Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Category:

Gen

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationships:

Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov & Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Irina Rozanova, Alexei Rozanov & Irina Rozanova

Characters:

Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov, Irina Rozanova

Additional Tags:

Pre-Canon, Family, Sibling Love, Warning for Dimitri Rozanov, He's as bad as you think, Rule 63, Women in the NHL, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Gender or Sex

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of Still I Rise, Part 3 of Set in Heated Rivalry-verse

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-31 Completed: 2026-03-10 Words: 14,384 Chapters: 3/3

We Are Seven

Summary

Aleksei is seven when his father remarries. He is nine when Yulia is born.

If things had been a little different, he would have hated her. He was prone to envy at that stage: restless, anxious, without purpose. Jealousy would have eaten him through and left room for something uglier to move in. It doesn’t, because Yulia loves him first.

Aleksei is nine and furious at the world, and he doesn’t stand a chance. His heart cracks, breaks and swallows her whole.

Notes

Okay, so this one is

a) finished
b) part 1 of a three part series about the life and times of Yulia Rozanova.
c) sad

People who die in canon, die in canon. I like to think that Yulia nevertheless got a better deal than Ilya, but--I mean, it's really hard to tell?

If you struggle with concepts like DV and depression, this one isn't for you. Ilya's backstory is b l e a k

Chapter 1

1

Aleksei is seven when his father remarries.

Things aren’t great before, but they are normal. Aleksei doesn’t have a mother, and doesn’t think about it much. Not until his father brings one home.

Irina is a stranger in their doorway: young, tall, copper-blond hair down to her waist, light eyes. Most of the women Aleksei knows are cleaners and nannies and wives who pass through the apartment—older, separate, never really looking at him, or he at them. Irina looks. She kneels until they’re eye-level and tells him she will be his new mother. 

He stands there and can’t figure out what expression he’s supposed to have. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to hug her. If it’s rude not to want to.

She never does become his mother; no serious attempt is made, on anybody’s part. He likes her well enough. She doesn’t hit him. She doesn’t shout. She smells like oranges and coffee. In the mornings, she makes him tea and gently corrects his consonants over breakfast, teaches him how to say his h’s and s’s without hissing.

That's great and all, but she never tucks him in. She never tells him stories. She doesn’t take him to school. She doesn’t step between him and his father when his father gets mean, which is—Aleksei decides early on—the whole point of mothers. Irina doesn’t belong to him, and he doesn’t belong to her. They both belong to his father, in different ways, and his father keeps it that way with a steady hand.

Irina is eighteen when she marries a man twice her age. Aleksei doesn’t learn why. He doesn’t ask. He grows older and understands enough to be glad he never learned. What he knows of her is sad enough. 

He is nine when Yulia is born.

He doesn’t know what to do with a sister. He doesn’t know what to do with a child who belongs in that apartment in a way he never will. A child his father wants. A child with a mother who didn’t die in childbirth, who has someone to love without reserve.

If things had been a little different, he thinks sometimes, he would have hated her. He was prone to envy at that stage: restless, anxious, without purpose. Jealousy would have eaten him through and left room for something uglier to move in.

It doesn’t, because Yulia loves him first.

She reaches for him with her whole body, a baby’s absolute trust. She clings. She laughs when he enters a room and cries when he leaves. And Aleksei—Aleksei is nine and furious at the world and confused and pointless, and he doesn’t stand a chance. His heart cracks, breaks and swallows her whole.

They do everything together, for a given value of do. While she’s a baby, he takes her everywhere he can. The older she gets, the easier it becomes. She’s a precocious child, cheerful and full of energy, and by three she is following him through the apartment on deceptively fast, stubby legs.

Her first word is his name, or so he insists—a garbled mess that roughly sounds like “Lyekei.” He takes it as proof that she is his. Proof he should keep her with him. Proof, mostly, that he has a purpose that isn’t pleasing his father. Even at the tender age of twelve, he knows an impossible task when it's set to him. 

Besides, it’s not like he has better things going on. The apartment feels wrong more often than it feels right, and Yulia makes him happy. 

Irina tries. Irina always tries. But Irina is a young woman in a small city with nobody of her own, married to a man who hurts people to feel strong. She smiles too much. She apologises with her eyes. She gets quieter, slowly, as the years pass.
His father gets angrier.

Aleksei learns to watch moods because nobody else can. Irina certainly can’t; she is terrible at it. She is too soft, too placating, too exhausted. She apologises for faults she doesn’t have. She tries to improve in ways his father doesn’t care about. She is honest to a fault, young and beautiful, and she doesn’t stand a chance. 

By thirteen, Aleksei is pretty good at managing his father and keeping himself and Yulia out of sight. He has a system. 

During the day, when Aleksei is at school and their father is at work, Yulia is safe. More than safe—she is with her mother, doing whatever daughters and mothers do when the daughter is four, and the mother is barely holding herself together. Aleksei knows they have rituals. Stories they make up and tell and re-tell, places they go that are theirs. He never asks, and they never offer. It’s understood between Irina and him that they are allies of necessity, and that the best thing they can do for each other is enable the strange shared custody agreement that they built. 

School ends at one thirty. He bikes home or takes the bus and is through the door by two. Thirty more minutes to get Yulia ready—he packs the night before as a rule, but there is always something, some factor of chaos he didn’t predict—and then they’re out again.

Two-thirty is the window. If they miss it, everything gets harder. They go to the rink.

He doesn’t know the first time he takes her that it will be the best decision he ever makes. He doesn’t know it will change the world. He takes her because he would take her anywhere. He would take her to school if it were allowed. So: the ice.

In Tver, it is hockey or nothing. Aleksei has played since he could stand; everybody has. He is a big kid, growing bigger by the month—spitting image of his father, they tell him, and it sends a chill down his spine every time. Hockey is a logical pastime. Their father approves, and approval is permission to leave the apartment.

Aleksei isn’t very good at it. He doesn’t think fast. His body grows too fast to ever feel comfortable. He is naturally strong enough to make up the difference at this stage and in this rink, because the truly gifted boys have been scouted out years ago. What’s left are hobbyists and late bloomers and kids who haven’t had their mettle tested yet. Everyone knows Aleksei. Everyone knows his father. Mostly, they leave him alone.

When he starts bringing Yulia, nobody asks questions. She’s tiny and cute, and people love babies. Well, people love the idea of babies; the moment babies become opinions and needs and inconvenient truths, the love gets complicated. But at four, Yulia is still firmly in the “cute” category.

Coaches and trainers don’t bother with her, and he doesn’t ask them to. He sits her on the bench and pulls skates over her feet himself. He teaches her how to stand, and more importantly, how to pick herself up when she falls, because she falls constantly.

Yulia skates like she is born on the ice. She is quick and mean. She learns edges the way she learns words—instinctive, impatient, irrepressible. The rink becomes hers in a way it never becomes Aleksei’s, and he feels a solid chunk of his ever-growing dread loosen and slide off. Never mind what he is or isn’t, the kid smiles again. She laughs. She grins and bounces off the boards with how much energy she has contained in that tiny body. At home, she still has to be quiet, but she bears it easier now that she has a place where she can shine as brightly as she likes, where she can be loud and obnoxious and praised for it as long as she follows the basic rules.

When she is five, the coaches take notice of her—not seriously, not yet, but charmed enough by her enthusiasm that they let her participate. At this age, they tell themselves it doesn’t matter. Most of these kids stop coming anyway, when interest fizzles out. No harm done. Besides, she can use the practice when she gets into figure skating. Aleksei doesn’t correct them. He saves corrections for things that matter.

When Yulia is six, she starts calling herself Ilya. It happens the way things happen in their lives: sideways, strange, born of pressure.

People at the rink start asking questions. Who’s the kid? Why is she here? Why does she play like that? Isn’t she a girl?

Aleksei doesn’t know how to cross this hurdle. Yes, she is a girl. It doesn’t matter, except it obviously does. She’s there because she wants to be. She’s there because she moves like a hummingbird on the ice and because she is clearly and obviously the best player in her cohort.

But that’s not the question, is it? They don’t care about her interests or her life. They care that a little blond girl with big blue eyes and baby cheeks is playing hockey, and that there isn’t a neat explanation for it. Little girls don’t play hockey. Not like that. Not with boys.

Yulia solves it for him, in what he will later recognise as her trademark lateral thinking.

Ilya Kovalchuk’s name is everywhere—on posters, on rink signs, on kids’ jerseys. Kovalchuk means hockey in Tver. Ilya means hockey. So when the questions start and don’t stop, Yulia starts giving them an answer they recognise.

Who’s your hero?

Ilya Kovalchuk.

