucked in, dragging it over his skin, finding the flesh of his lower back and running her palms up. At the touch of him she's gasping in his ear, head tilted back. He's so warm. He's always so warm, and she does not always take a moment, even one, to revel in the simplicity of that pleasure.

That gasp is truncated; Ivan is kissing her again, ardent and ravenous. She moans instead; her fingers curl and her nails drag down his back, harder than they should but gently, oh: so gently, for someone like her. She presses herself to his body, lifting her hips again, closing what distance there is between them. He fights with the dual, crossing layers of her sweater, pulls at the neckline of her camisole, stretches everything out brutally to get at her breasts. One, then the other, her arms nearly trapped at her sides and now her hands resting on his waist, and he is touching her and sucking at her, ferocious.

Hilary clenches, deep inside. Ivan may as well be rolling in her scent the way he is now, rubbing his face and his hands on her, rubbing his body against her, covering himself in her. She knows, is intimately and instantly aware, that they haven't done this for weeks. She doesn't know how many; it may be just two, for all she knows. But she hasn't let him touch her since the day he had her followed, and that was

quite some time ago.

She is panting. She is pleading, in a whisper:

"Make me yours again, Ivan,"

and whatever else she's said, she means it.

At least for now.

He loves the way she breathes when she's like this. When he's mauling her like this. He loves the way she gasps, he loves the way she pants, he loves the shudder on the edge of her breath and the moans just underneath. She wants him to make her his again,

at least for now,

and his response is instantaneous and instinctive. He sinks his teeth into her. He bites her shoulder, firmly, seizing soft skin between his hard teeth. He growls: no mistake about it. It's a primitive, feral sound, on the edge of violence, even though

god,

he wants to be gentle, he wants to be soft and slow and ever so sweet to her.

Sometimes he likes her arms pinned while he fucks her. Sometimes he likes to turn her on her stomach, pull her wrists behind her, push her into the mattress while he pounds her. Right now he doesn't want that. Right now -- he rears up suddenly, leaving her nipples wet, leaving the imprint of his teeth in her shoulder. He tears his shirt off. Soft, long-sleeved, a pullover, it rises to bare his lean torso; those long supple muscles and bones. The shirt falls aside, a rumpled heap. He grasps her and pulls her up and pulls her sweater up, up, up the other way, yanking it, tugging it, heaving it loose and whipping it out behind him. It drapes down the stairs. He returns to her, cupping her face between his hands, drinking from her mouth like he can't breathe without her, and now her hands are free, now she can wrap her arms around his neck or scratch her nails down his back, whatever she wants, anything she wants. He wants for her anything she could possibly want.

"My beautiful girl," he mutters, kissing her. Slows, slows: smooths her hair back. Cups her breast, those lovely handfuls, that softness beneath which her pulse beats like a trapped thing. He bends his head. He kisses her upon her breast, while his left hand deftly, precisely works the fastenings of his pants open. "My krasivaya devushka. Ty tsentrom mira. Ya razvalitsya bez tebya."

He enters her smoothly, deeply, shudders when he pauses to collect himself. He wraps his arms around her, tightly. She is very precious to him, after all. He holds her close to his body, their bare heartbeats pressed together, their lower bodies still entangled in all manner of ridiculous human trappings. He is kissing her, and he is muttering in her ear, and it is all in russian, and she understands so little of it, but

he is murmuring words of love, words of adoration, words of praise. He is saying again and again: mine, mine, mine.

[Russian: "My beautiful girl. You're the center of my world. I'd fall apart without you."]

Somehow she knows that he isn't going to bind her this morning. She knows he isn't going to grasp her wrists and pin her down. That is not what he wants. She knows, like a lightning bolt briefly illuminating the black and darkened heath of her mind, that he wants to have her, own her, take her,

and also wants her to love him, and forgive him, and accept him, and be as pleased with him as she longs for him to be pleased with her.

Hilary knows, and the knowledge troubles her but she clings to it anyway, soothed the way she is often soothed by disturbing things. She is bitten, hard, and the pain of it makes her cry out suddenly, soaring and aching and pleading. That will mark her. That will stay, and bruise where even his flat human teeth dug in, and that sends her to heights she had almost forgotten. She clutches at him, nails digging into his waist. She imagines him tearing her apart with his hands and teeth, claws and fangs. She opens her mouth and pants her breath out, arching for him.

Ivan, seconds later, lifts up over her. Hilary is askew: her crossover sweater draping off one shoulder, her camisole beneath yanked down to bare her breasts, her nipples pink from his savaging. Her perfect bun is even starting to look a little loose, a little lopsided, a little frayed. She looks up at him, ripping his clothes off like that, and her pupils opening. She is sitting up to him, lifting her body with her hands on his body, running her tongue up his midsection, playing homage, giving worship. Ivan, more practical than a god, unwinds her from that narrow, thin sweater, if he can manage it: tugging and pulling won't serve him much here. Anyway, it falls.

They lower themselves back to the floorboards, and her legs wrap around him. He's over her again, kissing her, playing with her breasts, stroking her hair, kissing her flesh. It's like a magician's act, all the soft things while he unfastens his slacks, undoes his belt. Hilary knows, though. She knows they are one and the same: the patter is the same as the trick. It's all the way that he adores her, wants her. She whimpers for it, not understanding a single word he says other than those first two. She tries to catch the others but they drop around her ears, drip to the ground. She writhes a little, her clothing pushed up and pulled down and Ivan's fingers working at her panties, tugging them aside so he can fuck her.

Hilary gasps, a sharp and deep intake of breath, when he slides into her. She grabs at his upper arms, clenching around him in those same seconds while he is trying to remember his name. Her teeth bite into her lower lip; her eyes are closed, have been closed for a little while now. She is lost, for a little while. She is feeling him on top of her, feeling how heavy he is, feeling how hard he is. She is being kissed, so softly, while he is fucking her now, fucking her to the tune of mine, mine, mine, to endearments she can't understand, to acts so primitive she can't help but understand them. The way he is with her now, the way he takes her. The way her shoulderblades and her hips move against the hardwood. The way he grasps at her, her body or her hair or her face. The way she aches, so tightly, and the way it wells up in her, making her eyes wet, making her whimper a half-sob.

If anyone were to walk in on them now they would not think any of this was okay. To know that she left him, or that he left her, to know that she came here only to take her son away from him, to know that he was threatening her servant-kin outside, and then:

to see him fucking her like this, both of them half-clothed and her clothing half-torn off of her. To see her weeping, body shifting slightly again and again on the floor in time with Ivan's thrusting. They would not understand, to look at the weeping woman with the bite mark on her skin, that she was so scared. That those tears are relief.

Maybe it's fucked up that she cries when he fucks her. Maybe it's fucked up that he never stops when she starts crying. That sometimes it just makes him fuck her harder. Hit her more. Tie her tighter, cover her mouth, call her hair-raising names. That sometimes he uses her tears as a sort of metric, a sign that he's taken her there, he's broken her down, she's open and raw and she feels, she feels, the words coming out of her mouth are finally unadulterated truth.

He never stops,

except,

today he does stop. He is fucking her, and she is weeping, and she is clutching at him and holding him like maybe if she doesn't he'll disappear, he'll insubstantiate. He is fucking her and biting her and kissing her and she is just

taking him, dissolving into some strange tearful emotion he can't even understand. They are half-clothed. They are half-wild. They are half-human at best, but that part of him that is human, and humane, and maybe even a little sane compels him to stop this time. Pauses; joined with her still, his weight and all that sinewy lean strength of his atop her. He kisses her. He kisses her mouth and her face and her neck. He kisses her again and again, so softly, nuzzling her; stroking her hair until the strands start to come undone from that once-perfect ballerina's bun.

"Why are you crying?" he whispers. "Why do you cry when we make love?"

The sick thing is that he's right.

He fucks her until she cries; he fucks her harder, then. Slaps soft, tender skin until she's screaming, until she's red, until she's sobbing and shrieking against his covering palm while he holds her down, thrusts into her. It's sick. But what's worse is that it's all true: she's there. She's with him. And she can feel everything, including love, including tenderness, and she can tell him the truth.

Hilary clings to Ivan, who is not striking her or hurting her, just fucking her now, kissing her so savagely, biting her sometimes. She holds onto him, and he pauses. It isn't a slow stop, just a pause, his body in her body, his arms and his mouth enfolding her, cradling her, keeping her from falling down the stairs.

She shivers, because he stopped. She shudders beneath him.

Her eyes, reddened, open. Her head turns so she can see him.

"Because I missed you," she tells him, answering the first. She has no answer for the second.

Their faces are close together. He brooks no distance between them. He is on his elbows over her; his biceps against her sides, his forearms under her shoulders, his hands in her hair, cradling her head. He looks at her -- wet eyes, soft mouth. His eyes darken with some nameless emotion of his own. He closes what little space there is and he nuzzles her again, very gently, very delicately, the tip of his nose against hers, tracing over her cheek, his mouth pressing kisses like secrets into the corner of her mouth. The line of her jaw.

"I missed you too," he whispers, barely audibly.

And moves again. Slow, slow, steady, smooth. He draws back and rocks into her, wraps his arms around her, buries his face against the curve of her shoulder, her neck. She hears her name. She feels him kiss the side of her neck, and then

his teeth gripping her again, not so hard as before. His hand pushing into her hair. He grips her there, too, and god their love is sick but it is love, the way he holds her by the hair is loving, it truly is: and god knows what anyone seeing them now would think, but they don't care. They never cared what other people might think of their relationship. Their love. Their obsession. It is at once their strength and their blindness, their weakness.

Long ago, or what feels like long ago, he used to try and pry her open. Demanded answers where there were none, emotions where she had only emptiness, explanations to things that she gave up trying to make sense of a long time ago. And she got so angry at him, finally, so fed up and so wrecked and exhausted. Ivan relented, but that doesn't mean he gave up. He found other ways of understanding her. She came, ultimately, to trust him.

Some of the things she has told him make him understand, now, why she keeps everything out. Why she looks away from even herself, looking only into oblivion rather than live with what is inside her.

Now, when he could drag so much from her, learn so much, he doesn't want to. He doesn't insist she answer him: why does she weep? Why does she ever weep when they are making love? He only tells her what is true, and begins to move again. She chokes on a sound, a sob, a cry, lifting her arms and holding him by the head, the back of the neck, arms around him, legs around him, not quite happy but not cold any longer. And that does matter. That does make a difference.

--

Their coupling at the top of the stairs is quick, all things told. It is a little rough, Hilary's body pressed hard against the wooden floors of the old but refurbished house. They sweat a little, though the house is cool. Her hair is mussed beyond reckoning, almost. But there is more to it than what goes where, who is on top or bottom, where he bites her or how she holds him.

Something in it is so tender. Because her tears do stop. She is overcome from within by something else, growing and burning and rising upward. It heats her skin, dries her tears. She tips her head back, gasping, as Ivan pushes her thighs higher up, snarls to her to wrap her legs around him, tighter, hold him. Lilting, panting French shivers from her tongue as he growls, chasing down his pleasure in her like a beast harrying its prey. Which is closer to the truth than most things that could be said of the two of them.

This, too, is tender: the way he holds her, holds her so very close to him, his hands on her arms, his mouth on her shoulder, her neck, kissing her mouth, kissing her heartbeat, nipping at her breasts with low, caught groans echoing against his parted teeth.

No saying, really, who comes when or how or what it feels like. Only that they do please each other, as they almost always please each other, as they have ever pleased each other. He with his young, hard body, his rough attentions. She with her fair skin, her long legs, her soft breasts, her plaintive submission,

her secret savagery.

Somewhere in there, the door downstairs opens. There is a beat, only, and it closes again, the servant who was entering quickly showing themselves out again.

--

Hilary is a mess now. Her clothing is shucked, to some degree. She is wet between her legs, sticky, though he is still inside of her. Her bun is fallen, lopsided, pins still stuck in it. She is red-cheeked, red-breasted, looking up at him as she trembles. There are salt-tracks on her cheeks, almost invisible now. Her eyes gleam, wetly, ass he looks at him.

She wants to tell him that she thinks her baby is here. Her son. She is afraid to tell him. She is afraid he will ask her how she knows.

She is afraid of the fact that she just knows.

It's like they can't help but make a mess of each other. It's like they can't help making a mess wherever they go: of clothes, of houses, of other people's lives.

Their clothes are strewn over the stairs. He's ruined that sleek bun of hers. She's left marks on his back, and he's left marks on her shoulder. Her tears still shine on her face, dried and near-invisible, there only if you know where and how to look. There only if you can taste it, as Ivan does, kissing her beneath her eyes.

