Page 78 of Crimson

She needed to know what had happened. What made Samara choose Paris in the end.

So she opened to the next entry and read:

February 8th, 1986

I told Papa I wouldn’t marry Petya. He said I have to, or he’ll disown me. He says I’ll never see Mama or Rashel again.

I looked at Mama to see if he really meant it. And she wouldn’t look at me in return. She just turned and went in her room. So I know she’ll go along with it.

My heart is tearing in two.

But if they force me to choose, I know who I’ll pick.

I sent him a message. I told him to meet me at the Luzhnetsky bridge.

I’ve packed a bag, and I’m going there tonight.

I’ll wait for him, and if he meets me, we’ll go away together.

Even if it means I’ll never see my family again.

Swiftly, Nadia turned to the next entry. She had to know what happened. In her fervor, she almost expected to read an account of Samara and Ivan running away together.

But there were only two sentences scrawled across the middle of the page:

He didn’t come. I’m going to Paris.

With shaking hands, Nadia turned the page again. But there was nothing. It was blank.

“No!” she cried, flipping through the remaining pages of the diary.

They were all blank.

She had never looked to the end to see—she’d always assumed the journal was full.

But that was the end of it. Samara hadn’t written any more.

“No!” Nadia cried again.

Now the dam burst, and the tears flooded down her face.

She felt the loss of her mother as she’d never felt it before.

Samara was gone. There was no one to tell her how the story ended.

Why hadn’t Ivan come to the bridge?

Had Stanislav discovered their romance and ordered Ivan to be killed, as Nadia had always feared?

Well, Stanislav wasn’t dead. He might be able to answer that question at least.

Getting to her feet, Nadia went out to the hallway and listened for her aunt.

She heard no murmur of Rashel’s voice from Stanislav’s room, reading aloud to the withered old man. All was silent behind the door, save for the gentle, rhythmic beeping of the monitoring machines.

Nadia crept inside her grandfather’s room. She could see his still figure beneath the sheet. As she drew closer, she could hear the impossibly slow rasping of his breath; inhales and exhales that seemed to last an eternity.

As she drew closer still, she saw that he lay on his back with his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling. In the faint blue light of the monitors, and with gravity pulling his skin taught against the bones of his face, he looked surprisingly young. If he still had his mustache and his thick, dark brows, he might have resembled Tsar Nicholas once more.