She says it like a spell. Ilya Kovalchuk. Ilya Kovalchuk. Kovalchuk, Kovalchuk, Kovalchuk. Adults love asking children dumb questions like that, and they love getting an answer that makes the world feel orderly. It becomes cute, plucky, harmless. This stringy little girl, picture-perfect and glittering, claims the local hockey god. People decide it’s wholesome. People decide her older brother must be the reason, and that makes it even easier to accept.

From there, it doesn’t take much. She crows enough about her idol; some idiot kid calls her Kovalchuk as a joke; she pounces.

“Kovalchuk is too far,” she says, bright-eyed and perfectly serious. “But I’ll take Ilya.”

And she does.

Even back then, she took what she needed, what she decided was hers by right. She claimed it, wore it and powered through the jokes, the sneers, all of it. And it stuck. 

People forgot, because people always forget, and the rink was not a place you went for consistency or long memories. Kids came and went. Coaches rotated. A city that small, a rink that shitty—everything turned over sooner rather than later. And just like that, nobody was left who remembered she had another name. 

Nobody even knew her real one.

At six, Yulia is integrated enough with the coaches—especially Coach Kutrov, who used to train him when he was younger—that Aleksei stops going on the ice altogether.

It’s a blessing. For several months, he does nothing, just sits tucked up in the bleachers behind a concrete column where nobody will see him unless they’re looking. If he were to open his eyes, he could see little baby Ilya bundled up like a postal parcel, huffing and puffing and terrorising the boys. He doesn’t. He sits, alone, in silence, rests his head and his heart, gives his body to work through the strange jitters it has started producing at all times. 

The results are undeniable from the first week. He’s half out of his mind when he drops her off, and by the time she’s done, he’s calm enough to speak like a person. He can talk to her. Talk to her coach. Remember things. Follow a conversation without losing it halfway through. He can help her change, make sure her hair is dry, make sure she’s got her coat on properly, make sure she hasn’t forgotten her scarf or done that thing where she stuffs one mitten into the other and calls it solved.

Then food becomes the next big one.

She needs a balanced diet. She’s growing like a weed, and hockey is demanding even at this stage, and if she eats badly now, her body will form wrong, and there won’t be an easy fix later. He doesn’t know anything about food, so he reads and learns and prepares. Careful, pre-packed meals. Some shops sell them pre-made, and they’re a bit pricey, but a viable alternative if he didn’t manage to make them at home. It’s all manageable. Easy. 

His memory is still awful—stress, the books say, which is the least helpful thing in the world except that it reassures him it’s probably not a brain tumour—so he starts making lists. First on post-its, then on a notepad. After six months, he has three notebooks: one for food, one for hockey, one for life.

There is plenty Ilya needs to learn that nobody seems willing or able to teach her, and they usually have two hours after training before they have to go back home. That’s when it’s his turn.

It sounds more complicated than it is; most of these are straightforward things. He can’t remember who taught them to him—nannies, probably—but Ilya has no use for the quiet downtrodden women their father employs, and the women have no use for a child who looks them in the eye like she’s counting their flaws. They let her be.

Which is not to say that teaching her is a hardship. Ilya is so smart, it sends chills down his back sometimes. She is a kid, a proper baby, but she speaks like she’s twelve. She can read—not perfectly yet, but she’s getting there—and she is bigger than eight-year-old boys, never mind girls her age.

What she doesn’t know are the dumb things. How to open and shut doors properly. What keys are, how they work and how you keep them. How windows latch. Where the fire escapes are. How to cross the street. How to talk to adults—both the ones you know and the ones you don’t. Basic things. She absorbs it like water. He starts keeping a fourth notebook of things she already learned so he can stop teaching her the same lesson twice. 

Time blends. It blurs. Ilya is six, then seven, then eight. 

Hockey and healthy—if bland—meals keep her well-formed. At least he thinks so. He’s not great at judging the health of children, but her hair is shiny and smooth, her nails strong, her posture straight. She sleeps through the night—another thing hockey is good for—and her skin is clear.

Coach Kutrov places her with the mixed group, boys ten and up. He runs her labs—at Aleksei’s urging—once every six months and hands the results to Aleksei, not their father, not Irina. Other than a minor iron deficiency, she hits the necessary boxes. It feels like proof. Proof that he is doing an acceptable job. Proof he can keep her alive.

At the rink, most people forget Ilya is a girl at all. That’s a relief in a way—it would have been easier if she weren’t—but it’s not a fiction Aleksei is allowed to sink into. Ilya is a girl, and a very pretty girl already. Their father is a cop and something else, something to do with internal security, and Irina—Irina is doing all she can already. Nobody is coming. There is no off-ramp, no nook, no adult who will appear and fix it. It’s him or no one.

So when she’s eight and he’s seventeen, he teaches her the other stuff.

What to say when kids twice her age grin at her and say things that aren’t meant for a child. He teaches her how to say it flat. How to say it loud enough for other children to hear. How to make it embarrassing. He teaches her how to pick locks—he has to bribe a shady guy from the building across from them to teach him first—and how to run for cover. She’s fast and strong for her age, but the main thing she is is tough and good under pressure. She knows how to move when she’s in pain, how to shrug off things that would stun other kids. It’s easy to teach her how to run, what to hide under, how to scream for help.

He teaches her how to punch.

Realistically, if a little girl has to resort to punching, things have gone to shit far past the point where he can plan for it, but it’s better than not knowing. So she learns, bright-eyed and eager, like she is about everything he teaches her. She learns where to aim, how to duck, what to look for. He teaches her what she can use to protect herself with and what will break and hurt her more. He teaches her how to keep her centre of gravity low, how to keep her chin down.

He teaches her how to tell the difference between big pain and little pain.

“Big pain,” he tells her, “is sharp. Big pain is wrong. Big pain is when your body is telling you something broke, something moved that shouldn’t move. Big pain is when you can’t put weight on it. Big pain is—”
He stops. What is the point, he reasons? Why name what is so obvious? Why poke at wounds they can’t heal? 

In retrospect, of course, he should not have stopped. He should have talked about it, over and over, talked about nothing else until she understood. He should have, himself, realised that something can break in your heart, that something can move that shouldn’t. That something can break and heal brittle, and then one day you will not be able to put weight on your understanding of yourself. 

Everything true about bones and blood is true about heart and mind. But he didn’t know, so he didn’t say. 

I did my best. 

Irina also does her best. She has no tools and no strength to fight their father directly, but she does what she can. She slips Aleksei money for food—or jewelry to sell when cash is hard to come by. She makes sure the clothes she buys are sturdy and warm, their winter gear the highest quality. She gives him money for Ilya’s equipment and, very carefully, doesn’t ask what it’s for. She sits with Aleksei while he studies in the morning and brings him books—science, biology, chemistry—that he can’t easily find. She looks over his homework, corrects his essays, even writes a few he doesn’t have time for.

Sometimes she takes Ilya’s face in her hands, fingers smoothing the tight, no-nonsense braid Aleksei tied. “Good,” she tells her. “You’re so good. Listen to your brother, my love. He is always there for you.”

Sometimes she whispers to Aleksei instead, when the kettle is on and the apartment is quiet for a rare minute: “Thank you.”

He hates those moments more than anything.

He hates her with a visceral, helpless rage he doesn’t feel for others, even their father who is the source of all the horror. He hates her for what it must take to humble yourself like that. For her courage and her weakness. For not doing more—for doing as much as he has.

He hates a lot of things. Most everything, except Ilya. He learns it from his father. Spitting image, etcetera.

Men like Grigori had always needed a target.

Aleksei was the first and most obvious target: the misplaced, disappointing thing that killed his first love. Men like Grigori romanticised dead wives; they liked to forget the ways they sapped their strength and ground their joy until the normal battles life threw their way became insurmountable. There was a lot for a man like Grigori to hate about a kid like Aleksei. He hated that Aleksei never went anywhere with hockey. That he wasn’t popular, wasn’t the talk of the town. That he didn’t make him look good. That he spent his days braiding Ilya’s hair, preparing her meals, taking her to and from the rink.

The reasons spread and multiplied. Men like Grigori hated with passion and skill. They relished it. They let it burn high and bright and consume everything in sight.

Irina was easy to hate because so much of her was good. Men like Grigori did not enjoy the proximity of virtue, and men like Grigori hated the things they did not enjoy. He hated her for not having a career. He hated her for being young and beautiful. He hated her for being quiet, weak, frightened. He hated her because she could not hide how sad he made her.

The final campaign was Ilya. Yulia, as she still was sometimes. It took him a while to build the fortitude to hate a child he once wanted. It took some doing because even in his rotten mind, he recognised that Yulia was everything he admired and everything he liked to think he was. Smart, strong, brave. She took what she claimed. She never lied. She never backed down. She was loved by everyone, and she only loved what was hers and not a single thing more.

Men like Grigori could, in the end, grow the ability to hate a seven-year-old girl if they destroyed their capacity for love. It took effort, but it could be done if you tried hard enough.