He keeps kissing her. He kisses her where he can reach her, here and there and over and over. He lays over her and cups her face between his hands and kisses her in this slow, adoring, patient way. He covers her breast with his hand and he is still kissing her like he is learning her with his lips, her taste: the inside of her arm. The dip of her throat. The seam of her lips.

--

People are here. Carlisle still waiting outside in the car is joined by Miranda and Miron, pulling up alongside. None of Ivan's people are here; only Hilary's. Even Miron is Hilary's now, by his own choice, and before that he was technically Anton's. He gets out, the baby held comfortably and easily against his side.

They look at the house, the servants. They wait for their mad mistress and her mad paramour to finish with each other. They wait for those breathless gasps, those moans, those growls, the inevitable rhythm of their coupling, to cease. They wait for those well-born Fangs to break themselves apart and put themselves together and show themselves and give instruction the way they do, with utter and thoughtless entitlement.

They know neither Hilary nor Ivan will explain a thing -- not the reasoning, not the rhyme. They know they are not privy to the secret machinations of their betters. Need to know, see. They know it's better that way.

--

Gradually he subsides. Gradually he shifts to the side, gives her room to move and breathe. He lays beside her, stretched out on that hard floor, feet hanging over the stairs. He doesn't want to move. His eyes are open and he watches her ceaselessly, tirelessly, pausing only to blink these slow animal blinks from time to time. Thinks perhaps she will fade, and he will wake into a nightmare, if he moves.

"Ya ne mogu zhit bez tebya," he whispers, watching her still. They are words she has spoken to him, but not with his fluency. Not with his familiarity. And a moment later, in a different language: "I can't live without you."

Anton keeps wanting to get down. He is home and no one is going inside, where his toys and snacks are. Eventually he is permitted. He toddles around the yard, inspecting hedges, following bugs. He talks, jabberingly, to Miron about everything. He is a talkative boy. He is curious.

There is no trace of what shape his madness will eventually take, only the clarity of his mother's breeding, his father's blood, in the shape of his nose and the color of his eyes. That perfection will bring a cost. A heavy one.

--

When Ivan slides out of her she is a mess. She exhales. All he did was pull her underwear aside, and now it is sticky as the rest of her. She is dazed, reaching up to her mussed hair as he lays out and as she slowly sits up. Her fingertips take hold of the edge of a pin, sliding it out of her hair. There are others. She drops them, one by one, methodical and mindless, until her hair starts to fall, fall, until she unwinds the elastic. She is disheveled then, though not in that lazy, natural way he likes. Just messy.

Hilary's shoulders are tense. She starts to reach, to lift the strap of her camisole, but it makes her shiver.

He is staring at her, and cannot miss the vulnerability in her body, the sudden terror at the state she must be in, the act of re-clothing herself. She shakes, and startles when he speaks. Hilary looks at him, without responding. She just sees him, anew, and her lip begins to tremble. She can't.

As good as she sometimes tries to be and wishes she is, she cannot escape her madness. Her endlesss, relentless terror.

Ivan doesn't sit up. Not yet. His brow furrows, though, and he turns slowly onto his back. Even in that there is a grace, a fluidity of flesh and bone that is his birthright. From Falcon; from Luna; from his blood and his lineage, which despite his family's indiscriminate and mercenary matings still stretch back into the mists of antiquity.

He looks at her, sitting, reaching, shaking. She looks at him; in her eyes, the look of a trapped thing. He raises his hand, and he does it slowly, so that she can see every motion. The prelude of every motion, even, in the way his muscles move, the way his tendons tense.

And he settles his hand on her back. He touches her as lightly as one might a wounded animal, a startled wild thing. He touches her, he strokes her, he murmurs some wordless sound of hushing.

"What are you afraid of?" he whispers.

"I don't want to be naked," she says, tight but not whimpering. "Ivan, please."

So he does sit up, then. And he is most of the way naked as well, his pants somewhere down his legs, his shirt ... somewhere, period. It is reflexive to reach out, to put his arm around her, to draw her fiercely and silently against his side. He shelters her with his body. He would shelter her even if the sky were falling.

Even if all the stars go out.

Even if all the world vanishes.

"Okay." He presses a hard kiss to her temple. "Okay. Wait here." And he lets her go, gets up, pulls his pants quickly and ruthlessly up -- nevermind the mess -- goes down the stairs picking up their clothes as he goes. His shirt, her sweater. Her bra. He comes back up, handing her that criss-crossed garment of hers; wrapping his shirt around her overtop for good measure.

"You have some things upstairs," he reminds her. They went shopping the last time they were here, after all. "Should I draw you a bath?"

Some of their clothes are down the stairs, draped as though they were falling once, and the people within them vanished. Ghosts. Gone.

Hilary shivers. She doesn't mind Ivan being naked, pants around his knees. She minds that her breasts are bared, that her panties are askew, her skirts rumpled, her hair a mess, and she does not seem to be able to stop trembling to put herself back together, and something about putting herself back together makes her want to wail. She exhales, drawn to his side, curling so that her chest is covered, her legs tucked together, her face hidden.

And he kisses her, after a long, hard moment. Kisses her, and she yelps a little when he leaves her, covering her chest with crossed arms. He brings her the sweater he pulled from her, leaving her camisole around her waist, handing her things. Hilary, helpless, looks up at him.

Ivan offers a bath and she exhales, nodding. Tension floods out of her, suddenly, unexpectedly. It will not be bad to be naked then, getting clean. She nods again, but is still curled in on herself while he wraps her sweater around her, arms out of the sleeves. Covers her with his shirt as well. She closes her eyes, trying to hold on to that sensation of the anxiety leaving her, gone.

"Just a little one," she says, and stating something decisively, preferentially, seems to solidify her a little. "Just a short bath. I want to be able to hold Anton while we talk to Miron." She looks up at Ivan again, opening her eyes. "They're here," she tells Ivan quietly. "Anton's here."

Which means the others must be, too.

Ivan stills for a moment.

"I know." His voice is as quiet as hers. His eyes meet hers for a moment. Then he holds his hand out to her.

"Come on," he urges. "Let's wash. And then we'll talk to Miron."

--

For the first time in months, the attic apartment is opened. There are dustcovers on the bed, the furnishings. The pipes clank in the walls when Ivan runs the faucet. He lets the water run for a minute or so before stopping up the tub, letting it fill. And downstairs, Miron's cellphone buzzes in his pocket. He sees who it is and hesitates; then answers.

The blast of water is a backdrop to Ivan's voice: "Take Anton inside and get him something to eat. We'll be down in half an hour, and we'll want to talk to you about our son."

Miron thinks for a brief, flashing, rebellious moment that these people hardly deserve to call Anton their son. That Anton would be better off if his mother had stayed dead and his father had stayed on the other side of the world. That he does not understand these people, and never will, and has very little to say to them at all.

He swallows it. He answers, "Yes, sir." And he waits until Ivan hangs up, and then puts his phone away.

Something, dark and aching, moves in her eyes when he tells her that. Hilary just watches him. And as he holds out his hand she takes it, unfolding, unfurling, rising to him.

--

In the attic apartment she looks around, feeling like they are coming back from the dead. She aches inside, twisting, wanting Ivan to slowly and gently undress her, wanting him to move her about like a puppet or a doll, but a small part of her feels she has somehow lost the right to that. It makes her very sad. She also wonders, somewhere in that echo chamber of her thoughts, if that's what she wants, despite it all: to be a doll, to be dressed and undressed, to be bathed, to be cared for like she is a mute animal, a child, something weak and weary and mindless.

It gives her a skull-splitting headache, trying to understand. In the end she just stands there, holding sweaters around her body, skirts fallen again around her legs, while Ivan calls Miron. That makes her look up, taking cold fingers from her brow, looking at him while he fills the tub and while he tells Miron what to do. When the phone is tapped off, Ivan will find her looking at him.

There is a strange, dark clarity in her eyes.

Slowly, as though stiff, she unwinds the clothing from her body. She lets it fall, and removes her skirt, stepping out of it in panties and boots. Her camisole is dropped as well, a dark stain atop the diaphanous cream of the skirts. She stands there and tips her head, beginning to remove her earrings, her rings, her bangles. She swallows, staring into the distance like a normal woman, a sane woman who isn't overthinking anything, just undressing, and then wiggles one, then her second foot out of their boots.

Hilary is wearing little socks, too. She exhales, dropping jewelry atop clothing, stripping down to nothing. And when she has, she comes to him, and puts her hands on his waist, kissing his mouth. It's very soft. Her eyes are open, and are watching him when her lips withdraw. Her hands rest where they are.

"I'm going to take a bath now," she says, slow and quiet and careful. "Are you joining me?"

When Ivan sets his phone on the bathroom counter, an uncertainty settles over the moment. Hilary is standing there. She is looking at him, and he looks back at her. Their eyes are very naked. He feels very naked, down to the moorings of his soul.

He wonders if she wants him to undress her. To move her about like a puppet or a doll. To undo this and peel back that; to take her down to skin and bone and blood and flesh. To lift her in his arms and set her in the water where she can be cleansed again, returned to the way she was. Baptized; reborn.

He wonders if he has lost the right.

After a while, she moves. She begins to undress herself. One and then another, her garments fall. He watches even after she looks away. Sees the motion of her throat. The gentle lift of her breasts when she lifts her arms. The subtle softness of breast, stomach, thigh; all the places where their intrinsic nature differs most. When she is naked, when even her jewelry is glittering amidst the clothes, she comes to him. His hands match hers. They hold each other gently, familiarly, with hands that know one another's bodies. His eyes are open too. He kisses her with a low, banked fire in his pupils, an ache on his brow.

"Of course I'm joining you," he says softly, tenderly, when she draws away. He undoes his pants, lets them fall; steps out of socks and shoes. All the while her hands stay on him if they wish -- feel the pattern of his motion beneath his skin. He finds her fingers with his when he's done, and he laces them together.

She steps into the tub ahead of him. He follows, sinking into warm water.

So, she says, she will bathe. And he is invited directly to join, or requested, or -- simply asked if he is going to, which is a subtler way of asking if he wants to. This is nothing she has ever done before. Even confessing to Ivan that she wanted him to fuck her, that night she let Oliver do what he did to her, was hard for her. Whispered, like a secret. She likes to pretend that she has no will, no wishes of her own. She likes to hide inside of Ivan's desire for her, where she is simple and perfect and cannot be displeased or disappointed or distressed. She likes, or has liked, to be a vessel for someone else's wanting.

Something is changing in her. And despite her anxiety, visible and trembling, she walks with him to the attic bedroom. She undresses herself, very quickly and not very seductively, distancing herself from the act of disrobing under her own power without entirely letting go of what is built between them when they fuck. Make love. Whatever it is. This work is terribly difficult, though; it takes all of Hilary's concentration to maintain that tenuous bond without submission so utter, so entire, that she vanishes into it even as it reveals her.

Ivan touches her. And Ivan goes with her to the bath, helping her step over the side and sit down so she doesn't slip. She has such elegance then, such regal carriage, the way she rests her hand in his and permits him to serve her. Such grace, when she lowers herself into the hot water. Such

tender, aching need, when he slides in behind her. Hilary is curling into his chest almost before he can settle himself into the bath with her, reaching for his arms to pull them around her. She almost makes a noise while doing so, plaintive and eager, but she swallows it, burying her face against his bicep, inhaling the scent of sex and sweat he acquired out on the landing.

--

Downstairs, servants are entering. Anton is starting to toddle around, looking to make sure everything he left in his house is still there where he left it last night. He doesn't much remember last night; he has never woken up in the morning anywhere but his own house, so everything is Very Exciting right now. He has been on a long journey. He must ensure that his den is still his.

Miron watches him, but goes to prepare some sort of lunch. This is really what Izolda does, and Elodie -- but he knows how to feed his charge. Whatever Anton needs, isn't that his purpose? Isn't that why he's here?

Miranda sits in the car outside, on her phone, communicating not only with Darya but with the US, the wealth management firm she's conscripted to grow Hilary's money, the people looking for more permanent lodging for their clan -- because now she is not sure, entirely, if they will or won't need a place with an extra wing for the boy and his servants.

Carlisle waits outside, standing beside the other car still, hands folded, watching the house.

