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Chapter Twenty-Two

Petyr

“P etyr, my man!” Oleg shouted, brushing past me like we’d been waiting with open arms. “We thought this place might be empty, but look at this! Firewood stacked, food on the stove—hell, you’ve been living.”

Pavel and Anton followed behind him, both grinning like idiots and nodding their hellos.

They reeked of vodka and bravado, already halfway to plastered.

Two women I didn’t recognize trailed after them, giggling about the breeze in their skirts and the wildflowers by the road.

One of them wore a leather jacket two sizes too small, the other had hair bleached to the color of old straw.

They were women who used their loudness like armor, chirping about god knows what while their eyes scanned the place for something stronger than tea.

I smiled like the friendly host I was pretending to be.

“Of course! C’mon in, comrades,” I said, sweeping an arm toward the kitchen as if we’d invited them, as if this wasn’t the one weekend all season I’d begged the universe for solitude. “The dacha’s for everyone in the spring and summer. You know how it is—one big party all season long.”

Laughter erupted as they made themselves at home. Oleg was already poking at the samovar like he owned the place, and Anton stretched out on the couch like he planned to sleep there until August. The women drifted toward the kitchen, following the scent of Dimitri’s stew like hungry wolves.

“Ohhh, you’ve been cooking,” said the blonde, eyes wide with glee.

“Please,” I said with a bright grin that hurt my jaw, “help yourselves. Anything you see, it’s yours. We’ve got food in the fridge and a stew on the stove—don’t burn yourselves.”

I caught Dimitri’s face just as he turned to walk out the back door. Rage was written in every line of it. His shoulders were coiled tight, fists clenched. But he didn’t say a word. Didn’t need to. I knew exactly what he was thinking. And worse—what he was feeling.

I cracked a joke about ration coupons with the girls, just loud enough for the others to laugh. Then I slipped out the back.

He was standing in the yard, rigid as a soldier, eyes burning into the trees at the edge of the property like he could set them on fire.

I followed him without a word. When we crossed into the thin line of woods just beyond the garden, he spun and punched a birch tree hard enough to make it shudder. Bark split. So did his knuckles.

“Fuck!” he hissed, shaking his hand, blood blooming between his fingers. “Fuck.”

I grabbed him by the shoulders before he could do it again.

“Dima, stop! You’ll break your hand.”

“I don’t care.” His eyes were glassy with unshed tears, but his voice was sharp. “They just invited themselves in! How are we supposed to—how are we supposed to be anything when we can’t even be alone?”

“I know.” I kept my voice low, steady.

“Do you?” he snapped. “When are we ever going to be alone together?” He swiped angrily at his cheek. “It’s always something. It’s always something.”

My stomach twisted. The blood on his hand was bright, angry red, and I wanted to scream with him, punch trees with him, burn the whole dacha down if it meant one damn night where we didn’t have to pretend.

“I’m doing the best I can,” I whispered. “You know I am.”

He looked away, breathing hard through his nose. “I’m sick of Sanctuary, dark alleys, and watching you with Vera.”

“Maybe they’ll leave before the weekend’s over,” I added. “Oleg always gets bored fast. Hopefully by tomorrow night, it’ll just be us again.”

Dimitri laughed without humor. “Yeah. A couple hours of pretending we’re just friends who like to sit too close on the couch.”

I couldn’t argue or promise him anything more than I had. I wanted to. God, I wanted to. But we couldn’t tell the others to leave. Not without drawing suspicion. Not without risking everything.

I glanced at his hand again. Blood was dripping onto the mossy ground now, quiet and steady like rain.

“Let me see it.”

He hesitated. Then, with a reluctant sigh, he held it out.

I took it gently, cradling it in both of mine. Guilt twisted through me like a knife. His skin was torn, the knuckles swollen. All because we couldn’t just be. All because love—real, desperate, human love—had to be hidden behind smoke and fake smiles.

“Damn it,” I murmured. “Why can’t we ever catch a break?”

* * *

By the time I got back inside, the record player was going, and the vodka was flowing.

A scratchy LP of Alla Pugacheva was warbling out from the corner of the sitting room, and Oleg had taken off his shirt for reasons known only to himself.

Anton and Pavel were deep in a conversation about which of the girls was “more fun,” while the girls pretended not to hear them from the kitchen, where they were raiding our bread stash like cheerful mice.

The air was thick with cigarette smoke, the windows sweating from the heat of too many bodies and too much alcohol.

Dimitri was nowhere in sight.

I told them he’d gone to check on his mother at a nearby dacha. Something about promising his father he’d look in on her every day. I said it with a wink and an easy shrug, the kind of thing no one questions because it sounds just boring enough to be true.

No one blinked.

Someone passed me a glass of vodka, and I took it with a practiced smile. I didn’t drink it.

Then Pavel leaned over and turned the volume down on the record player until Alla sounded like she was melting.

“Alright, everyone, hush up a minute,” he said, glancing around as if the dacha walls had ears. “I’ve got news. Real news. But you’ve got to be quiet about it.”

Oleg rolled his eyes so hard I thought he might sprain something. “If this is about that goat you thought was a bear, I swear to God—”

“No,” Pavel snapped. “This is serious. I mean strange-shit serious.”

We leaned in like kids around a campfire.

“There’s this guy,” Pavel said, lowering his voice. “Boris Yeltsin. From Moscow. He’s been saying things… loud things. Stuff that makes it sound like he wants Russia to break away from the USSR.”

I blinked. “Break away?”

“And that’s not all,” he said, sloshing vodka as he gestured. “I heard Lithuania’s going to declare independence. Like, any day now.”