Time moves, they adapt. They settle into a strange, relatively functional, ruin of a family. 

Aleksei’s job is simple enough, for all that his results are unacceptably poor: get Ilya out of that apartment when he can, and stand between her and their father when he can’t. Irina was on her own in that respect. He left her to her own devices without a twinge of conscience—

Well. Not without a twinge. Only a lunatic would be happy about other people suffering. But he didn’t stop it. Not once. That wasn’t his job.

It’s fucked up, in retrospect. It’s fucked up that Ilya had to learn any of that. That Aleksei didn’t teach her to reject it all. She grew up in a fucked up place with a fucked up brother and a fucked up mother and a fucked up father, and didn’t know any better. If she’d had a proper adult, maybe she would have learned about pain in the context it was meant for: muscle soreness, skinned knees, training injuries. Maybe she would have learned that your mind can be hurt as badly as your body and that it’s your responsibility to try and fix the damage as best you can. Maybe she wouldn’t have known how to jump out of a window onto a fire escape and down into crowds. Maybe she would have had friends.

She didn’t have that adult, so she learned how to survive, how to stand her ground, how to compartmentalise. She learned that authority looked away unless it truly couldn’t avoid it, and even then, it looked for the first excuse not to care. She learned a thousand lessons, most of them worthless, most of them will only ever be baggage she’d drag. 

Also, in retrospect, maybe Aleksei was always going to be a doctor.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Careful with this one, loves. If you aren't okay with reading about DV, this is a lot. Its, in fact, upsetting.

Ilya is ten, and Aleksei is nineteen when they move to Moscow. Things devolve further. Aleksei does what he can.

Moscow is not Tver. Tver is a small, run-down rink, with terrible roads and neighbours who know your name. Moscow is eyes. Moscow is traffic. Moscow is the world. 

Their apartment is smaller than it should be for what their father is becoming. The walls are thinner. The neighbours are physically closer and mentally farther away. There are fewer places to disappear indoors and countless ways to do so outdoors, none of them good. 

Rebuilding his systems takes some doing. New routes, new windows, new timing. Who is home when, what can be said and what absolutely cannot. Is Ilya eating—when, and what? Where can he buy high-quality food for her? Is there a clinic nearby where they can get their checkups done discreetly? How does the metro function? Where does it go, how reliable is it? Is it safe? Is any of this safe? It’s a lot of work, but he enjoys it. His old systems were falling apart anyway; he just didn’t have the time for a complete overhaul, so he kept patching things as he went. This is better. 

It’s not the only upside, either. Aleksei enrols in university, in a criminology program, which buys him time—both day-to-day and overall. The big picture is clear enough: he’s bought himself three years. Five if he’s lucky. On a more micro scale, he simply has more time. University is less time-consuming than high school, which means he can shuffle things around better. He can spend more time with Ilya; he can sit down with her and tailor his approach to her needs, because she can participate a lot more now than she could at five or six. 

Most importantly, he can actively influence his father’s absence from the home. 

Grigori is moving up in the world. From a police commissioner in Tver, he becomes some sort of low-level official in the FSB. Apparatchik, without a doubt, with little concrete power except, of course, the weight of the org itself. People fear him more obviously than before, and for good reason. It isn’t only about what you’re allowed to do, it’s what kind of man you have to be to want that job. What kind of contacts you will make, once you get it.

All of which is to say that Grigori starts going out more. He flaunts young mistresses, goes to events, and throws his weight around. He likes being seen. He likes being feared. And Aleksei—six-four already, broad-shouldered, the kind of face people describe with variations of cold and wrong and strange—is becoming a valuable accessory to take with. 

Becoming is a nice word for it. He works at it—studies them, studies how they move. Studies his face in the mirror, practices the expressions. He ropes Ilya and Irina into it sometimes, gets them to help him practice saying the right words without looking ridiculous. That’s the hardest part. Aleksei is awkward by nature, a bit puzzled by the people around him, and severely removed from people his age. He knows this about himself and doesn’t particularly mind it—people his age are, by his estimation, complete and utter idiots—but it does mean he has a steeper hill to climb if he’s going to become someone his father wants to bring along. 

The solution is simple and, this time, comes from Irina. 

“You can be quiet, Alyosha,” she says, lips twitching. “Mysterious and brooding is a better fit than loud and gregarious. You have the look down already, just be sure to frown some more. Maybe pitch your voice lower—No, not that low, you’re not reading a children’s story—“ 

She’s right, as it happens. With a little reframing—small sneers, hooded eyes, an unimpressed expression, all things he lifts from Ilya wholesale—and a serious coat, he can pass for a—Well, not a player, not someone that does a lot of thinking, but he’ll take unhinged Bratva thug if the alternative is awkward, social outcast. 

And, suddenly, a whole avenue of control is open. Aleksei sits at tables with grownups, with cops and crooks and informants that he can’t even imagine aren’t themselves Bratva thugs. He’s pretty sure one or two of them tried to suss him out, see which gang he’s working for. Crucially, Aleksei can influence his father’s behaviour. He can nudge him into staying for another drink, meeting another woman, going to another den with no windows and soft lighting and the stink of cheap cologne. He can keep him away from Ilya for days at a time. 

If Aleksei had this leverage in Tver, he would be thrilled. Exhilarated.

Only they aren’t in Tver.

And daughters of men like Grigori do not play hockey in Moscow.

The shift happens on an ordinary day, which is the only way these things ever happen. Aleksei comes home from class with the plan already in his head: two-forty-five, leave, then the metro, then the rink. Get homework done while she’s training— 

Ilya is in the kitchen in a dress Irina made her put on, stiff and wrong on her body like a costume. Her hair is brushed too neatly. Irina is at the counter with the kettle, shoulders hunched like she’s trying to disappear into the tiles. Their father is in the doorway.

“You’re not taking her,” Grigori says.

Right. Alright. He exhales a measured breath, focusing. There is no sense in asking where. 

“Why?”

Grigori looks at him. This is not going to be pretty. He wishes, briefly, passionately, that Irina, at least, wasn’t here. Ilya—this wouldn’t have happened if Ilya weren’t here. If their father didn’t decide to hurt her. 

“Because I said so. She will start ballet.”

Ilya takes a step forward. Aleksei’s whole body tightens. He knows what she’s about to do. He knows what she wants to do. He hears her breath change—

Ilya makes a sound, a shout that doesn’t belong in a child’s throat, raw and hoarse. “No!”

She shoves away from the table and storms toward the doorway. Aleksei moves without thinking, takes a step back and to the left, slides between them and stops Grigori’s lunge short. 

“Ilya,” he says, low.

“I’m not dancing,” she spits. “I’m not—”

Grigori’s hand comes up. Aleksei sees it, and his body does what it always does: it goes still. The slap lands across his face with a crack that snaps his head to the side. Heavy gold of the rings digs and drags, bites into cheekbone and mouth, dragging as the hand follows through. Aleksei tastes blood immediately, sharp and metallic, 

It isn’t the pain that gets him. Pain has stopped being shocking years ago. It’s the way he does it. Open palm, back of the hand. Derisive, relaxed, utterly convinced he is in no danger. There is little anger he can see, just contempt. A performance, because Irina is there, because Ilya is there, because Grigori enjoys hurting them. 

Heat flares under Aleksei’s cheekbone. His ear rings. His eyes water, stupidly, reflexively, which feels like its own humiliation. He hates that most—the involuntary softness, the body betraying him, inevitably. 

He doesn’t move or lift a hand. He doesn’t, crucially, step back. His purpose, here, is clear. Ilya is behind him, so here he stands. A wall.  Behind him, Ilya goes dead quiet. Irina makes a small sound by the counter. The kettle screams, a full boil, like it, too, can’t handle the pressure. 

Grigori leans in, close enough that Aleksei can smell his cologne, the cigarette smoke, the alcohol on his breath. “Do you remember your place?” 

Aleksei blinks. Forces his eyes to focus on his father’s mouth, not his eyes. If he looks at his eyes, he will want to do something stupid. If he does something stupid, Ilya will do something worse. 

“Yes,” Aleksei says. Flat. Immediate. Truthful. That much, at least, has always been blessedly clear. 

Grigori’s mouth twitches. “Well?” 

Right. Now, the bargaining. You can do this. You’ve been making trades like these for years. “She can do figure skating.” 

Ilya inhales sharply behind him, like she’s been punched in the gut.

Grigori snorts. “Figure skating,” he repeats, amused. 

“It’s appropriate,” Aleksei says. “She’ll train. She’ll be supervised. It’s discipline.”

Grigori’s eyes narrow, pleased and offended at the same time. He’s not done. He never is. He needs an extra twist—something small he can point to later as proof he held the leash. “No hockey equipment in my house,” he says immediately. “None. You throw it out.”