--

In the apartment, upstairs, Hilary is not sure if she wants to fuck again or if she wants to simply be held or if she can stand her own skin. She is not shivering as much, due to the heat of the water and her lover, but she is touching his sides and she has half-turned in the bath to be closer to him, and she kisses his chest and his arm and his shoulder, his neck, panting softly, but that uncertainty almost vibrates off of her. She does not know what she wants, or wants too many things to choose. She is unsettled, animalistic, touching Ivan's face with her wet palms and kissing him, kissing him, each one a plea,

though, if he listens to her body under his own hands, not a plea for sex. Not in the end.

Ivan is a little surprised when Hilary clings to him like that. He wraps his arms around her even as she's pulling them into place. The water is warm, on the edge of hot, but never so much that it would scald her skin. Give him this much: he is careful with her when they're like this. He tries, he does try, and so very hard sometimes, to take care of her.

He tries hard enough that sometimes he even understands her again. Sometimes he can even tell the difference between need and lust. And so, kissed, touched, curled into like that, he wraps his arms around her tighter. Holds her still and holds her firm, fixes her against his body, surrounded as they are by the water.

"Shh," he whispers to her. "I'm here now. We're here together. We're still here, and it will be all right. We will make it all right, Hilary. With Anton, with each other, all of it."

That is what she wants. What she needs. When he holds her, firmly and solidly, and keeps her still against his chest. And she is so grateful, again, so relieved, that she shudders, finally coming to rest her brow against the cradle of his neck and shoulder. Her hair, only wet at the ends, drifts in the water and falls to shield her face from view. It muffles his voice, which resonates through her fingertips and breasts where she holds him and is held by him.

Like this, she can believe that it will be all right. They will be, Anton will be, everything will be all right. She breathes in deeply, exhaling slowly, trusting. She begins to relax, slowly, her joints and muscles unwinding until she is soft, until she is pliant, resting against him. She calms, and that is all it takes: one would think she'd learn, when so quickly reassured, that there is no need for her anxiety to trip over into terror, no need for her uncertainty to become panic. That, in fact, inhabiting her own body the way she does is not something that must leave her so vulnerable, so frightened, so helpless, by default.

Hilary has had decades to learn, and has not learned. May never learn. But given a look back into those first years, and the ones that followed, few would say that she has no justification for being so filled with fears as she is.

--

She does relax with him. She turns a bit more, resting her back against his chest, closing her eyes. She breathes a little, opens them again. Her arms unfold, after a while, and lift to the sides of the tub, fingertips draped off those sides. She is still, for a bit, until she remembers: just a small bath. A short one. Anton is downstairs, and when she is quiet in her own mind she can almost hear them in the house below. They need to sort out what to do about him. And thinking this gives her a little furrow to her brow, a consideration.

After a while, if Ivan has not already, Hilary reaches for the body wash sitting in the basket with sponges and the like.

Everything about this is different. Everything, from the prelude to the undressing to the way she clung to him to the way he takes care of her.

Ivan doesn't wash his lover. He doesn't wet the sponge, he doesn't scrub soap into suds. He doesn't cleanse her, inch by inch, limb by limb. He doesn't rub the tension from her back, kneading her spine loose with his thumbs the way he's learned to after all this time.

He just holds her. He holds her, and she relaxes, and he does too, and the two of them: they drift. They let the water warm them. They let the warmth suffuse them, relax them. After a while Ivan thinks of that day in the late spring, when the two of them came here together. He thinks of how he rowed them out onto the lake in that little boat, and how he held the umbrella open so Hilary could lie in the shade. Lying in the tub with Hilary now, Ivan stirs under the water -- threads his fingers through hers, wraps both their arms around her waist.

--

She reaches for the body wash. His eyes open. He watches her and he doesn't stop her. When she takes that little bottle, when she uncaps it, he cups water in his palm and sluices it over her shoulders. Leans around to kiss her temple. Looses his arms a little, giving her room to wash herself in the shelter of his half-embrace.

He doesn't say a thing. He doesn't remark on how unusual this is. He watches. He thinks maybe he understands.

It happened so naturally, the first time. He fell into ravaging her so easily that it disturbed him. He cared for her so effortlessly in the aftermath, and she didn't know what to do with herself. So much, between them, has simply been an expression of their nature.

It must mean that not everything in them is terrible, wrong, bad, and broken. That his instinct is to take care of her; that her instinct is to trust him. Not everything, Hilary thinks. She takes a sponge and carefully pours some of that creamy, lightly perfumed body wash onto it. Her eyes briefly close and she sighs when he pours water over her, leans forward to kiss her, and then she begins to wash. Her arms. Her breasts. Her stomach. She covers herself in lather, then twists slightly, looking over her shoulder, holding the sudsing sponge towards Ivan.

He is still with her.

See: she can care for herself, and still want him to care for her.

Until that moment, Ivan was uncertain if she still wanted him to bathe her. If she still wanted him, sometimes, to care for her, to be gentle with her, to treat her like as precious and rare as she is. Until that moment, he is simply holding her, accepting her,

aching a little inside for the loss of some small part of what has become a ritual.

But then: she turns in the circle of his arms. She hands him that sponge. He looks from the sponge to her hand to her, something soft-dawning in his eyes. His hands are so deft, so precise, and his fingers gather hers up, sponge and all. He kisses her fingertips as he takes the soapy implement from her. He kisses her shoulder, and the truth is he has soap on his lips now, but that's all right. With gentle hands he urges her to sit up, lean forward, lean her elbows on his knees if she likes. He sluices water over her back with one hand, soaps her with the other.

Neither of them say a thing. Neither of them remark on the silent significance of these rituals, these transactions, what changes, what stays the same.

Until that moment, they were both unsure of this.

But Hilary does turn to him, unwilling -- certainly not unable, as he knows, as he has personally searched for the limits of her flexibility and not quite found them yet -- to wash her own back. She holds the sponge out to him, not knowing he was aching, not knowing he felt a loss or feared a loss as she did. There is a hope, a request, in that offering, as much the demand that rests like lace atop the rest of her feeling.

Ivan takes it. Something changes in his eyes and, absurdly, he kisses her through the soap on her fingers, on her shoulder. Hilary huffs a breath outward, murmuring so quietly:

"Stupide petit faucon," which he doesn't need to know French to understand. She says it with strange tenderness. Fondness, even.

Hilary reaches into the water, sudsy as it is in spots, and cups water in her palm. She reaches, turning, brushing the soap from his lips with her own fingers, pouring water over his closed mouth to rinse him clean. And as she does, she leans toward him, nuzzling under his chin, kissing a drop of water as it rolls off his jawline.

Then she turns, obedient and willing, leaning forward. Her hair drapes past her cheeks, falls more into the water, as Ivan washes her back. She exhales slowly, sighing. No, neither of them remark; Hilary would not know what to say. How to name it. It is, perhaps, better that she doesn't try.

Ivan laughs softly as he is called stupide. He keeps still for her, his eyes flickering down to her fingertips, as she brushes soap-suds from his mouth. Pours water to cleanse him. He tips his head back too, eyes closed, trusting and enjoying, as she kisses him where his lifesblood flows so near the surface.

She is turning as he lowers his chin, opens his eyes. His hand has grown lax, forgetful, but it tightens now again around that sponge. He bends to his task, diligent and careful and tender, cupping water over her back, soaping, cupping water again, and then abandoning the sponge to float atop the bathwater as he uses his hands instead.

He kneads her back, the same as he always does. He rubs tension from her sleek muscles, rubs his palms over her back to feel her slenderness, her strength. He wonders, sometimes, if she knows how beautiful, how perfect he finds her. One can hardly fault him for seeing her perfection more than her flaws; wouldn't anyone?

He does see her flaws, though. He sees her changes, too; her strange moods, her altering mind. That is more than anyone else can say. That alone would make him unique.

His wet hands slide around her after a while. He pulls her back against his chest, exhaling like a sigh. His jaw rubs against her temple. He sinks into dissolving warmth with her again -- never minding the tick-tick-tick of time.

It has been a long, long time since she has called him her little falcon. It's such a fond term of endearment, but it hasn't crossed her lips in ages. Even with his foolishness teased as part of it, the words hold deep significance. They carry forgiveness. They carry acceptance. They carry something that both of them thought, even an hour ago, wasn't possible. Not ever again.

How quickly they change. Their moods, their goals, what they can put up with. What they feel for each other.

--

She is not expecting the backrub. It makes her breath catch a little, but she closes her eyes and gives in to it, washed and massaged and taken care of. She does not think of how he sees her, beautiful or perfect. She thinks of the warm water, her undone hair, his hands on her back. She thinks of her breathing, as it steadies.

She thinks, idly, of his body as he draws her back to him, as she lays against him, her breasts and upper chest bared to the air. Hilary blindly wraps his arms around her there to cover her, warm her. And for a while, all they do is drowse, as the water cools.

--

Eventually they let it drain. Eventually they rise and rinse off. Hilary lets all of her hair get wet. She moves efficiently then, after they've stood up: when the water turns off, she steps out of the tub first, reaching for a towel and a robe. She even begins to dry herself off right away, without waiting for Ivan. She isn't cold, distant, ignoring him, but she isn't nuzzling him and hugging him and waiting for him to treat her like a child either. It's very strange. All of this is very strange.

Ivan, in a rare chance, gets to see Hilary dress herself. Sees her search for clothes and put them on, clean underwear and bra that were left here, then dark blue slacks, then a sweater the color of oatmeal. He gets to watch her stare at the bathroom mirror, her eyes piercing as knives, determined, as she combs and then twists and pins her hair into a lower bun at the nape of her neck, where its wetness matters less. Hilary, of course, has jewelry here: she puts on a light gold chain of a necklace, a gold bangle dotted with pearls, a pair of earrings with a gold setting, diamond studs, pearl drops. She even, in the little clutch she carried, has lipstick to darken her mouth a touch, mascara to illuminate her lashes.

Perhaps it is shocking that she can do any of this without Darya. Perhaps it is merely shocking to see her doing it, rapid and thoughtless, her fingers dancing as she prepares herself. Finds thin trouser socks and rolls them on; finds shoes and slides her feet into them. She looks casual, and almost businesslike, and yet still elegant, still regal. Only after she is satisfied does she look to see where Ivan is, what he is doing, if he's dressed himself so they can go see to Miron and Anton.

They live their lives in such luxury that it's almost shocking to remember they are not helpless or wholly devoid of survival skills. Ivan in particularly sometimes has a hard time remembering that once upon a time Hilary was not waited on hand and foot. Once upon a time, Hilary was quite alone, rather destitute, surviving on the dwindling remnants of an evaporated family fortune. She can dress herself. She can feed herself. She can survive

without him.

So it is with Ivan as well. Without his attendants, without a silent valet to pick out his clothes and do up his tie, shave his jaw, fasten his cufflinks, he likewise manages. Truth is, he dresses himself more often than not, even at home. He's vain like that, and distrustful of Dmitri's dubious sense of style.

He pulls dark jeans off a hanger. Pairs it with a thin sweater, quarter-zip at the collar. Doesn't wear socks at all, or even shoes. This is his house, after all. This is, he supposes, his den. It takes him a shorter time to dress than it does Hilary, and so when she looks to him, she finds him ready, leaning against the wall, watching her in turn. He looks sleek and dark, a slightly more casual foil to what she has chosen. Seeing her looking his way, he shrugs off the wall, straightening.

With a touch of humor he offers his arm. They exit the attic apartment together. They can hear Anton downstairs, far away, babbling as he bangs one toy against another. The sound grows closer, clearer, as they descend one flight of stairs,

two,

round a corner, come into the kitchen. They are at the table, Anton and his faithful Miron. Miron is trying to feed Anton, because that is what Miron does and what Miron has been instructed to do: feed him, care for him, love him, be the father and mother and brother and guardian and servant that Ivan, quite frankly, doesn't care to be. He looks up, startled, as Ivan and Hilary come into the kitchen. His eyes flash between them. He has no idea, none, what has happened, where they stand now, what will happen.

He swallows. He takes a step back from Anton, because somehow in Hilary's presence he never quite feels at ease to be so close to the boy. And, lacking anything better to do, he bobs a quick bow to the two of them: shining, regal, mad creatures that they are.

Ivan offers his arm, but Hilary wraps her palm around his upper forearm only to slide it down his sweatered arm to his hand, linking their fingers. They exit, and descend. The deeper they go down the stairs, the clearer she can hear her son, and her heart lurches. She heard him babbling this morning, and heard him crying when he was wet and hungry, and heard him last night,

screaming,

as she took him away from his home. Her heart is broken. And it is such a small heart to begin with, so fragile, that she isn't sure what to do with the pieces. She just goes downstairs, a step ahead of Ivan, but never letting go of his hand. She catches her breath at the end, and at the foot of the last set of stairs her palm slips from Ivan's grasp.