Aleksei’s stomach drops so hard it feels like falling, but his face doesn’t change. “Okay.” 

“And,” Grigori continues, warmed now by the sound of obedience, “she wears her hair like a girl. Dresses when she leaves the apartment. She answers to her name. Yulia.” He glances toward Ilya like she’s dirt on the floor. “Not—that.”

Ilya makes a strangled sound. Aleksei feels it like heat against his back. He doesn’t turn. If he turns, he’ll have to see her face.

“Okay.”

Grigori watches him a moment longer, deciding if there’s anything else he’d care to take. Then he steps back as if granting Aleksei permission to exist again.

“Good,” he says. “You’re learning.”

The door closes behind him with a soft click when he leaves the room. Thirty seconds later, the door of the apartment slams shut. Aleksei stands there, buzz in his ears slowly receding, keys still in his hand. Focus on your breathing. Breathe. 

Behind him, Ilya whispers, so quiet it’s almost worse than the bellow.

“Alyosha.”

He closes his fist until the metal bites deeper. He doesn’t turn around yet. 

By the time he’s gathered enough of his mind, Irina somehow convinced Ilya to sit, breathe, have a cup of tea. 

“Sit, Alyosha,” Irina says. Her voice is shaking. There is little in her expression past pain and fear. “Please, sit. Drink. Do you want something stronger?” 

His stomach rolls at the very idea. “Tea, please. Thank you.”

Right. Alright. This was—

“Alyosha.”

He sits, exhales a long breath. His cheek is already swelling. Right, that’s enough of that. He gives himself three seconds, one-two-three, and meets her eyes. She’s staring at his cheek, eyes bright, feverish. 

“It’s not forever,” Aleksei says, because his mouth is stupid and because he needs something to hold on to. “It’s—”

“It is forever,” Ilya says. “He said.”

Aleksei takes his tea. Earl Grey. Lovely. 

“Nothing is forever.” 

They finish their tea in silence. 

The hockey bag is still there, of course. Why would it have moved? He might have spent a couple of minutes praying that somehow, it would have disappeared in the meantime. That their father would have thrown it out himself, spared him the argument—But that was foolish of him. The cruelty is the point. He has to throw it out, because he was the one who bought it for her. It makes sense if you look at it like that. 

Behind him, Ilya takes one step. Two.  He grips the strap and lifts. The skates inside knock together softly. The sound makes his heart race. 

“Don’t,” Ilya says, voice cracking. “Don’t you—don’t you throw it out.”

He doesn’t look at her. “I’m not,” he says.

“Then what are you doing?” 

Irina’s head snaps up, terrified, and she hisses, “Ilya, keep your voice down.” 

Ilya’s eyes flick to her mother and then away again, contempt and panic tangled together. She looks fifteen, but she is ten, and scared. 

Aleksei sets the bag down on the kitchen table and unzips it.

The smell hits him: sharpened metal, old ice, sweat baked into fabric. Home. A ridiculous word for a smell like that, but there it is.

He starts pulling things out and lining them up. Skates first. Tape. Socks. A puck she stole and kept like a trophy. Her shin guards. Her practice jersey, faded and rough, with ILYA on the back. Aleksei had it custom-made, and nobody argued because nobody, ultimately, cared. 

Right. Focus. Think. You need to handle this. 

Ilya watches him with a sharp, vibrating stillness. Her throat works like she’s swallowing around a scream she’s been keeping in her whole life. 

“What are you doing?” she repeats, quieter.

Aleksei wipes his hands on his jeans. His head throbs. “Packing.” 

“For where?” she snaps. 

He looks at the window. The street below. People moving, cars honking, life happening at a distance like they’re watching it from behind glass. He takes a breath.

“I don’t know yet,” he says, and it’s the most honest thing he’s said all day.

Ilya stares at him like she wants to hit him. Like she wants to crawl into his skin and drive him like a car. Like she wants to cry and wants her big brother to fix everything. Her eyes flick again to his face—the handprint, the swelling—and then away. Back, and away. 

“You should’ve—” she starts, and stops. 

Yeah. Not so simple, is it? Hockey is everything to Ilya, but she is everything to him. Hockey can disappear in a puff of smoke, never to have existed. This whole fucking city can burn, and he will pull the blinds down and sleep easy—

Aleksei picks up the skates, the puck, the jersey, and stands, pads past them towards his bedroom. Ilya follows him without thinking. She always does.

He drags the suitcase out from under his bed, fumbles for the spatula behind it. Sliding out the boards on the floor is easy, utterly silent. He’s done this countless times. Inside, another suitcase, older but higher quality. Something he can carry without grabbing attention. 

Ilya sees it and freezes.

The contents aren’t dramatic. None of this is about theatre. The wretched thing isn’t even full. But—It’s a start. A plastic folder with documents—copies he’s made, things he’s stolen from drawers and offices and pockets, things he’s managed to get stamped in the right places. Cash in envelopes. Notebooks and printouts and leaflets. Maps. A list of names that mean nothing to Ilya and everything to Aleksei because they’re the only threads he’s been able to find.

No passports. Not yet. 

“You’re going to leave,” she whispers. “You’re going to leave me—“ 

Aleksei’s jaw tightens. “Don’t be stupid,” he says immediately, harsh, harsher than he ever is, with her. “And don’t be reckless.”

Ilya’s eyes flare. “Then what is this?”

“This is us not dying in this apartment,” Aleksei says, and then stops, because that’s too much truth in one sentence. He forces it into something she can understand. “This is preparation.”

Irina is hovering in the doorway. Her face is pale, eyes flick from the suitcase to Aleksei’s hands to Ilya’s posture. 

“Alyosha,” she says, soft. Warning. Pleading.

Aleksei doesn’t look at her. If he looks at her, he’ll see gratitude, or guilt, or both, and he’ll lose his temper in the wrong direction.

“The three of us will not be dying here,” he says. “I’m working on it.” 

Ilya drops to her knees beside the suitcase, hands trembling. She reaches as if she’s going to grab the folder and run with it like it’s proof.

Aleksei catches her wrist. Not gentle. “No,” he says.

She jerks against him. “Why?”

“Because you don’t understand what any of it means,” Aleksei says. “I’m not ready. We’re not ready. He is not—We will only get one chance.” 

Ilya goes very still, the words landing. ‘“So you’re just—what,” she spits. “Waiting? Letting him—”

Aleksei’s cheek throbs. He can still feel his father’s hand like a ghost. “Yes. That is exactly what I’m doing. I’m going to wait and work and let him, until we are ready.” 

Ilya’s eyes glitter. “When?”

Aleksei looks down at the folder. At the cash. At the blank space where passports should be. At the fact that he is nineteen and his father is working in the principal security agency of Russia. 

“When I have what we need,” he says. “When there is a way that doesn’t end with us dragged back. Not before.”

Ilya swallows hard, reaches past him and grabs her jersey off the bed.

“Don’t put that under,” she says fiercely, ridiculous and urgent. “It’ll wrinkle.”

Aleksei pauses. “Okay.” 

He lets her fold it, slow and reverent, around the puck. Lets her arrange it at the bottom of the suitcase, then place her skates over it. She closes the suitcase herself, clicks the latches shut, the sound too loud, ringing through the room. Then she looks up at Aleksei, eyes burning.

“Say it,” she demands.

Aleksei’s throat tightens. “Say what?” 

“That you won’t let him,” Ilya says. “That you won’t—” Her voice breaks hard on the edge of something, something she turns all too easily into rage. “That you’re not going to—To let him.” 

Let him do what? Hit him? Aleksei has scars on his back, a lump on the bridge of his nose, a patch on his head where hair doesn’t grow. Irina—He doesn’t want to think about Irina. They demonstrated they will let him do just about anything. As long as he leaves Ilya alone. 

He reaches out and grips the back of her neck, as soft as he knows how. His thumb presses into the tendon under her hairline like a point of contact.

“I will always do my best for you, Yulka. Always.”  

Ilya’s eyes flash, furious at the answer, furious that she wants more and he can’t give it to her. For a second, she looks like she might bite him. Like she might cry. 

Then she leans forward, sudden and violent, and presses her forehead into his shoulder like she’s trying to knock him over. 

Aleksei takes it as it’s meant and wraps his arms around her. In the doorway, Irina turns her face away.

He adapts. They all do. There is nothing else to be done. You fall, you get back up. 

Ilya goes to figure skating. She answers to Yulia and wears dresses. She lets Irina brush her hair and sits patiently while Aleksei figures out more feminine hairstyles. She stops sneaking into Aleksei’s bed—not because she doesn’t want to, but because it’s not appropriate, now. She does what she has to, and she grows angrier and angrier.

Aleksei sees it in the way she holds herself: shoulders too high, jaw too tight, hands that never quite rest. In Tver, the rink drained something out of her, let her sleep easy at night. It gave her a simple, bright point of joy. In Moscow, there is only pressure.