She walks forward, distraction that she is, to the baby. She hardly even notices Miron stepping back. Anton is older now, has a little spoon of his own clutched in his hand, but if we're honest, he still needs a great deal of help actually getting food to his mouth. She pays no mind to the servant; she strokes her fingertips over Anton's scalp, following the flow of his golden hair, leaning over him to kiss his brow, his temple, his cheek. You would almost think she's a real mother, a normal woman, the way she fawns over him, the way he wrinkles his nose and pulls away, unsure of what to make of this.

He feels, when she is near, a rising of need warring with sharp anxiety. They are simultaneous and he cannot make sense of it. He starts babbling at her; she rubs her face against his face, nuzzling him wordlessly, heavily, like an animal. Only after a few moments of this does she draw back, looking at what he's eating,

judging it, of course,

and then looking at Miron.

"Finish feeding him," she says. "Then we all are going to talk." She looks to Ivan, then, turning away from Anton. "We should eat, too," she thinks.

A hesitation. Then, Miron, knowing how insufficient it will be considered: "There is chicken in the refrigerator."

So that is what they end up eating. Ivan does the honors, seeing as how Miron is still occupied with Anton. Perhaps Ivan fantasizes that he is being so responsible right now: providing shelter and food, feeding his mate. He finds the half-a-roast-chicken in the refrigerator and he carves meat from the bone, slices it, makes cold cuts of it that he garnishes with cucumber and tomato. There is bread in the bread-box, home-baked, and butter as well. Apparently not feeling terribly well-mannered today, Ivan eats with his hands, sitting at the opposite end of the small kitchen table. He discovers he is ravenous; he tears through bread and meat, pauses now and then to freshen his palate with a cut of cucumber, a sip of water. Or perhaps juice. There's a lot of juice available, with a toddler in the house.

When he is finished, Anton is too. The boy is babbling, banging his palm on things, looking at Ivan and Hilary. Miron is trying to wipe Anton's face, but the boy keeps squirming around him to stare at the strange people. Eventually, his charge's face most of the way clean, Miron gives up and folds the napkin. Then he looks to Ivan, to Hilary.

"You said we must talk," he says. This is a small act of bravery. "What must we talk about?"

For a while she is torn: to go into the kitchen and make sure Ivan doesn't prepare something disgusting, or to stay with the baby and watch him eat, stare at him as she sometimes does. In the end, she waits to be served by the man who is and is not and is her mate, brought a plate with chicken and cucumber slices and tomatoes. She thinks of this as simple fare, wonders why he didn't think to include cheese, but tries to remember that he is an uncouth Russian with no taste whatsoever. He wouldn't know good cheese from soured milk.

There's no fondness in this judgement, no amusment. Just an eye-rolling sort of resignation to the flaws and lack in the man. He cannot help it; it is in the blood. She doesn't think he has adequate taste in wine, either. Maybe vodka, sausage, but certainly nothing more refined than that. Who cares if his is the oldest house of their tribe? If you can't pick a good wine, what good are you in polite society?

Hilary sits at the table, watching Anton be fed with keen eyes and a faint smile, until Ivan brings her a plate and a glass of water. She sits closer to Miron and the boy while the animal at the end of the table gorges himself on the majority of that half-a-chicken. For her part, Hilary eats slowly, slicing through the cold chicken and pairing it with tomato slices, dropping cucumber slices in her water glass. She smiles at Anton at one point; he laughs at her, pointing, jabbering to Miron in broken, toddler Russian that she can only barely make sense of. He gets bored of eating near the end of his own meal, and Miron doesn't force the issue. He moves in to clean the boy, who naturally fusses about it.

One of the sounds Anton makes is akin to a snarl, a throaty growl that is not intimidating at all but is animalistic.

This arrests her attention, briefly. She glances down at Ivan, for a moment, then away.

She has only eaten half of what was brought to her. She looks at Miron with some degree of affront that he broached the subject again without her leave, raising her eyebrows, then narrows them, frowning slightly. "I do not want to be away from Anton for months at a time. Nor do I want to tear him so completely from his... from the people he knows."

Hilary gives a small shake of her head. "He was unhappy last night. I do not wish him to be so unhappy. Your purpose is to care for him, and do what is best for him, and you know him well. So you will tell me what you think is best."

It is, in truth, a grotesquely unfair burden to heap on Miron's shoulders. But then, neither Hilary nor her paramour have ever been terribly interested in fairness or justice. The question is posed to Miron. Miron, justifiably, looks put on the spot. Trapped in the headlights. He steals a glance to Ivan at the end of the table.

Ivan chews the last of his meat-and-bread. He takes a swallow of water, slouching in the kitchen chair: negligent, languid, dissolute, lordly. His eyes are keen and sharp, though, and they stare blandly back at Miron. The boy will get no help from his quarter.

And so, Miron turns back to Hilary. He thinks a moment. Then: "Do you... do you wish to live with him, then?"

Hilary's brows tighten together. "I do not know. Not altogether. I do, but I do not know if it will distress him."

She looks down at her plate: half-eaten slices of chicken, slices of cucumber, one with a perfect set of her dental imprints. Tomato and its juices, leaking.

"He could come live with me, in Chicago, but I am known there as someone who birthed a stillborn son. We could move elsewhere, if Ivan is there to protect us, and find some place with enough space. With grass and a pond or a river. Quarters for all of you as well as my own servants. Or... I could live here, at least sometimes."

Hilary looks up again, looking at Ivan. "I do not know what Ivan wants. Or if he cares." Her eyes come back, quickly, to Miron. "You should be with him. And I think Polina, despite how sour her face is, is quite effective. I care less about the others, so long as he has someone who can improve his French and cook decent food for him." She frowns. "Do you think he must stay here, in this house, as things have been? Will it... damage him, if we do otherwise?"

There is a moment when Ivan's eyes meet Hilary's. When she looks his way. When she says she does not know if he cares. There is a stirring in his pupils, a thread of ache. It passes, and then she looks away.

Miron, then. Miron, who looks consummately uncomfortable, out of his depths. His eyes flick again from Hilary to Ivan, Ivan to Anton. On Anton they stay, fixing like a magnet to a lodestone. He seems to draw on some inner source of strength, taking a breath and speaking.

"I think... I think he's young enough that he can move to another city, or even another country, without being traumatized. He doesn't go to school yet. He basically knows us, and that's it. He knows this house, it's true, but ... I think as long as you bring his things with him, his bed and his toys, he will be all right."

Miron looks at Hilary, then. His chin rises a little. He dares:

"I think he'll be better off if his parents are in his life. Everyone wants to know their parents. He'll be better off if he can live in the same city as you, maybe even the same house. He can have his own wing, but if he can at least see you most nights for dinner, or maybe for bedtime, I think that'll be good for him. In the long run.

"Because right now he's still very young, but soon he'll be old enough to remember things. If you leave him here and keep visiting once a year or even once a month, he'll soon be old enough to notice that most children live with their parents, but he doesn't. And he'll wonder why, and he'll think it's because you don't love him.

"I will go to America for Anton. And for you. I think Polina will too, even if she will make a stink about it. I don't think Izolda will, she has a husband here and a baby of her own. But that's okay, because I think to be honest Anton doesn't really need her that much anymore and she ... probably wants to live with her own family too. I think maybe Elodie will come too, if you want her. We can all help you. I know... I know it's not easy for you and Ivan to... to be parents.

"But if you are asking me what is best for Anton, then I will tell you: what is best for him is to have his parents with him more often than not, instead of two times since he was born. If you can stand to, you must try."

When Miron tells her that he thinks Anton will be better off with his parents in his life, she is startled. It shows. She looks surprised, not just that he thinks that but that he would say so. That Anton would be better off to live with her, near her at least, be close to her, see her at mealtimes, bedtimes. That it would be good for him.

That she could be good for him. There is a brightness in her eyes that she will not permit to show in front of the help; she looks away, and blinks, and as Miron goes on, she rises slowly from her chair, walking around the table. She unceremoniously but more slowly than last night lifts Anton from his chair, into her arms, sitting down. He wants to get down and play. She buries her face in his shoulder for a moment, marveling at his softness and fragility, marveling at the fact that his tenderness and vulnerability does not inspire murderous and grotesque thoughts in her, nightmares of methodical and curious violence, and marveling a little at his smell, which seems as familiar as any she's ever known.

She looks up, hearing Miron say that Anton will eventually notice that other children are different, and that it might make him wonder if he is loved at all. She looks stricken, and she looks furious. She has her teeth on edge behind her lips, and looks away, letting Anton move from her lap to the floor, his tiny bare feet setting down and immediately taking off for the living room and the basket of toys he knows is there, which he has to check on, excuse him, it is very important. His belly is rotund with having been freshly fed; he toddles off and pauses at Ivan's chair.

Looks up at him. Babbles something, pointing at the living room. He has his small hand, cleaned by a rag, pressed insistently against the side of Ivan's leg. He speaks, and pauses as though to await a response, then babbles again and takes off.

Hilary watches this, but does not look at Ivan. She turns back to Miron for a short time. She does not make a decision. She exhales, thinking, then says: "Thank you, Miron. You are excused. I will stay with Anton."

Give her this: for a moment there, she realizes that Miron was dragged out of his home in the middle of the night. He has not washed. He has not changed clothes. She waits for him to leave, if he does. And then she begins to rise, but Anton is waddling back into the little table where they take such informal meals. He is carrying a stuffed toy, a dragon with scales stitched in, shimmering. It is blue and purple and black with hints of fiery orange and red at the eyes and crest and tips of the wings. It has been well-loved, which means it has been gnawed on, slept with, and is missing scales. He is carrying it with his fist wrapped around the long neck, and holds it up to Ivan, blathering away.

"Dakon," he keeps saying, missing the r sound, regardless of language. "Dakon." And he hits the soft stuffed dragon against Ivan's lap, insistent that Ivan must take it, and look at it, and perhaps... appreciate it? Or have some opinion of it? Who even knows. He baps the dragon on Ivan, all but whacking him with it, and starts making growling noises.

Hilary covers her mouth with her hand.

There is a mild sharpening in Ivan's regard, his alertness, when Hilary lifts the boy from the high-chair. He is watchful; he is, if we are honest, a little wary. He does not intercede, though, and after a while Hilary wraps the boy up close, buries her face in his small shoulder. And Anton, who really just wants to get down and play with his toys now that food-time was over, nonetheless calms for a little while. He puts his head against the side of hers. He has his fingers in his mouth, his eyes big and curious, staring at the light coming in through the kitchen windows because at his age even the light through a window is wondrous and new.

Ivan aches again, a little. It is different this time.

--

Miron is excused. Anton is released. Anton comes over to Ivan -- he is walking now, Ivan realizes -- and he presses his little paw against Ivan's leg. Ivan looks down at him, perplexed. The speech is too unclear even for Ivan to decipher. When no answer comes, Anton takes off for the living room, and Miron departs the room, and

it is just him and his lady. Him and his love.

"I do care," he says softly, after a while. "I care because you care. And because he is mine. Maybe I don't care as much as you do, or love him as deeply as you do ... but I only gave him to you because you can't live without him. I would never disown him, left to myself."

Anton is back. Anton has a toy, and it is a dragon, and he is talking now too. He is bashing the dragon against Ivan's leg, doing it again and again until Ivan picks the toy up, bemused and amused, lifting it to examine it.

"You're supposed to hate dragons, you know," he tells the boy, smiling. "They are the great enemy of our race, and you're supposed to trample them into the dirt." He hands the toy back. "It's even in Moscow's heraldry. What sort of Russian Silver Fang are you anyway?"

It means something to her, what Ivan says. Not that he cares because she cares, not that he cannot love as deeply as she loves, but the rest. That he would never disown him. That he only gave him up because Hilary would die without her son, or thinks she would. It is not what he said when she asked for Anton to be given to her. He only said he didn't care: what good was the boy, if he was losing her?

She thinks now that maybe, at least in some measure, Ivan was lying.

Walking over she stands near his end of the table, his emptied plate, as Anton comes stamping his tiny feet back into the room. Her head tips. She watches as Ivan plucks the dragon from Anton's hand, and Anton watches as well. Anton's brow begins to furrow. He realizes he does not have his toy anymore. He reaches for it, whining, and it is handed back. He hugs it, biting down on its throat right beneath the head.

Hilary does not cover her mouth in time now. She laughs, short and bright, and Anton looks up at her, dragon dangling from his tiny mouth, and she bends to him, stroking his scalp. "He is also Belgian. Aren't you?" she asks Anton himself. "L'union fait la force," she coos at him, and he beams, still holding his toy in his teeth, and then turns, dropping to all fours to crawl off, back to his toybox.