Irina tries to build new rituals. She takes Ilya out on walks whenever she can. She writes new stories, tries to get her interested in reading, in poetry. Sometimes Ilya even laughs, sharp and sudden. It’s almost even more sad, then, when she remembers where she is, and the laughter dies like it’s been slapped out of her.

Aleksei helps by making it possible. He helps by making himself scarce.

Days are for university and, more substantially, plotting. Nights are for their father. He becomes the son Grigori wants to show off, the accessory he can drag into rooms full of men who smell like cigarettes and money. He learns how to be useful in a way his father values. 

When he can, he tracks everything. His notebooks grow in number, notes in complexity.  Addresses. Names. Hours. The days his father travels. Which drawer the documents go in. What stamps look like on what papers. What you can photocopy without anybody noticing. What you can say at an office without a man behind a counter deciding you need to be punished.

He doesn’t have passports. Not yet. That fact sits in the back of his mind, always. Migraines haven’t yet become unbearable, but they’re getting there. He flirts with the idea of pain relief, then thinks better of it. The last thing any of them needs is an addict in the family. Christ knows they have everything else. 

Sometimes, on the metro, he catches his reflection in the dark glass and doesn’t recognise the figure staring back. He looks older than nineteen. He looks like his father, broad and strong and crazy around the eyes. 

Not that it’s surprising. He’s learned how to dress like them. He learns how to speak like them—aggressive, dismissive, flawlessly submissive to his father and only to his father. He learns posture. He learns distance. He learns how to drink with adults and smoke cigarettes. He learns what to say about women, about other men, about politics, about the West.

He learns to say, “I will join the military after university,” and make it sound like a plan instead of a lie.

He learns how to shoot a gun.

It is theatre. Smoke and mirrors. Nobody knows that better than their father. But it is a lie that serves them both. It gives Grigori something to brag about. It gives Aleksei a role to perform. It buys time.

It’s not all dread and pain. Even their father can’t always be there. One time, Aleksei tempts him into a trip to St Petersburg, and when they return, Ilya and Irina are both sporting discreet golden crosses around their necks. Another time, when their father is off on some hush-hush work trip, Aleksei spends a whole, glorious afternoon with Ilya in the city—just the two of them. They get lunch, they catch a play, and in the evening they play cards with Irina, the smell of bergamot thick in the air. 

A lot of it is horror, but not all. It’s enough to get them through the first year.

It is not enough to get them through the second.

Aleksei isn’t there when it starts, and by the time he’s run across the hall, Ilya is screaming, Grigori is staring at her with—delight. Hungry, twisted joy about having an excuse. 

“—Coward!” 

Aleksei moves before the sentence ends. He comes up behind her chair and puts a hand on the backrest, a quiet anchor.

“Ilya,” he says, low.

She doesn’t look at him. 

Grigori walks closer.

“What wonderful timing. Come.” 

Right. Never let it be said that Grigori changes a pattern when it works the first time. Open palm. Across his mouth, hard enough that his teeth knock together. Good, he thinks. Good, and now they will shout some more, Ilya will subside, Aleksei will be able to smooth this over— 

Only Ilya doesn’t subside, and she doesn’t shut up. Her face is twisted up, eyes wide and manic. She’s staring at their father like she’d want nothing more than to kill him, to sink her teeth into his neck and tear— 

“Don’t.” 

Grigori watches her like she’s turned interesting. “What,” he says, delighted. “You want to defend your brother?”

“If you touch him again, if you fucking—“ 

Aleksei moves, gets in front fully. 

“Ilya,” he says again, sharper now.

Grigori laughs, ugly and approving.

“This is what hockey did to you,” he says, like he’s diagnosing her. “Made you feral.”

Ilya jerks her chin up. “You will see how feral I am when I slit your throat in the night.”

Aleksei’s eyes want to close, mind spinning. What—She’s eleven. She’s an eleven-year-old girl—What has he done? Should they have just run? Made it on the streets, somehow? Ran further out, maybe— 

Grigori is making his way forward, trying to circle him. Aleksei is moving with. Jesus. Jesus Christ. 

Ilya is not backing down either. She surges up from the chair, shoulders square. He can feel her breath on his back. Puberty has made her reckless with her own body, like pain is a currency she’s willing to spend. Here’s hoping they all live long enough for her to learn that little girls don’t often get to make that mistake twice. 

Grigori looks at Aleksei then, as if Ilya is no longer the point.

“You,” he says.

Aleksei stills. The blood in his mouth tastes stronger now that his heart is pounding.

“You said you would join the army,” Grigori says casually, like he’s discussing dinner plans. “After university. That is the plan, yes?”

Aleksei’s throat tightens.

“Yes,” he says. 

Grigori nods, easy, calm. “Good. You graduate in—eight months? I will start making calls, and we will stop pretending this is optional.” He looks at Ilya, slow and pleased. “Since you can’t control your little sister. Since you can’t teach her manners. Since you can’t fix what you broke.”

Well, that, at least, is absolutely, irrevocably true. 

Grigori wander back and leans on the kitchen counter. He’s smiling. “A year. Two. Maybe it will teach you discipline. Maybe it will teach her—” He nods Ilya’s way. “—To remember her place.”

Something in Ilya breaks cleanly. She lunges, fast. Aleksei is faster. He has her by the waist and in the air before the first shout is out of her mouth. The sound is obscene.

“No,” she screams. “No, no, no—” She thrashes in his arms, elbows and knees, furious and strong in a way that comes from hysteria, from making debts you will be paying soon and long.  “Let me go!” 

“Ilya,” Aleksei says, and his voice cracks. He wonders at it, a little; it’s the first crack in months. “Stop.”

She bites him, teeth closing around his upper arm, deep. He’s pretty sure she drew blood.

Grigori watches with interest. “Look at her,” he says, amused. “Animal.”

Right. He retreats, walks as fast as he can, while she’s fighting him every step of the way. She doesn’t want to hurt him, he doesn’t think, but he is reachable, and he is hers. Only thing in this hellhole that is. Only thing she fears losing more than she fears their father. 

Aleksei gets her into her room and shoves her inside. Ilya spins, hair coming loose, face blotchy. “Don’t you dare,” she spits. “Don’t you—”

Aleksei steps back and shuts the door, clicks the lock. 

Ilya is slamming into the door the very next breath, frame rattling from impact. 

“Alyosha!” she screams. “Open the door! I mean it, I will break it, on my fucking life, I will wreck this house--”

Aleksei keeps his hand on the knob. His whole arm is shaking. He leans in close to the wood. 

“Breathe,” he says. “Please. Ilya, breathe.”

On the other side, she makes a horrible sound, halfway between a sob and a laugh.

“Don’t tell me to breathe,” she chokes. “He’s going to take you.”

“He’s not.” He doesn’t know if it’s true. “I’ll fix it.” There it is—the pleading, the helplessness, the inevitable conclusion of love. “Ilya. Yulka. Please. I'm begging you, let me fix it. Please don’t—don’t do this.”

She hits the door again. Harder. Then she slides down it on the other side, and Aleksei can hear her breathing change—ragged, broken, animal.

Aleksei presses his forehead to the wood.

In the kitchen, Grigori is still talking. Laughing. He can hear Irina’s voice, small and shaking. “Grisha, please—”

Aleksei closes his eyes. “Ilya,” he says again, quieter. “Count with me. Four in. Four out. Please.”

There is silence on the other side for one terrifying second.

Then, faintly, a sound that might be a breath.

Aleksei stays there with his forehead to the door and his cheek throbbing and his mouth full of blood, and counts. He will fix it. He will— 

Chapter 3

After the lock clicks on Ilya’s door, Aleksei begins living in two directions at once. After a while, it stops being metaphor and becomes schedule.

One direction is toward Grigori. Aleksei gives away as much of himself as he can afford, and when that is no longer enough, he learns to give more. Grigori is a simple creature underneath it all. Vice has worn him down to appetite, then narrowed even that appetite into a few crude forms. Aleksei’s job, in plain terms, is to become more useful to his pleasure. It would be easier if he had more obvious tools. But, he is unmistakably male, and unmistakably Grigori’s son; the resemblance by now is almost obscene. He finds other methods. Besides, sex, for Grigori, has long been less about desire than power—displaying it, proving it, feeding on it. Power is simple. Power, Aleksei can supply.

Before, it had been enough to stand at Grigori’s shoulder and look the part: large, obedient, visibly unstable, an extension of his father’s physical force. Now he pushes the act further. He begins drawing more attention from the men around them, and from the women, too. He does not bother with anything too subtle. Even if they were capable of reading it—and many are not—the effect would be too delayed, too fine-grained, too easily lost on Grigori. He does not need complexity. He only needs to be recognisable up to a point, and wrong beyond it. If he looks like a thug, speaks like a gentleman, and strips his face and body of all but the bare minimum of human response, he lands squarely in the uncanny. That helps; it’s a valuable part of it. The key, the red, pulsing heart of the performance, is the servility. That is what binds the whole thing together. He makes a spectacle of his deference to his father, so complete and so nauseating that even he is revolted by it.

The nameless men and women around Grigori cannot look away. They cannot stomach what they are seeing. Not because they care; they could not scrape together enough human feeling to worry about their own mothers or sisters, much less somebody else’s son. What disturbs them is Grigori. More precisely, it is the fact that they do not know what he did to Aleksei to produce these results.

So they investigate. At first, at least, they look for the usual tools: drugs, pain, blackmail. Aleksei, whose one true point of control is so obvious it might as well be painted on the wall, and yet so far beyond their moral imagination that they never even approach it, lets them look. It is the best thing they could have done. Because they keep looking. These wretched, narrow creatures keep inventing new horrors for him, new mechanisms, subtler brutalities, elaborate methods by which a man as weak as Grigori might keep a man like Aleksei so obedient. The mystery unsettles them. People like that cannot tolerate mystery where power is concerned. They need a method, a system. A leash they can name—and, ultimately, use themselves. 
And when they find nothing, they do not conclude there is nothing there. They conclude only that the leash is finer than theirs, more expensive, more sophisticated, and therefore more frightening.

Grigori loves that. He delights in the new unease in other men’s eyes. He likes being taken for a creature with deeper pockets, sharper tools, stranger appetites.

So a balance establishes itself—thin, unstable, treacherous, but real. When Grigori comes home hungry for conflict, Aleksei is there first. When Grigori’s attention begins to tilt toward Ilya, Aleksei shifts it elsewhere: toward drink, toward some mistress, toward business, toward himself if he cannot find any better target to place in the way.

The other direction is away.

As with everything Aleksei does, it begins with lists. Addresses. Consulates. Office hours. Numbers. Names. He writes down the days Grigori travels and the days he does not. He writes down which offices Grigori can reach into with a phone call and which ones sit outside his immediate grasp. He makes small experiments, tests and figures out what can disappear without anyone caring, and what cannot disappear without the household stopping dead and turning its head.

He begins selling things carefully. A valuable book here, a piece of jewellery there—never anything sentimental, never anything whose absence would provoke memory instead of irritation. When the opportunity exists, he steals. When it does not, he plays cards with drunk men and wins exactly the amount they will tolerate losing: enough to matter, not enough to remember.

At the university library, he reads international law with his pulse hammering as if he were looking at pornography in public. Asylum. Borders. Minors. Guardianship. The language is dry, bureaucratic, almost offensively calm; entire kinds of catastrophe reduced to clauses and subclauses, lives like theirs flattened into procedure. Still, procedure is useful, if you can use it, and he has the kind of mind that can move through convoluted language and legal mazes without panic. In that sense, the material is almost familiar. These pages were written by people not so different from him: orderly, abstract, not overly creative, in different countries, over many years. The scale of it is frightening. The logic of it is not.

He tries for passports twice. Once, legally, by attempting to have them reissued without his father’s knowledge. Once, illegally, through a man who promises a convincing fake for a price that all but advertises betrayal. Both attempts fail. Both come so close to revealing everything to Grigori that for several weeks afterward Aleksei lives in a state of such sharpened terror that the sound of footsteps behind him makes it near impossible to breathe. He does not try a third time.

Instead, he works sideways. He gets what he can get: certified birth certificates, stamped school records, contracts, certificates, copies of things that prove existence in the limited, state-approved sense. He gathers evidence of a life having been lived, and tries to think his way around the obstacle. Facts are as they are, inarguable and plain. Aleksei has proper identification, documents, identity cards, an administrative personhood. Ilya and, more obviously, Irina—they belong to Grigori. Property has no use for personal documents. They both understand this, for all that they understand it differently.

Irina, for better or worse, has never expected anything good to come her way, and whenever it does, it startles her. Ilya expects nothing except what she has already laid claim to, and she claimed Aleksei completely. As far as she is concerned, if she does not have a passport, then neither does he. The logic is simple, clean and sacred. The force of her certainty is a steady source of warmth to him, a bright light above to keep the monsters away. Ilya has never doubted that he would do this for her—that he would give up his body, his peace, his soul, if that was the price. That he would die for her. She knows it as she knows the sunrise. 

And naturally, because this is Ilya, because this is him, the comfort of that certainty turns easily into dread. The reverse is also true; with Yulka, the reverse is always true. As completely as she trusts that he would die for her, she is prepared to die for him. The thought of her small body throwing itself between him and some half-formed danger has terrified him so thoroughly that nothing else compares. The three of them have been, in theory, trying to teach her otherwise—to show her that her role is not his, that she is not meant to shield him with her own life. In practice, he still wakes choking on terror, and she still looks at the world with the serene conviction of a child who does not yet understand what her life is worth.

And how could she? What in this house has ever taught her that she is precious? Every day here makes a liar of that claim. What answer does he have to set against the reality of Grigori? None. None she could live by.

He’s working on it, yes. He is doing everything he can, but it’s slow. Ilya’s thirteenth birthday comes and goes, and he is still there, still playing the dutiful son, the useful, pleasurable son, sinking deeper into the role because he pushed as far as he could in practical terms; take a single step more, and he’s going to start accumulating the sort of leverage that will outlive the escape and come back later.

The fights are getting worse. Aleksei is getting hurt more often and hurt worse. Ilya is getting older. More beautiful, too, which is not a thing anyone says aloud, not in that house, not in any room where sound can travel. Grigori himself has treated her with nothing but a complicated variety of contempt, and thank Christ for that, but the company he keeps is a different matter. There are looks. When she enters a room, men sometimes glance at her before recognition catches up with them. A pause. A blink. A recalculation. The kind of look that lasts less than a second and makes Aleksei’s shoulders tense. Grigori hasn’t noticed. Ilya hasn’t noticed. But Irina— 

Something shifts in Irina around this time. Something Aleksei should have recognised even then. You do not need textbooks, professors, or any formal education in the mechanics of despair to know what it looks like when hope burns down and away. Some knowledge comes preloaded into the body. Some truths announce themselves through instinct long before the mind agrees to admit them. And yet—he didn’t see. He made himself not see. Looking back, he was the only one who didn’t. 

Irina, to his eyes, seemed to improve. She grows calmer. Brighter, even. More composed, more present. She stops apologising so much. Stops crying, stuttering, folding in on herself as if she is trying to take up less space than her body demands. The change is plain enough that he thinks it is healing.

Well, maybe. Probably, even then, he had to have known. His conscious mind may have lagged, still sorting facts into columns, still trying to prove what his nerves had already concluded, but his body must have known. He must have been aware that, in a place like this, people do not get better for free. A silence can fall over suffering, certainly, but that does not mean suffering has ended. Sometimes it has simply gone somewhere deeper, somewhere more final, hid and waited, patient and inevitable. 

Ilya is thirteen now, thirteen going on twenty, aged prematurely by anger with nowhere to go. Figure skating does not drain it out of her, but it has stopped being a direct cause of it. She is good at it, which helps, and in its narrow, conditional way, it is good to her. It gives her form. Precision. A language for pride that no one could ever beat out of her. She has grown graceful even as she is still growing fast, all coltish length becoming, somehow, elegance. Her posture is flawless. Her neck is always held high, as if some old empress has been reincarnated by clerical error into a furious teenager. The gold of her hair is almost violent in a certain light.

None of this is a problem, exactly. Not yet. It is merely true. Grigori is a handsome man. Irina is breathtaking, blessed with the type of beauty that makes hearts race and heads spin. It would be strange if their daughter were not beautiful too. There is no crime in beauty by itself. No immediate danger in a thirteen-year-old girl beginning to resemble the woman she may one day become.

Except, of course, for the obvious. Irina’s blessings hadn’t brought her anything but pain. Hers isn’t the type of fate Aleksei would wish on anyone, least of all Yulka. Nothing happened, yet, nothing definite, nothing he could drag into daylight and kill with his bare hands. It is only that the future has begun to cast a shadow ahead of itself. The one thing no one wants for a thirteen-year-old girl is for the world to mistake her for seventeen, and a beautiful seventeen at that.

He had thought Irina was speaking to her about this. They speak a lot, more than ever, in hushed, focused tones. He thought she was talking to Ilya about her body, about puberty, about sex. She was not.

She was, instead, speaking to her about music, grace, and language. About poetry and kindness. About love. About Christ.

Later, he would understand this for what it was. Irina spends a year saying goodbye to her daughter, almost to the day.

It happens on a day with nothing to recommend it. Aleksei comes home to silence.