She follows him with her dark gaze, then looks to Ivan. "I do not think we can bring him to live with us in Chicago," she says quietly. "No matter the size of the house. We might both be very well killed. Whether by Durante or Grey. Neither would swallow that affront, to find me with a living child who is, we can both plainly see, obviously the product of our two lines. He will be known by bloodline, by scent." She is still, a moment. "Someone might kill him to punish us."

"Good boy," Ivan approves as the dragon is clinched and throated. "Quick study."

Then, surprised, Ivan shifts in his seat to look more directly at Hilary. "I didn't even know you were Belgian," he says. "I thought perhaps you were Parisian, the way you melted into that city like you were born to it. Hm." He smirks at her, gently. "It seems I have inadvertently fallen in love with a Brussels sprout."

They become serious, then. She speaks of the impossibility of Chicago, and Ivan nods in immediate assent. She thinks perhaps someone will kill them. Will kill him, their baby boy. Ivan's eyes go to the toddler. He is so small, so golden, so harmless and unharmed. Ivan wonders if he was ever so innocent. If Hilary was.

"Not Chicago," he agrees. "That is impossible. Perhaps New York. My parents have a home in Manhattan and an estate upstate. In a pinch they could take the boy without anyone growing too suspicious. It is already quietly known and accepted there that I have been borne a son by an unknown mother. It wouldn't be out of the question that he would be reared by his grandparents.

"Or perhaps somewhere else altogether. The weather is nice on the west coast. Or we could move to Lausanne." A pause. "If you want to live with me, that is. With Anton, and me."

In the living room adjacent to them, Anton is down on the ground, taking things out of his toybox one by one and throwing them around. He still has a dragon between his teeth, the neck thoroughly soaked in toddler slobber now, and he keeps growling, snarling as he does, the monster in some story living in his formative mind.

In the little dining nook, Ivan makes a pun that has Hilary lifting an imperious brow at him, melting him with a gaze. She does not stop to explain her heritage. The truth is: she doesn't know it. She doesn't know much more than a bit of Belgium, some English? Perhaps she really is French. And she has never ached over the not-knowing, but she has many, many times run into Garou who are a bit taken aback. Her purity is so strong, her lineage so powerful, that they wonder at even a kinswoman being unaware of the names and titles of her ancestors.

Hilary is used to it. But the pun: oh she withers that, giving a small shake of her head. She mutters something dismissive in French: that he is an absurd child, more than likely. Something along those lines. Nevermind his profession of love, after all they have been through the past weeks. Months. It's all he could say, groaning in her ear, as he took her on the landing. He loves her, he loves her. He cannot live without her. God damn him, he loves her. Despite everything. Because of everything.

She sits, where she can see Anton playing past Ivan's ear. They are both looking at him, for a moment. New York is mentioned, and his parents; she wrinkles her nose a bit. Something about that gives her distaste: having grandparents about, as though family is an inconvenience. Or perhaps it's something else. The way she might remain unknown. That now she realizes he would still be, for her, too far.

Ivan mentions the west, the warmth there. He speaks of Lausanne, where they were together once. He says --

Hilary turns her head, looking at him once more. "I think I would like to live with him. Even... with some space. I like that he has his own house right now, his own servants, his own land. But if we could have such space and freedom but... be close. Where I could walk down the halls and see him." Her brow is furrowed; she sounds sad. "I am afraid to live with the both of you. I am afraid of it all happening again. And I am still afraid that you will try to... own me."

What humor and lightness there was -- and there was humor and lightness, and even a rare, rare laugh from Hilary -- has ebbed away. Hilary is sad. Ivan reaches out to her; puts his hand over hers. They sit like that for a while, quiet.

"I'm afraid of that too," he confesses. "And I'm afraid I won't be able to stand it, truth be told. I'm -- I'm sorry to admit it."

A smaller pause.

"I think you should choose. Which city, which house, when. I'll arrange the finances and the documents for Anton and his household to join you. Perhaps we'll hire additional staff to keep the house and its land, if it is large. And I'll get a place in the same city. I'll visit, often." He looks at her keenly, questioning. "Does that sound all right?"

Bizarrely, she is relieved. He says he might not be able to stand living in a house with her and their son, and Hilary looks up at him, not so much startled as aware, brightening. She hears him: she chooses, and he will arrange the rest. He'll --

"That is what I was going to say," she tells him, the sort of thing couples love hearing from each other early on, when you can dream that you're one person, that you share a mind. It's not something they've ever had, but it is also the truth in this moment. "I was going to say... you should be there. In the same city, but with a penthouse. Like you have now. It's so lovely. It's so you. And then you'll be there, and we can be together, but... I can also be with Anton. And you can be, too.

"Sometimes."

When he can stand it. When she can stand it. But he will still be there, always ever welcome in the wing or building where his son lives, welcome on invitation to Hilary's domicile. There to guard them, there to watch over Anton, make adjustments to his staff or his training so that one day, he will be a better wolf.

Hilary squeezes his hand. "I don't know where," she confesses. "Can we stay here, for now?"

She is relieved, and so he, too, is relieved. Relieved that she is not hurt; relieved that she does not feel betrayed or rejected. His hand is squeezed. He looks at her hand in his, and then he lifts it, places kisses on the tips of her fingers rather as he had in the bathtub.

"Of course," he says softly. "You don't need to ask. You are his mother. This is your home too."

Her relief floods her, too. That he is not hurt, that he doesn't feel held at arm's length, betrayed after their painful reconciliation. Relief, too, that he will not be stalking the hallways of some household, infiltrating, watching, controlling. That he doesn't want that, at all. That he wants what she wants: to be near, but independent. That's what she wants, ultimately, for both he and their son.

There is a clatter in the next room. Hilary starts, looking up even as she is brushing her fingertips over Ivan's lips. It's just Anton, toppling his toybox so that everything spills out. He claps for himself, laughing at the carnage, and she doesn't mind. She looks back to Ivan.

"Perhaps the west," she says quietly. "But we can decide later. We are all right, for now." She is quiet a moment, seems about ready to go, then, her voice falling to just above a whisper:

"Do you believe him?" Hilary wants to know. "Miron. When he says... it would be better for Anton, to have us near?"

Ivan thinks on that for a while. His head is turned, his eyes abstract on Anton. In the morning light, which is drawing nearer to a noonday light, his profile is quite a thing of beauty: the eyes deep-set, the bridge of nose high. He thinks of Hilary and her parents. He thinks of his own. He thinks of Miron, young and full of ideals. He thinks, too, of Hilary's fragile heart.

"It would be better for him to have us near," Ivan says at last, "if we can keep our madnesses at bay. If we try, and try hard, to be at our best for him, and to keep away from him when we are at our worst.

"It will, as Miron said, be difficult at times. But it is worth it, because if we are near, then Anton will know he is loved. Just as you wanted for him."

She fears that: Anton growing up thinking his parents love each other, but not him. Anton growing up without knowing that love exists, or that it matters. Even as the thoughts pass through her mind she feels like scoffing at them: how absurd, to be concerned that way. But then she knows, on some level, why she scoffs.

This is what happens to you, when you are not given love. This is what you think of it. This is how you go mad.

She clutches at his hand, briefly, and just nods. She wants to believe that her being near her son is better for him than her being away. She has a very, very hard time believing that. But she rises, smoothly, as gracefully as she ever moves, and crosses into that other room. Anton is lying on his back, holding a toy with his feet, examining it with his hands. She walks to him, kneeling down, and strokes his mouth with her fingertip, ever so softly. He looks at her, open-mouthed, and she smiles, albeit thinly. She turns her hand at the wrist, curving her fingers, tickling him under the chin. A gurgling, sputtering laughter emits from the boy.

This makes her happy. As bathing with Ivan made her happy. They are different sorts of happiness. But she thinks they might both be real. She stays in the little living room even when Miron comes down; she is in there, being handed toys and handing them back, and she is simultaneously very bored and very content. She tries to hold on to both, and then slowly begins to let go of both, simply sitting there, inhabiting the rituals that the toddler brings. Here is a toy, now give it back. Here is a toy, now give it back. She does not join the conversation when Ivan tells Miron, if he bothers telling him anything, that Hilary is going to stay here for a while, while she decides where they are all going to move to.

Hilary just sits there, playing with her son. Watching him play. Thinking about what it will be like,

living together,

as a family.

Ivan

Hilary doesn't seen the sheer disarray she leaves in her wake. The cloistered, comfortable little house suddenly turned on its ear: its heart torn out, its anchor fled. No one sleeps soundly that night. Polina can be heard banging about her room until the small hours, slamming drawers, clapping closets shut, dragging luggage about. She's packing, she's moving out, she's leaving this madhouse, and when the new girl -- Elodie, that is her name -- comes timidly to her doorway to ask where Polina might be going, she's rebuffed with words so scathing that Polina is left in peace the rest of the night.

Elodie, for her part, keeps to her room. She tries to sleep. She wonders what was to become of her shortlived employment now that the boy she was charged to tutor has been so abruptly removed. She thinks of asking Dmitri, but the man is too silent, too grim, too forbidding.

Besides, Dmitri has matters of his own to see to: he spends hours on the phone, fielding one call or another, departing abruptly around 3 in the morning with the car, returning at dawn.

He is not the only one in the SUV, then. His master sits in silence beside him, sleepless smudges under his eyes and the crackle of spirit-paths still upon his skin.

--

In the morning, the little house is as perfectly charming as ever. Sunlight brightens the grass and dapples the autumnal trees; the hedges lining the drive provide some measure of privacy. Behind the house and past that grassy slope, the river Volkhov slips shimmeringly by.

No servants emerge to welcome Hilary's party. No guardians emerge to challenge them. The front door opens as they park, as they gain the porch steps. The house is silent and still

apart from the wolf that stands in the doorway, lean and drawn, feral even in his man's shape.

The aristocracy is mad. Too mad for the simple, genuine love that can exist among the lower, saner classes. The love that tore Miron's heart out when Anton started wailing his name. The love that Dmitri may in fact have, somewhere, for Ivan, even though Ivan is possibly incapable of returning it on any level. The love that makes soft, small dreams in Hilary's mind feel strangely like nightmares.

It is possible that in a year and a half, Polina has come to love Anton, and Miron in her way, and this house, and stupid Izolda, and this life, and the future it held, as the sharp and extraordinarily well-paid manager of an aristocrat's household. It goes without saying that Miron, guardian and servant and brother and father and uncle and best friend, loves Anton, devotedly. It is not beyond expectation that Izolda might love the boy, too, holding him and feeding him from her own body for a year, bathing him, soothing him to sleep, just as she might love persnickety Polina and stalwart young Miron.

In less than fifteen minutes, Hilary ripped all of that apart. Ripped Polina from her home and future. Ripped Miron from his entire life, even his home country. Ripped a limb from Izolda without even setting eyes on her. Took Anton, the only one she cares about, from the only home and life and family he has ever known.

--

Night rolls onward.

In that time, Carlisle drives away with Miranda and Darya behind the first car. In the back seat, Miron is holding Anton, and the steady motion of the car is as soothing to the boy as his caregiver. He sucks on his fingers, resting on Miron's shoulder, looking across the way at the strange woman he does not know, or remember, even four months later. The woman he is, all the same, drawn to and curious about. She does not speak. She stares at Anton, and he stares back at her, until he falls asleep in the car.

There is a place waiting for them, a rented house not far from the airfield. It is dark and unfamiliar, but prepared by Carlisle before the jet touched down. Carlisle and Darya and Miranda thought of things Hilary would not even consider: things like diapers, things like food suitable for a child of Anton's age. No one was expecting Miron, though.

Hilary does not want to eat. She stays with Miron and Anton as Miron puts the boy to sleep in a room upstairs, the mattress pulled from the bed to the ground. She watches, sitting on the floor beside the door, staring, until she can't anymore. She drifts then, rising, leaving the room, going to her own. There are pills. And there is darkness.

The servants bed down, but for Carlisle, who stays up, sitting in the front room just in case. Miron sleeps in the same room as Anton. There is nowhere else for him.

This house, not a home, is as silent as the one behind them is clattering.

--

Dawn comes, and some time thereafter, Anton wakes. He does not know where he is but his best friend is there, there for him to bat at and wake up, wake up. There to pick him up and change him, there to take him downstairs and look for something to feed him. Darya is awake, always wakes so early, and watches Miron and Anton as silently as her mistress does. Soon enough, she is called up by Hilary to prepare her for the day.