Not ordinary silence, not the temporary hush of a house between noises, but something denser than that, something clogged with dread. The air itself seems obstructed by it. Ilya is standing in the hallway barefoot, her face gone still with a shapeless, formless terror. She is present only in the most insubstantial sense, as if most of her has already stepped away. 

“Alyosha.”

His body moves before his mind does. He walks. He opens the door. He sees Irina. Afterward, time becomes unreliable.

He checks for breath. For pulse. The body is cold; there is nothing to be done. For some indeterminate stretch of time, he performs chest compressions while another part of his mind, slower and weaker, attempts to understand what it is looking at.

She is as beautiful in death as she was in life.

You would think–You would think that there, at least, he could expect some mercy. That something this terrible, this fundamentally wrong, would at least have the decency to make itself outwardly ugly. But Irina is not ugly. She is ethereal, face relaxed, delicate and perfect. Death, having been invited, seems to have had the manners to arrive quietly.

“She’s dead?”

Aleksei drags in a breath. It tears at his throat on the way down, but the pain is preferable to the hot, expanding pressure in his chest.

“Yes.”

“I—Okay. Okay.”

Ilya’s eyes are wide and blank, her mouth slightly open. She looks drugged. Maybe she is. 

“She— Is there—” She blinks once, slowly. “Did she leave us something? A letter?”

For a moment, his head spins so violently he has to sit back on his heels and breathe through it. He had not even thought about the cause of death. Had not made the obvious inference. Had not yet climbed that far.

“I don’t know.”

“I will look. We must find it before—before people come.”

Jesus.

“Ilya—”

She turns to him at once. “Yes?”

She is not blinking often enough. Her eyes are not tracking properly. You need to cry, he thinks. You need to scream. Please. Cry. Break something. Rage.

I don’t know what is happening.
I do not understand any of this.
I thought we had more time.

“You should stay,” he says, and nearly loses the sentence to the roll of his stomach. “I will look. My mother—I used to think I—It would have helped, to have said goodbye.”

Maybe. He hadn’t thought about that for some time. He never even went to her grave. He does not know whether she has one.

Ilya nods anyway and moves past him with that eerie, gliding grace of hers, touching the world only as much as she chooses. One hand is wrapped hard around something at her throat—a cross, he thinks. The other reaches out, slow and awkward, and comes to rest on Irina’s shoulder.

Aleksei bolts for the bathroom. By some miracle, he has stopped vomiting by the time Ilya finds him.

“I found it,” she says. Mercifully, she does not elaborate. “You can call Father now. I will—I will hide somewhere. He won’t see me. I promise.”

The full-body tremble goes up a notch. He does not feel it as sensation, so much as register it clinically, the impact of his limbs against porcelain, the failure of the body to obey ordinary standards of stillness.

He won’t see her.
He won’t see her.

Aleksei has not wanted to hurt anyone in years. Not since he learned, thoroughly and in great detail, what it means to hurt and to be hurt. But now the desire comes over him pure and white-hot.

“If he hurts you, I will—”

He retches again, incapable of finishing the sentence because lying, here and now, to her, will strike him dead, and deservedly so. He will—what? If Grigori hurts Ilya, Aleksei might very well do nothing at all, because fury is not the same thing as power, and dead boys are of no use to orphaned girls. If he gets himself killed, or jailed, or disappeared in some efficient and entirely legal fashion, Ilya will be left alone in the wreckage.

“I know, Alyosha,” she says. “I know.”

They need to get the hell out of this house. 

When they are finally alone again—when Irina has been taken away, when the apartment is empty, when the slim, hand-bound book Aleksei cannot bring himself to touch has been wrapped in one of her scarves and tucked into the suitcase—he goes into the kitchen, opens the cabinet, and finds Irina’s mug with the chipped handle. He stands there holding it.

When Ilya comes in, she does so quietly, padding barefoot into the kitchen and sitting at the table. She is very still. Very cold. Very far away. Tears are running down her face, but he doubts she is aware of them. They seem incidental, almost mechanical—a bodily function, like breathing or shivering. As if the body, faced with an excess of grief too large to be processed whole, is doing what it can. 

He will move in a moment.

He will go to her. He will gather her into his arms. He will figure out what to say, how to say it, what shape language is supposed to take on a day like this. Any moment now. As soon as he remembers how to make his limbs obey him. As soon as he is sure he will not drop the mug in his hands. As soon as he remembers why death is not, in fact, a mercy. 

“It was too much,” she says. “Too much for her.”

Yes, he thinks. Yes. It was too much for her. It would have been too much for anyone. For everyone. Irina endured as long as she could, and then she drank enough sleeping pills to kill a hundred men, and Father told everyone it had been an accident, a filthy and blasphemous lie which he fully expects them to repeat. 

And they will repeat it, because—

Because Irina is dead and they are not. Because, at present, preserving that distinction seems important, even if Aleksei can’t quite remember why. Because there is no one else. Because, if he permits himself to feel anything true in a direct and unmediated way, he will smash the mug in his hands against the counter and watch it become fragments, and his soul will follow it gladly. And if he falls apart, no one will feed Ilya. No one will get her to school. No one will stand between her and Grigori when Grigori, inevitably, mistakes bereavement for opportunity and steps across some final line Aleksei will, then, have to kill him for.

And if he kills him, Ilya will be alone.

The thought arrives complete, cold, and perfectly arranged. Not hysteria. Not even fear, exactly. A systems problem. A chain of cause and effect. He has always trusted logic. Logic, unlike mercy, shows up when summoned.

So he sets the mug down very carefully; the handle clicks softly against the counter.

He takes a breath, fills the kettle, and begins to make tea.

The months after Irina dies do not settle into memory properly.

Later, Aleksei will be unable to say what happened first, or second, or on which day a given thing occurred. Time does not so much pass as smear. He exists inside a split reality: one half of him performing tasks, the other standing somewhere at a great distance, watching.

Falling apart is out of the question. He does not get to lose track of his duties, of obligations, or the practical shape of his own life. Ilya needs to eat. She needs to sleep. She needs to go to school and to the rink. Grigori needs managing—tilted away from certain moods, steered from one bottle to the next, from one den of iniquity to another, so that his appetites fall anywhere but home.

Wake up. Check on Ilya. Make food. Get her dressed. Keep her quiet. Keep her moving. Keep her alive.

For weeks, Ilya cries without stopping, but it is not the crying of a child. It is silent. Constant. Tears stream down her face while she does homework. Tears on the metro. Tears at skating practice, brushed away with the back of her hand as if they were sweat, nothing more than another inconvenient bodily secretion. She does not appear particularly interested in them. Unforgivably, neither is he.

He does not cry at all.

This is probably a sign of something wrong with him. A disorder. Some deficit of the soul or nervous system. He does not spend much time examining the question. Examination would imply leisure. He has none. He can function well enough for now, and “well enough” is all anyone is getting. Until they leave, that will have to suffice.

He keeps researching. Europe. Borders. Geography. International law. Transit routes. Railway lines. Shelters. Consulates. Child welfare statutes. He has accepted that he will not get passports. That avenue is closed. Fine. Then he will make up the difference with cash and information. There are laws about these things. There are rules. Somewhere, outside this apartment and the reach of Grigori’s voice, systems exist that do not belong to him. And Ilya is a child. That must count for something.

Aleksei learns what grief looks like when it does not permit the dignity of collapse.
It looks like laundry. It looks like soup. It looks like scrubbing a sink. It looks like standing in an office signing papers he does not read, because reading them would require him to absorb their meaning, and meaning would require feeling, and feeling would, at present, be operationally catastrophic.

They go to Irina’s grave often. Once a day, when they can manage it.

Ilya is better there. Not healed, not even peaceful exactly, but better. She still cries, but there she folds herself against Aleksei’s side and talks without stopping. About school. About skating. About the weather. About some teacher she dislikes, some music she heard, some thought that caught in her mind and would not let go. Aleksei, who must ration his words in the real world as if they are medicine in wartime, sits with his sister in his arms and barely hears any of it.

What he hears instead is her heartbeat—steady, strong, insistently alive. Her voice is at an ordinary volume. She is not happy, but neither is she furious. There is a softness to her there, a loosening. It is, God help him, the closest thing to contentment he has seen in her for years.

That, too, is probably a sign of something.

Irina’s things begin disappearing from the apartment by degrees. Ilya does not seem to mind. Or perhaps she minds and has placed the feeling somewhere Aleksei cannot reach. In any case, she does not protest. Aleksei keeps what he can, the important things. He finds her notebooks, every scrap of paper in the house touched by her hand, every list, every margin note, every folded page. He wraps them in silk and fine linen; then wraps those bundles again in her dresses and scarves and packs them away.
There is not much. He would give a great deal for there to be more.

He does not read any of it. He is not a savage, blind to the nature of these relics. They are not for him; they are holy things. Beautiful, because she was beautiful; kind because she was kind. He will leave them behind if he must; Irina’s most beautiful creation will always be Ilya. But he will leave behind everything else, first. 

They resurface, the two of them, emerge from the ashes, made as much by the fire as by anything that existed before it.

Aleksei feels very little and too much. The absence of anger is the strangest part. Hatred, too, has gone dim. What remains, above all, is fear: a huge, misshapen pressure lodged somewhere inside him, impossible to approach directly and too constant to waste time resenting. He does not understand it. He does not have the patience to understand it.

Ilya, meanwhile, seems to have burned away what little fear she once possessed. What remains in her is passion, and it flips from one form to another with frightening speed. Blind rage. Hatred. Violence. Then, just as suddenly, a quieter force altogether: a love so vital and absolute it can make the others seem like mere weather passing over it.

“Do you—” He clears his throat. The question feels embarrassingly delicate in his mouth. “Once we leave, we won’t be able to come back here. Not for a long time. Not while he’s alive.”

Ilya lifts her head enough to look at him. “Here as in Moscow?”

Aleksei swallows. Pointing at the grave feels obscene, but so does naming it outright. “Here as in here, Yulka. Right here. You won’t be able to speak to her like this anymore.”

“Oh.”

She exhales and settles back against his chest. She is still so small. So slight. It remains, somehow, difficult to reconcile with the force of her.

“I don’t care about that,” she says. “Mom explained. She’s always with me. I like this place, but it’s just—” She shrugs. “It’s peaceful here, and I like looking at her name written down like that. We can do that anywhere. Just buy a stone and pay someone to write her name on it. We can keep it in our new place, for all I care.”

Jesus Christ.

He tries to imagine living with Irina’s grave in the house—sleeping with it on the other side of the apartment, having to watch it, day in and day out, and the thought sends such a sharp ringing through his ears that he has to regulate his breathing before he can speak.

“Or not,” Ilya adds, head craned a little to see his face. “Wow. We definitely do not have to do that. We can put the stone in a field somewhere. I’m just saying bones are nothing. She was love, and so she is Christ, with Him, whole and safe. The rest is just for us.”

He has not envied anyone in years, but something dangerously close to that stirs in him then, small and bright and ugly as a spark falling into damp grass.

He knows almost nothing about Christianity. Not really. What made its way into him through culture was mostly superstition, discipline, inherited shame—customs stripped of wisdom and left as machinery nobody knows the make and purpose of. But Ilya, through Irina, has somehow been given something else entirely. Something vast and real and merciful. Something that makes sense of the world. 

Some days, he can’t remember his mother’s name. He has never truly known the idea of her,  let alone a presence capable of offering comfort. And Irina—

He thinks he might have liked it, this way of seeing the world. It would be peaceful, maybe. It would be nice to have this place of refuge that exists beyond the mundane hurt of life. That nobody can ever touch, much less take away from you. 

Fortunately for him, envy can no more take root in him than joy can. There is no soil for it. Nothing fertile. The fear chokes everything before it has a chance to live.

“Alright,” he says at last. “That’s—I’m glad, Yulka. Truly. Well done.”

In retrospect, he should have known better. By then, he should have understood that plans are only useful as rough drafts. You move before you are ready. Always. You do not wait for certainty, or safety, or the right amount of money, or one more week to prepare. You go when there is a chance. That is all. But he did not know that yet.

So they stayed. They stayed so he could sell a little more, steal a little more, hide a little more. Until he has enough cash, enough documents, enough contacts. They stayed as if enough were a thing the world reliably provided.

The last day Aleksei spends in Moscow is, perhaps mercifully, grey but dry. 

Grigori is drunk, as usual. Ilya won a skating award the weekend before and is in a tolerably good mood. Aleksei has missed nothing obvious, made no visible mistake. Later, there will be nothing he can point to and say: there. That was the warning. That was where I failed. That was the thing I should have seen.

He has just finished showering—not properly, just a quick wash to get the day off him—when he hears shouting.

Grigori first, high, slurred, ugly with pleasure. Aleksei is already dressed by the time Ilya’s voice rises enough to reach the hallway. By the time he gets to the living room, it is already too late for calm, past the point where anything can still be mended. 

The room is too bright.

Grigori stands in the middle of it, eyes wet with drink and fury, one hand braced on a chair, the other cutting through the air. Ilya is in front of him, barefoot, hair loose, sweater twisted, one sleeve hanging wrong at the shoulder. Aleksei is moving, but not fast enough.

Grigori is old, ruined with drink and vice. To Aleksei, he is nothing. To a thirteen-year-old girl, he might as well be a giant. His hand closes around her elbow. He yanks. Twists. Pulls. Ilya hits the floor and goes silent, her arm bent wrong.

What little higher thought Aleksei has left simply shuts off. Later, he will assume he must have crossed the room. It is, after all, more likely that he crossed the room and drove Grigori into the wall hard enough to crack the panelling than that some higher power intervened on his behalf. But in the moment, there is only a white gap in time, and then Grigori hits the wall. Aleksei blinks and finds himself standing over him.

Through the blankness, with a clarity so clean it feels divine, he remembers the drawer where Grigori keeps a gun. That would be the easy answer. The neat one. One shot. Six shots. Every bullet in the house. Maybe Ilya would like to have a go; hands-on closure, as it were. Loose ends tied off. Neat little red bow. 

He exhales once.

Right. Because what they need, obviously, is to flee the country with a murder charge attached.

Ilya makes a sound, then. Small. Pained. Deliberately swallowed. Aleksei drops to his knees beside her.

She is pale, eyes blown wide, rims red, blood vessels burst. Her mouth is clamped shut so hard it has gone colourless. She looks at him, and whatever is in her face, it is not fear. Good; he can work with anything but fear. He scoops her up. Christ, she is light. Bird bones and fury. How is she this small? He could carry her in one arm. He thinks, wildly, that she could fit in his palm. 

Move. Step. Step.

By the time his mind catches up, they are in his room. He sets her on the bed and looks once at the arm and knows two things immediately: it is broken, and he does not have time to do a damned thing about it. So he does what he can. A scarf. A belt. A sweater. A makeshift sling, ugly but functional. It will hold until somebody competent can touch her. He checks her fingers for circulation because he read about that sort of thing. Ilya watches him without blinking.

“What is happening?” she whispers.

“We’re leaving.” 

She blinks once. “Now?”

“Yes.”

He drops to the floor, rips open the hidden compartment, and drags out the suitcase. They will cross borders with cash, truth and luck. If they don’t, if they try to stop them, they might as well shoot them on the spot, because the next time he sees Grigori Rozanov, it will be to kill him.

Suitcase. Coats. Shoes.

He debates the gun for half a second, decides against it, then takes it anyway. He can surrender it at the border. He has permits. Perhaps that will matter. Perhaps nothing will. It is hard to care.

Behind him, in the hallway, Grigori groans. Alive, then. Shame.

Aleksei crouches in front of Ilya and takes her face between his hands with a care that surprises them both. “Listen to me,” he says. “Don’t talk. Don’t look at him. He’s dead already. Do you understand?” His voice catches; he forces it level. “He’s dead. He does not exist. Nod if you understand.”

She nods.

“Good,” he says. “That’s really good, Yulka. Now hold still. Press your arm to me. Like this.”

He tucks her against him,  broken arm pinned safe between their bodies, one arm under her knees, the other around her back, like she is four years old and half asleep on the way home from the rink. She does not protest.

They move. Out of the room. Down the hall. Into the living room.

Grigori is half upright now, one hand on the wall, eyes glazed with drink and hatred. He sees the suitcase. Sees Ilya in Aleksei’s arms. For one brief second, his face empties completely. Then something ugly and animal rushes back in to fill it.

“You—” he starts.

Grigori lunges. Some old reflex rises through Aleksei’s body, an embarrassing memory. He pivots, lowers his shoulder, adjusts his centre mass and slams into Grigori sideways, smashing him into the wall. Grigori is an old drunk. Aleksei is six foot four and carrying, quite literally, his life in his arms. He could bench a car.

They leave. In his ears His ears are full with echoes of Ilya’s bitten off inhale, of her pained breathing. Of the sound of her arm breaking, loud and wet. It can’t be true; it’s not true, surely. It can’t have sounded like that. Surely that part belongs to films, to exaggerated audio design, to tricks of the mind. Nevertheless, the sound stays with him.

Outside, at the bus stop, after he has managed to get Ilya into her coat, he says, “Tell me about your day.” She looks up at him, dazed. “Like you tell Irina,” he says. His voice is rough now, starting to fray. “Tell me anything. Please. I would really like to hear your voice right now.”

He does not look back.

Bus. Train. Border. Asylum.

Poland first. Then they will see. Germany. France. The Netherlands. Somewhere. Anywhere.

It does not matter.