And Hilary is happy, coming down to the kitchen of the cottage. She is not grim or terrible. She sees Anton as he is being fed and she is delighted. She sits near him as she takes her own breakfast, talking to him in French. She wants to take him for a stroll outside, so Carlisle goes with her, and Darya.

Miranda holds Miron back. They have things to discuss. A list of what he and Anton need from the house. Then there is the matter of getting him out of the country without causing a fuss. Outside, Hilary is holding Anton in early sunlight, stroking her cheek against his, holding him so tightly to her chest. She is okay. She is okay. Everything will be okay.

--

The car, low and long and black, slides to a stop before the house. Only Carlisle is there, driving. He has not slept since the jet touched down last night. Hilary sits in the back, alone. She is dressed simply, elegantly. Her skirt is long, made of multiple tissue-thin layers at varying angles. Her boots hug her calves, but have only a slight stack for the heel. Her upperwear is simple, a dark camisole underneath a cashmere wraparound sweater, slender on her arms. Her hair is bound up, in a bun no one would call 'messy'. There are hoops in her ears and shades on her eyes.

But for the sweater, she does not look very different than she did that summer day when she took shelter in Ivan's penthouse because her husband would not leave her alone, would not let her sleep for trying to get a child on her.

It goes without saying that the similarity, for Hilary, was unconscious.

She is not paying attention; but when the car stops, she hears Carlisle take in a short, sharp breath. Hilary lifts her head, looking out the window toward the house, the door opening to the sound of the car turning off. Behind her shades her eyes widen and she flinches, pressing herself into the corner between the seat and the door.

Carlisle says a word, a request for instruction. Hilary cannot even hear him. She curls deeper into the seat, pressing herself away from Ivan. He probably cannot see her through the tinted glass, but who knows?

The doors of the car do not open.

Back at the rented house, Miron looks shellshocked. He slept poorly the night before; who wouldn't? Uprooted, transplanted, put down again in a cold house with no semblance of family ties; only the bitter blood-ties that bind his master to his mother. Not even a true bed to call his own -- just a cot and a blanket, because no one expected him.

In the morning Miranda wants to go over things with him. A list of necessities, which he has to rack his brain for. Details of passports and visas and things he can't even begin to wrap his mind around. She wants logic from him, and she keeps opening doors to new questions, new concerns, new directions he hadn't even concerned. He wants to wake from the nightmare. He wants to close all the doors and go home to that little house by the river, where he and Polina and Izolda and Elodie had lived.

They were going to hire a French chef around Christmas. They had been talking about that. Polina had been reviewing dossiers, going over budgets and accounts; she had been getting quite good at managing finances and affairs. Izolda had been looking into hiring a gardener, a weekly maid service, so that she and Miron could be freed to do other things. And Miron had been looking into preschools, and Elodie had been buying children's books in three languages. They had plans. They had built themselves a little family, a little home, a little life, a little future together.

Miranda tells him to provide passport photos. She hands him paperwork. They'll have to forge the documents this time, but all the same, he has to immigrate legally. It's for the future, you see.

--

In the morning, Ivan is the sole occupant of the house. He chased everyone else away. Izolda was told not to come in today. Polina went back to her apartment in the city. Dmitri took Elodie, poor bewildered Elodie, and checked into two rooms at the nearest reputable hotel.

Just Ivan, now. Standing in the doorway as the engine dies. Stepping out onto the porch, his eyes narrowed by sunlight or spite; pacing the floorboards back and forth like an animal. The doors of the car do not open. The chauffeur does not step out. Hilary retreats into darkness, as though to be seen would undo her. Ivan paces, and paces, and paces; sometimes pauses to brush a fleck of lint off the front of his shirt, sometimes pauses to scuff his sole on the wood. Sometimes pauses just to stare into the car

before he begins to move again.

Back at the cottage, Darya sits in the living room on the floor. There are no toys for Anton to play with, and Darya is a maid, not a nurse. She watches him as he crawls around, sometimes picking himself up to toddle one place to another. He pushes things off of tables. He pulls things off of shelves. She does not interrupt, unless he looks like he's about to hurt himself. She just watches him with those wide, pale eyes of hers, imagining how things will change now. All their lives. There is a child, now. She can't fathom what is going to happen.

--

And at the house:

Hilary curls in on herself, watching Ivan emerge, watching him pace. Her heart is pounding. Carlisle speaks to her again, asks her what she wants him to do. She just begins to weep. She doesn't know. She is too scared to get out.

And then abruptly a change: a deft turn on the porch, now Ivan is coming toward the steps, now he springs down to land effortlessly, strides to the car in seconds, bypasses the driver's window, goes to the back.

He tries the handle on Hilary's door. Perhaps it is locked.

Hilary yelps, and Carlisle decides. He turns on the car, but they are dealing with a Ragabash of Crescent Moon. He comes quickly, and Carlisle floors it. He has no desire to be chased down a rural Russian road with a werewolf on his tail, or worse -- on top of the car. He has no wish to die tonight by claw.

But he serves Hilary. And she has no one, no one else, to keep her safe anymore.

Hilary shrieks as the car takes off. She sees Ivan, nearly at the car, just before that same car kicks up dust and takes off. Which suddenly, whether Ivan gives chase or not, makes her shriek again.

"No!" she yells. "His flashlight!"

--

Her voice sounds like her heart is being torn out.

--

Carlisle exhales, aggravated, but stops the car. More gently. They are not very far at all. He sets his jaw, looking behind him, and then turns around. This time, when the car stops, and turns off, Carslisle gets out. And opens the rear door for Hilary.

There was anger in Ivan -- and something else -- but the anger was leashed, at least. It was controlled and contained. When Carlisle turns the car on, when he floors it, outrage bolts through Ivan. There's a second when all his muscles tense, when he very nearly does chase them down the long drive to the public road.

Nearly. Doesn't. He stops where he is, hands closing into fists, watching them go.

The car roars backwards down the path. It gets a ways away. Then it slows. Then it stops. Ivan is still watching. Carlisle gets out, and now, now Ivan is advancing again, and by the time Carlisle opens the door Ivan is behind him, is on him, grabs him by the shoulder and throws him aside with casual, vicious force.

"Get off my land," he growls without looking at the kinsman. "You are no longer welcome here."

And Hilary:

and Hilary, taking refuge in the backseat. Ivan looks at her for a long moment. Then he puts his hand out, palm up, fingers open.

Carlisle is a brave man, but he is not a stupid one and not a rash one. Nor is he terribly, profoundly proud. He is grabbed, thrown to the side. He notices that he is not thrown to the ground. Just as he notices that Hilary has set one foot upon the ground, one hand on the open door, and is looking at him. He looks at her.

He straightens his jacket, and looks at Ivan. Deferentially, at least. He does not meet the Fang's eyes. He looks downward, hands folded in front of him, and speaks clearly.

"I remain with her, sir."

--

And Hilary, for her part, is rising from the car, recoiling from Ivan and his hand if he still offers it. Her sunglasses are still on. The sun is bright today. Not a tendril has fallen from her bun; she was a dancer, after all. Once upon a time. She stands, both hands gripping the top of the open car door.

"Why are you here?" she asks him,

very small.

"Get off my land," Ivan repeats, slower. "I will not ask again."

His eyes have not left Hilary. The angle of his gaze changes as she rises. A beat; then a flick of his eyes toward Carlisle. He acknowledges the man's loyalty this much, at least:

"Your mistress is safe from harm at my hands. That is more than I can promise for you."

And as for Hilary: no answer. Not yet. Not while they have an audience. One public meltdown, it seems, is enough for Ivan's taste.

The manservant does not reply this time. Not when Ivan says he won't ask again. Not when Ivan tells him that Hilary is safe, but he is not.

Hilary's smallness does not last. She exhales.

"Go fuck yourself, Ivan."

And lowers herself to get back in the car.

Some invisible hand reaches into Ivan; grasps a wet tangle of entrails, yanks. He tightens. His brow constricts for a beat. He puts his hand on Hilary's -- shoulder. Arm. Something, somewhere he can reach.

"Stay," he whispers. "Stay with me."

Hilary flings him off, shakes him, something. She jerks from his grasp, glowering at him. "Don't touch me. Don't touch my manservant. Don't demand that he go and I stay, with no way to get away from you. I'm not yours anymore. I just. Want. My son's. Toys. I want him to have his things. I want him to have what he needs. I want him to have things that will make him feel safe and make him happy."

Somewhere in there, she has stamped her foot. Possibly more than once.

"Why are you even here?" she throws at him again, not small or weak or afraid anymore. She was afraid. She is afraid. And that fear makes her so, so angry. "You told me he's mine. You told me to come get him. You can't stop me. You can't take him back."

Her voice breaks, in there. Snaps like a violin string wound too tight, the sound sharp and shattering. "You can't. You can't take him. He's mine. He's mine." Sharp, shattering, shaking, like Hilary is shaking, fear overtaking anger, panic creeping up to swallow rage. "He's my only -- he's all I have."

Which is the truth. There's no one else left,

anywhere,

who shares her blood.

"I'm here for you," Ivan interrupts, somewhere in there, but she doesn't stop and he doesn't try to stop her. Only when she's finished, snapped, broken, does he repeat it:

"I'm here for you. So stay with me, and send your driver away. I can't stand to have this conversation before him."

"I will not," she says, stubbornly. "I'm not staying here with you with no way out. He's going to stay right here."

Hilary looks sharply at Carlisle. He looks at her, and he gives a nod. She looks back at Ivan. "I will walk with you, though."

A flare of temper -- "For god's sake, do you really think I'll hurt you? You?"

All she does is stare at him for a moment. Then she shakes her head. "That's not why he can't leave."

"Then why?"

"Because I don't want him to, Ivan!" Hilary snaps at him. "Christ! Do you want to stand here all day gnawing on this one thing? You came here for me. What does it matter if I want my car and my driver to wait for me? Why is that so bloody unreasonable?"

Like that, something in Ivan snaps as well. Breaks on the fulcrum of this one, minute, ridiculous detail: whether the driver stands on this patch of land or that. Ivan tastes bruised pride, bitter anger; he tastes ashes and forgets the flame.

"Get off my land." This time he's speaking to Hilary. "I'll send Anton's things to whatever address you give me, but I will not stand here once more while you shout at me and curse at me and treat me like -- like some low, crawling beast that never meant anything to you at all."

Hilary shakes her head. "No."

[I TINK DAT CALLS FOR A FRENZEE CHEK D:]

Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (1, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

For a moment anger beats so white-hot behind Ivan's eyes that he can see nothing at all. Not her face, not her eyes, not those lovely wrists he used to grip in his hands, pin to the bed. He puts his hand on, grips the edge of the car roof; inches from her face, his breathing harsh.

Then he lets go. Turns on his heel and stalks away, pounds up the steps to the house, slams the front door.

Hilary doesn't flinch. Carlisle does, feeling the pulse of rage. Hilary just peers at him, frowning, as he struggles to restrain himself. Watches him, still frowning that deep, furrowed frown, as he turns, goes up the walk, up the porch, into the house. When she flinches, it's at the sound of the door slamming.

She looks at Carlisle. "Stay," she says, like speaking to a spaniel. He just nods.

With that, she walks up, the same path Ivan went not a moment earlier, and goes inside the house. She takes off her sunglasses on the way. And she does not knock.

Ivan has not gone far. He is in the front room. The house is dark and quiet, though far from abandoned. Sounds from outside drift through an open window somewhere. Someone's abortive attempts at breakfast are cooling on the table. Everything is in a state of mild, lived-in disarray, though all the regular occupants are, for the moment, evicted.

In their place, Ivan with his back to the door. His head bowed into his hands, his fingertips spread over his brow as though to quell the pounding of his head. When the door opens behind him he turns, feral-fast, his eyes flashing. He sees Hilary. He straightens; a moment later, turns to face her.

Hilary holds her sunglasses to her side when she walks in. She closes the door behind her.

She looks at him, standing there. He is smoothing himself, not physically but visibly, in every way she can see. And she meets his eyes when he does turn, but she says nothing. She looks around; they were supposed to have Miron and Anton's things ready. She looks for boxes, for luggage, what-have-you.

But there are none. Exhaling, something like a sigh, she starts to walk towards the stairs.

"You may as well help me," she says, without looking back, as she's starting to ascend.

Help her. Ivan looks at her blankly, as though he spoke no English; as though she spoke some tongue ten thousand years dead. She starts up those stairs. Neither of them are looking at the other now.

"How did we get here, Hilary?"

He asks her this when she is nearly at the top; nearly out of sight. He sounds far away; thoughtful, flat, removed.

"How did we come to this?"

Not entirely at the top, she pauses. She turns, standing on two steps at once, looking down that narrow path at him.

"I don't want to be owned," Hilary says quietly. Not 'anymore'. She has thought about this; she has never wanted it. She has wanted to feel a sense of belonging, and she has wanted to feel safe, but barring those things and barring any hope for things like love or autonomy or peace, she had at least grown to tolerate the ownership of one mate or another. Ivan's was the least restrictive, the least invasive. Until it wasn't.

"And I don't want to pretend that it's... all right. Being mad. Hating everything." There are tears in her eyes now, slow and warm but there all the same. She shakes her head a little bit. "I don't like it."

She's silent for a moment, and breathes in deeply, her chest expanding with it, her chin lifting. "I told you I did not want to be owned, and you betrayed me. I told you I hated being mad, and you abandoned me." There's a faint pause, just a half-heartbeat. "I told you I wanted to be able to get in a car and drive away from here at my leisure, on my own whim, and you nearly killed me.

"That is how."

"When you say it like that, it makes all the sense in the world."

From below he looks up at her. Meets her eyes for the first time in some time.

"But you know it wasn't so simple as that. It wasn't quite so black and white as you remembered it; any of it."

A pause; then he looks away again. It's a comfortable house, he thinks. A comfortable home. Maybe he'll move in here for a while. Live here for a while, sequestered and secluded. It sounds like a lovely little dream.

"I don't think I've changed, Hilary. I don't think I've done much, or anything, that I wouldn't have done a year ago. But what you tolerated then, or liked, or even asked for, you now seem to abhor. There was no warning. You began to hate me, and every last thing I do only makes you hate me more.

"I'm tired. I'm tired of arguing with you. I'm tired of trying to keep you, and trying to love you, and trying to redeem myself in your eyes. You won't or can't tell me what it is you want of me, and I'm tired of trying to figure it out.

"Take whatever it is you've come for and go. Let it be done."

it makes all the sense in the world

Hilary is not blind to sarcasm. She tips her head slightly when he says that, though. She thinks it does make sense. She doesn't understand why Ivan hates her so, why he won't ever answer her when she tells him what he's done, why he won't just admit that she is right to be angry. Oh, he has said he's sorry and he has said he loves her, but he tells her too that it all makes sense, what he's done. And it doesn't. Nothing he's done makes the smallest bit of sense.

Not to her.

as you remembered

She bristles a bit at that, hearing emphasis where in reality there may not be any. She stares down at him. She is opening her mouth, saying "Then --"

but Ivan is speaking again. He doesn't think he's changed, but that was never the problem. She scowls. He doesn't think he's done anything he wouldn't do a year ago, but he's wrong, he's so wrong. Her scowl deepens. She used to like this or that, but now she hates.

no warning

Hilary's mouth is slightly open, on the verge over and over again of speaking, of answering him, of telling him where he's got it wrong, what he doesn't understand. And he is not done, and she does not interrupt him, and he just tells her he is sick and tired of her.

This is what she hears. He's just tired of this, of her -- which she knew, after the whores. It's not in him to try and love her anymore, not when she isn't as pliant and pretty and submissive, not when she isn't his possession. And there is nothing about her, otherwise, that is lovable. He confirms that now: to love her when she is owned is easy, as it has been for every wolf who has taken her. To love her otherwise, well... now that takes trying. And to Ivan, it's simply not worth trying anymore. She is not worth trying.

This is what she hears. This, and go away.

--

There are still tears in her eyes. She is capable of crying, this one. More than she used to be. She cares about things now. She cares about herself, to some degree. Sometimes. Enough to want a life of her own, a home of her own, servants of her own, where every moment of her day is not inextricably tied somehow to Ivan. Enough to know she wants her son, if she wants nothing else, and to understand -- grasping in the dark for it -- that in some measure this is because she has no family. There is no one who is connected to her, no matter what, even if they wish they weren't. No one but Anton.

"You keep ending it," Hilary exhales. "In your mind, or on the street, or after chasing me all the way to Russia. I'm not, don't you see?" She shakes her head, those tears brimming, brimming, but ignored. "I have never ended it. When I was angry with you, I still wanted you in my presence. When I wanted to have my own place to live, not yours, I did not want to end things between us. I came to you after that, Ivan. I came to you."

One drips down from her right eye, rolls straight down her face. Then her left, a hair later, losing the race. They fall from her chin. "I am angry. I am so angry. But I cannot tell you what I want of you because it has not been, from the start, about some lack I wished you to fulfill. And every time I try to explain to you what changed, why I am angry, how I feel, you are the one who hates me for it. You ask to know, and then you erupt when I tell you. You are the one who cannot tolerate me -- for being angry, for being in pain, for being afraid, for wanting to control my life. You are the one who said that if I despise my madness, then there is nothing left between us.

"I never wanted to end it, Ivan," Hilary says, her lashes flicking, water spraying over her lower lids for a moment from the tears her lashes pick up and fling, every which way, when she blinks. "That was never what I wanted. It is not what I want now. But you keep ending it. What am I to do, when you tell me you have given up, but believe you?"

Ivan cannot look at her. Because of shame, because of frustration, because if he looks at her she'll melt his resolve -- for all those reasons and more, he cannot bring himself to turn, to look up those stairs to where she stands, weeping.

He looks at the walls instead. They have been taking pictures, Anton and his strange little family. There are pictures of the three, now four young people and the beautiful baby. There are pictures of them on that little lake near the house, or down by the river. There are pictures of them at some neighborhood playground. There are pictures of them gathered around Anton for his half-birthday, and he was so small then.

There are no pictures of his parents on the wall. There is a picture of his mother's ghost, nearly twenty years ago, by his little bed. None at all of Ivan.

"I know you're angry," he answers after a time. "I know you're hurt. I know all of it seems to tie back to me. What I've done. Every time we speak there is some new crime I must answer for, something else I have done to wrong you. And every time we've spoken, the last few times we've spoken, you've told me how you hate madness. Not just your own, but mine as well. My madness, my fallibility, my weakness.

"I can't change that. I can't change that you're mad, or that I am too. When you hate madness, you're hating me as well. When you push that away, you're pushing me away. I can't escape your hate and your rejection. I can't soothe your hurt or dim your anger, either. And so all I've felt from you for a very long time now is hurt, and anger, and hatred, and rejection.

"I can't remember the last time you loved me."

A pause; hollow.

"So tell me, Hilary. Why shouldn't we end it? Why shouldn't we give up, if all that's left between us is pain?"

"I don't hate you," is what Hilary says, numbly, despite the tears. "I hate that we are mad. But I never asked you to change it."

She sinks, slowly, to sitting at the top of the steps, as though she can't even hold herself up any longer. Her knees are up, her arms draped over them; she cannot help but be elegant, be graceful, even in exhaustion. "But I don't see how you have even tried to soothe anything. Every time I've spoken, you've lashed out at me and told me how pointless it is."

Her eyes close. "Do you not remember what I said to you, the last time I saw you?" Her hand has risen, covers her eyes as though to block out the light. "I can't make you feel something you've decided to ignore." Hilary exhales, sighs, her hand lowering again, her eyes opening again. "I don't know, Ivan." A small shrug. "You keep telling me you want to, we should. So again: what am I to do? I will not beg you to love me if you don't."

The silence stretches again, long as a northern twilight.

At last, "I remember." Soft, that. He stirs; shifts his weight, turns after all. He looks up the stairs, which are hardwood, sturdy, a bit steeper than modern design would have it. She is sitting at the top now. They are alone in this house, and it occurs to Ivan that they have never, ever been alone here before. It seems ironic. This is where their son lives.

Lived.

"Do you love me?" he asks, then. "I'm not speaking of need, or survival. I want to know if you still love me, despite all that's transpired between us."

Twice now, he has not answered her. What is she to do but go, when he keeps leaving her, when he betrays her, when he keeps telling her to go, that it is ended? What else is there for her to do but leave him, then? Ivan does not tell her some new trick. He just moves forward, and she sits there, worn thin by days of this, weeks before it. Those sunglasses lie forgotten in one hand, dangling by a stem.

It is only just now, after everything, that she even begins to have an idea what he wants from her. Why he has been acting so ... so very mad.

Hilary sighs, saying softly: "Je t'aimerai jusqu'à ce que les étoiles s'éteignent, Ivan."

And this: "Ya lyublyu tebya do vsego mira ne ischeznet."

And this, quietest of all.

"I dream of people's throats being ripped open. I dream of dead animals and the things that eat dead animals. I dream of rape. I dream of monsters following me down endless hallways. I dreamt once that I vomited maggots, pieces of someone I knew, someone I had devoured. I dream of drowning, but never dying, only suffocating and sinking, lightless, forever.

Hilary stares at him, the blood out of her face, but not from fear. "I dream horrible, horrible things. I dream like this all the time. And the mad part is that I often don't even feel fear, or disgust, or distress. I just wake, and go on." She shrugs one shoulder, shakes her head. New tears have brimmed, and fallen over, flooding her eyes and dripping down her cheeks, falling past those perfectly formed lips.

"Sometimes, I have little dreams. And in them, I am not mad. My parents and my brother live. We are all together, and no one hates anyone else. There is light, and warmth, and Anton is with me. And Anton loves me, and is not afraid of me when I hold him. We lie in bed together, you and I and our son, and none of us are afraid of anything. There's only love. Nothing stopping us from it. Nothing darkly whispering other things in our ears. Just love. Happiness."

It would be merciful, if she would just glance away. But she doesn't. She swallows, though, taking in a shuddering breath. Sniffing, and even that is somehow graceful.

"From those dreams, I wake in tears. I wake in terror, and pain. Because it is not real, and perhaps it never can be. But lately, because now I know that you do not even care to try.

"Of course I love you, Ivan. I have never stopped. At my worst, and when I am at my angriest, when I am mad, mad, mad, there is still me, behind it, underneath it, loving you, and only wanting you to love me back."

She tells him aching things.

She tells him appalling, horrifying things. She tells him things that make his blood run cold, and things that make him twist inside for her.

She tells him things that break him open. That reach right into him to rip the armor from his heart; that leave him raw, vulnerable, stripped bare. She tells him things he never knew about her before; about that inner life behind the blackness of her eyes, where even he -- he, of all people -- thought nothing at all existed. She tells him the terrible, soul-scarring things she sees in her mind, and the beautiful, awful, unattainable things she dreams of.

She tells him,

until the stars go out.

until the world disappears.

and though he only understands one of these, it is the sound of the other that leaves its mark on him. That's her native tongue. That's the language she spoke before she was quite so broken, quite so mad.

--

There are tears in Ivan's eyes when she is finished. They are frustrated, self-castigating tears, and he turns away from her, covers his eyes with his hand and wrinkles his brow, squeezes his eyes shut, bares his teeth -- all in silence, a silent howling rictus, passing. He mops his palm over his face, covers his mouth a second, drops it. He looks up at her then, with his wet eyes, with his drawn and feral stare.

"I do love you," he says, harrowed. "I love you desperately, to the point of pain, and I am sorry, I am sorry I doubted you, broke faith with you, hurt you.

"But I don't know how to love you without caging you, collaring you, owning you. That is the way you've taught me to love you. That's the only way anyone has ever taught me to love anyone else, because I've never... I've never loved anyone but you. You're all I've known."

That is a painful truth. It shouldn't be painful; not after all these years, not after all the perverse delight he's taken in being so rudderless, so anchorless, so unattached, such a heartbreaker. He looks down a moment, brow tight, shoulders moving with a deep breath.

"I'll learn another way, if you'll let me. If you'll hold back your anger and your disgust, if you'll give me your patience and your forgiveness. If you'll remember that for all my flaws, I never, ever mean to harm you. I would rather lose you. I would rather die."

For a while, she's so quiet. Her face is so wet and she's making no attempt to wipe it, clean it, dry her eyes. She just watches him, as he flays himself open: it's her. It's only ever her. There's nothing else he knows.

"You mustn't have me followed, even for my own safety," she says quietly.

Ivan is looking for an oath, perhaps. An assurance: that yes, she will try to restrain her hatred, her mad rage for everything, and forgive him, and love him, and gently tutor him in a different way of loving her, holding her, being with her. But this is Hilary. And Hilary cannot see what Ivan might really need. She hears him asking her to teach him something different, and that's what sticks.

"You must yield to me my territory. My home, my people; my freedom, even freedom from you. You mustn't intrude or invade, coming in like a thief to leave things on my pillow." Hilary does lift her hand, using her slender sleeve to dry one cheek with her wrist, then the other. "And never, ever, ever fuck another woman unless we've agreed to it, unless we want it." There is a certain viciousness in this, a fervor, but -- of course there would be, after recent events.

She sniffs. "You must still break me, the way you do. Because I still need that. Want it," she adds, quietly, like brushing fingertips over hypersensitive, wanting skin. Her eyes meet his for a moment, there. "I don't know how to tell you what the lines will be, there. Between owning me when I need it and letting me be free, all the same. I don't know where they are, myself." Her throat moves, flashing white, as she swallows.

"You must adore me, and praise me, and call me your beautiful girl. And learn when to control me and when to let me control myself. And you have to try and love Anton. Care about him. Because it makes me happy," she says, small, whispered, "to think of you loving him."

Hilary blinks a few times, flicking away tears that want to shed, that she does not want to release. "I hate that we are mad, Ivan. But that is not the same as hating you. I don't hate you. My madness hates you. And everything. But that... that is not the same." She stammers, not understanding even what she tries to say.

That we are not our madnesses.

That that is what makes it madness in the first place.

[*change that to 'we are not our madness']

This is what he wants. More than assurances, more than oaths: this. A roadmap, however bare, however spare. A pattern to follow, a lay to the land. This is what she wants, this is what she does not want. This is what he must do, and what he must not do. This, to earn the privilege of calling himself her lover; her beloved.

Ivan listens to her. He listens perhaps more intently and more seriously than he has ever listened to anyone in a long time. Territory. Freedom. Privacy. Fidelity. He nods after each stipulation: yes. yes. yes. yes. In a way, he is reminded of the time he asked what she wanted him to do to her. How to break her the way he does, as she puts it. He is reminded of all the odd and precise little details she gave him then: a riding crop, ropes, high heels, long gloves. It might be pretty. She still wants him to call her his beautiful girl. Some tenderness -- the first in so very long -- unfurls its shoots through his heart, then.

She wants him to love their son. Try.

She wants him to know that her madness is not the same as her mind.

"I understand," he says, when she is done. He speaks softly. They are too raw for anything but. He puts his hand on the banister after a time, and he begins to take the first few steps up toward her. "I'll do my best, Hilary."

A small pause. He is close to her, then, close enough that he holds his hand out to help her up.

"Come on," he says quietly. "Let's get Anton's things."

Ivan rises toward her. Hilary does not flinch, or shrink. She shrank in the car, so terrified of him. Terrified, only, above everything, that he was there to keep Anton from her, to take him back, to stop her. She felt panic rising, and it turned to rage. As it so often does, in every mammal.

Now he comes, and she does not retreat. She remains quite still, salt tracks on her face, following his eyes. By the time he comes close enough to extend his hand, she is looking up at him. And what he says makes her face screw up, in pain. She fills with tears again.

"You didn't hear him, when I took him away. The way he screamed."

There is little he can say to that. Ivan's brow furrows. After a moment, he lowers his hand. After another, he lowers himself; sits at the top of the stairs beside her.

"We don't visit him enough," he says quietly. "He doesn't know us the way he knows this place and these people. That's all."

It is cramped, and she doesn't intuit that she should scoot over. Perhaps he sits a step above her, below her, or simply sandwiches in, squeezes alongside her. She sniffs.

"You didn't hear how he screamed," she whispers, again, and looks to him. "I don't wish to take him from his home, from people who love him. I only want to be near him. I was only taking him because you were done with me."

She reaches up, wiping at her eyes again. "What do you want for him?"

Ivan does, in fact, squeeze in alongside her. Lucky for them they're both slender, lean-bodied people. Lucky for them the house boasts a sturdy set of stairs.

"I was only giving him to you," Ivan replies, quiet and a little wry, "because I thought you wanted to leave me and I didn't want to use our son to trap you. You'd said something about that when you were angry. That I would use Anton to control you. I didn't want to confirm your fears."

He thinks a moment, then. Looks over what he can see of this comfortable little home. Sighs a little, passing a hand down his face, lifting his shoulders in a shrug.

"I want him to be comfortable and safe. I want good people taking care of him. I want him to have a relationship with you, however fragile it may be, because you want a relationship with him. There's no reason why he can't live here a few months of the year and spend the rest of his time in the States, or maybe in Paris. There's no reason why his people can't move with him -- or even you, if you wanted to be near. When he's old enough, I suppose we'll find him a nice school in Chicago or New York; save the international trips for summer and winter vacation.

"What about you? What do you want for him?"

Only when Ivan nudges against her, pushing, does Hilary realize what he wants. Despite everything, she looks at him with vague affront, but it's weak, and it fades quickly. She shifts a bit, sliding to the side, letting him come near. He tells her what he does, and she isn't looking at him, but she does hear him. Her eyes close. She never stopped fearing that: that he would use Anton to control her. It is the one thing that would, in reality, break her completely, and forever. If he used Anton, she would shatter. She would never leave. She would take anything.

She thinks so.

Ivan waves his hand, like magic, describing the way Anton's life could be. What they could do.

Hilary just opens her eyes, looking downward. She thinks for a while. She shakes her head.

"Love."

Love.

Simple as that. Pure as that. This, from a woman who is neither pure nor simple, nor even kind or good. Ivan hears it, and Ivan exhales. After a moment, carefully, as though expecting her to tear herself away from him again,

he wraps his arm around her shoulders. He turns toward her and lays his brow, the bridge of his nose, gently against the side of her head. For a little while, he rests against her like that.

"Anton is loved," Ivan whispers. "You love him. Miron loves him. Izolda and Polina love him. Elodie will love him." He kisses her temple through the veil of her hair. "I'll learn to love him, too. I will."

For the first time in a long time, or so it feels, Hilary does not pull away from Ivan, or throw his touch from her. She is still while he embraces her, rests his face close to her own. She closes her eyes while he tells her, assures her, that Anton is loved. By her, by Miron, Izolda, Polina, and for the first time she can remember the idea of anyone else loving her son, anyone but his parents, does not fill her with rage. She hears the name of the redhead and figures out, because Hilary is hardly stupid, who Ivan is talking about.

Someone to speak French to her son, to feed him French food, to teach him French ways. So that he would have a part of his mother there, growing up, even when she could not be with him. So he would not grow up wholly Crescent Moon, Russian, with no trace of her but his black eyes.

Hilary is kissed. She opens her eyes, sighing soundlessly.

"We'll ask Miron," she muses. "What to do with Anton. How he should live. Miron will know."

And Miron, who loves, will not advise them anything that would distress the boy.

"I'll talk to Miron," he promises. "We'll talk to him together, if you'd like. But if you want to be with Anton, then we'll take him with us. We'll take them all if we have to. We can make it work."

A final, gentle squeeze, and then Ivan unravels his arm from around Hilary. He stands, one hand on the banister for balance. "Come on," he urges, reaching for her hand again. "Let's go get his things."

Ivan rises, but Hilary is reaching into the handbag slung across her upper body, shaking her head at Ivan's outstretched hand. She's taking out her phone, or rather: a new phone, a different one. "We'll talk to him now. I'm having him brought here."

She is saying, as she is tapping a text out. Slowly.

Ivan -- one foot on the step below -- pauses. Considers; then nods.

"All right." He reverses, starts heading down the steps instead. "We'll talk to him right now."

It makes sense to her. To know now, not to make other choices. Not to move all of Anton's things, not to move him from one continent to another, not to fire or hire or adjust employment terms for three other people until she knows what to do with her son.

To bring him back here, to this house, and let him continue his life as he has known it from the start. To leave him again, back to the States, only to go through what she went through the last two times: days, weeks of depression, of hating herself and hating Ivan, hating everyone she sees and trying desperately to conceal it in sex or pills or what-have-you.

Or perhaps to stay here with him, at least a while. Apply for a visa and live in this house until he knows her, until she remembers who she is -- or discovers it. Winter with him, and summon Ivan here now and again. Spend Christmas together, winter surrounding them with snow, fires in the hearth.

Or take him with them to America. Little trouble: they are his birth parents. He is their son. If they are U.S. citizens, they can take him. Perhaps move Miron and Polina, at least, with them. Elodie too, maybe. Izolda might not come; she has a family here. She has children of her own. Have Max train Polina, have Dmitri train Miron. Buy Anton a house somewhere, a place of his own for him to grow into, in one of the finest American cities. Maybe they will all move to New York.

Christ knows. Hilary doesn't. She is not sure at all what to do, what will be best for Anton. What they can all survive. She has such faith, suddenly, in the boy who turned his back on everything he'd known the past two years in order to keep his devotion to a toddler. She does not think that faith is misplaced.

So a text is sent, out to Miranda. Hilary tells her to bring Miron and Anton, right now, to the house. And Miranda will obey. It is bred into her to obey. She is paid to obey. So, in Novgorod proper, Miranda obeys, and informs Miron: they are going back out to the house, right now. With Anton.

Anton is in the living room with Darya. He is slobbering on the corner of a pillow, and he has wet his diaper. He gurgles when he sees Miron enter the living room, rolling to his feet and stomping over to hug his manservant's leg, drooling on the boy's two-day-old jeans.

--

At the country estate, Hilary puts her phone away. She lifts her hand, catching Ivan's as he passes her. Her fingers entwine at the tips with his own. She looks at him, then begins to draw him back to her. Down to her. And if he permits, and if he will kneel on the steps near her, she kisses him. It is soft and it has depth, richness, her lips opening to his, drawing his breath in to mingle with her own.

It must be very confusing to be servant to Hilary. To be subjected to the wild winds of her whim: do this, do that, now this, now that, no, she's changed her mind. She hasn't been here very long, but in that time Miranda has already made headway toward getting Miron out of the country -- semi-legally at first, legally in eventuality. In that time, Miron has already made some headway -- albeit somewhat less, respectively -- toward coming to grips to the way his life has been upended. He is leaving Russia. He is staying with Anton. He is going to America, and goodness only knows when he'll return.

That'll all change with Hilary's text. They're to come back. They're to bring Anton. They're to sit down and talk, and Miron is to become responsible, solely or at least in great part, for what happens to a baby boy not of his blood. A baby boy nonetheless far more attached to him than either of his noble, erstwhile parents. He is to do this, and they are to do this, and there will be no explanation whatsoever for why, how, what changed between Hilary and Ivan, when.

Their lives are not their own, these kin who serve truer-blooded Silver Fangs. And in that way, perhaps Hilary, for all the horror of her upbringing, is in reality quite lucky after all. To be able to demand freedom. To be able to demand self-determination, and to reasonably expect to get it.

--

Ivan's hand is caught as he starts down the stairs. He pauses: arresting delicately in mid-step, balanced and smooth. He turns, an eyebrow up. Her fingers wind with his and the eyebrow comes back down. He understands before she looks at him. He knows before she begins to pull.

He goes easily, gracefully, willingly, sinking to his knees on the hardwood steps. The very first time they kissed, it was on a set of stairs, in the dark, in an ocean of noise and bodies and alcohol. He tasted like vodka and she tasted like

herself,

complex and deepening, opening her lips to him like a riddle, or a provocation. He did not know then how deeply he would come to love her, but even then he knew, he knew she was different, unique, rare, risky.

His mouth opens to hers. Soft and slow; a patient, textured kiss. When it is over he looks at her a moment. Words don't seem necessary. He touches her face; swipes his thumb across those dried tear-tracks on her cheek. Then he rises again -- their hands stretch between them, and then their fingers part.

"I'm going to get a drink," he says quietly. "Come find me in the dining room when you're ready."

At least right now, Miron knows nothing about the reason he and his charge are being called back to the house. Only that they are being summoned. Only that they are going, now. After Anton has been changed and given a small snack to keep him occupied in the car ride. Then back to the house.

Miranda will drive.

Miron will, perhaps, try not to think of why this is happening. What it means. He has been through so much, in less than twelve hours. Anton doesn't know, or care. He wants to look out the window, and point at everything he knows the word for. In any language.

--

This is a very different kiss from their first. They touch hands, when once she held the railing and hardly touched him at all but for her lips. She was standing, then. She was with what might pass for friends to a person like her. And he knew she was married, knew she was mated to a much stronger wolf. And he knew he was trespassing, and knew he would trespass further. Even someone like Ivan should have known better.

They kiss slowly now, and softly, and well. Hilary tastes his mouth again, effortlessly passionate and effortlessly graceful in her passion. She follows him, half an inch, when he draws back from her. Her eyes open slowly to his. He rises, and he is drawing back, and her hand tightens.

Pulls at him again, back to her, catching a breath from the air.