“Pavel, no one gives a fuck about that,” Anton muttered, already halfway to drunk and sprawled across the armchair like a bored house cat. “As long as vodka stays cheap and there're women in the kitchen, who cares what those stuffed suits are doing?”

Pavel narrowed his eyes. “You should care. Things are shifting. This isn’t just politicians waving their dicks around. Something’s coming, and it’s big. You mark my words.”

Anton made a fart noise with his mouth and raised his glass.

“That’s enough, you two,” said Oleg, stepping in like the self-appointed moderator of bullshit.

“But… Pavel’s not wrong, exactly. My brother went to Paris last year with his gymnastics team.

Said he saw homeless people on every street corner.

Filthy, begging, some half-naked. You don’t see that here. ”

He gestured around the room with both hands. “Guaranteed job. Guaranteed housing. Medical care. Education. Hell, this dacha? Belongs to the people. We didn’t buy this place. We earned it. What kind of idiot would trade that in for—what? French cheese and blue jeans?”

Everyone murmured their agreement. It was hard to argue with the surface of it. On paper, the system worked. It had its flaws, sure, but so did everything. Right? Then I recalled Vera’s parents, and how they could fit six of this dacha into their single one. Was that even remotely fair?

I glanced out the window.

Movement caught my eye. Just the barest flicker of motion in the dusk. Dimitri. Returning from the woods. His shoulders were slumped, his walk slow. Defeated.

It dawned on me that this world did work for men like Oleg, Pavel, and Anton. They fit here. They existed for the sake of existing. The system rewarded them for being exactly what it wanted: obedient, simple, content.

But men like Dimitri? Like me?

We wanted more than just a warm place to die.

The door creaked open, and Dimitri stepped inside, eyes darting briefly around the room like he was calculating threats. One of the women—Larisa, I think—saw his hand before I could move.

“Oh my god, what happened to you?” she shrieked, grabbing his wrist before he could hide it.

He winced. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? Your hand’s bleeding!”

She dragged him into the kitchen with all the delicate grace of a tugboat. I followed just far enough to hear the sink running and her voice rising over the water.

“You boys are always hurting yourselves. What happened? Did you fall?”

“Yes,” Dimitri said quickly. Too quickly. “I, uh… I tripped on a root. In the woods.”

“Well, don’t bleed all over the kitchen floor,” she scolded, but her tone was more amused than angry. “Your poor mother’s probably worried sick.”

There was a pause. The kind that crackles in the air.

“She’s… she’s fine,” Dimitri said, voice uncertain.

I winced.

He didn’t know about the lie. About the story I’d told them to cover his absence. And now he was caught in it.

I stepped into the kitchen, all smiles.

“There he is,” I said, sliding in beside them. “Dima, your mother didn’t give you any more of those mushroom pies, did she?”

His eyes flicked to mine. A half-second beat. Then he gave me the smallest nod of understanding.

“No,” he said. “She just wanted to make sure I was eating. You know how she gets.”

Larisa clucked her tongue. “All mothers are the same.”

But as she turned back to the sink, still fussing, I saw it.

The way Dimitri’s fingers trembled.

And how his eyes never quite met mine.

I helped Larisa wrap Dimitri’s hand in one of the kitchen towels—thin cotton decorated with fading strawberries.

She’d dampened it with cold water, and now it clung to his skin, blooming pink where his blood soaked through.

Her voice was still going, talking about how men never look where they’re going, always thinking about something else.

She wasn’t wrong.

Dimitri didn’t say much. Just a grunt of acknowledgment here and there. He didn’t look at me. Not even once.

And I was too scared to ask why.

“Alright, alright, back to the party!” someone shouted from the next room. The record had started up again—something brighter now, something jazzy and manic that didn’t match the mood in my chest.

I helped Dimitri to his feet, and we walked back into the main room like nothing had happened. Like we weren’t bleeding from places no one could see.

The room had turned rowdier in our absence.

Anton was now serenading Oleg’s shoulder with a ridiculous ballad, and someone had spilled pickled tomatoes across the floor, making the air sharp with vinegar.

The rest of the guys were too drunk to notice much.

Or maybe they noticed everything and just pretended not to. That was the Soviet way, wasn’t it?

See nothing. Say nothing. Be nothing.

I glanced at Dimitri beside me.

His jaw was clenched, lips tight. His eyes weren’t angry anymore—they were worse than that.

They were cold.

Empty.

A door slowly closing.

I felt something inside me curl up in a panic.

Dimitri knew I wasn’t strong enough.

Not strong enough to ask what was wrong. Not strong enough to speak the truth. And worse, not strong enough to fight for us.

Because what could I say? In a room like this, surrounded by people who toasted the Party without a second thought? In a country where deviation was treated like disease? What would I do if someone caught us with a look too long, or a touch too soft?

They’d send me to a labor camp in Siberia with a number sewn into my coat. Dimitri too. Or worse, I’d vanish. We both would. And no one would say a word.

That’s how things worked.

And the worst part?

I understood, and I accepted it.

Because I was a coward. I’d memorized the rules and followed them so well I could pass for a model citizen. I’d laughed at the right jokes. Toasted the right lies. I’d hidden in plain sight my whole life.

But now I had something to lose.

And that made it worse.

I looked at Dimitri again. He was sitting stiffly on the arm of the sofa, his wounded hand cradled in the towel. Someone handed him a glass, and he nodded without looking at them. I saw it then—in his profile, in the hard line of his mouth.

Contempt.

For me.

And God help me, I couldn’t blame him.

I deserved it.

Because he was trying. Struggling. Fighting to feel something other than despair. And I was doing nothing but lying and watching and hoping no one noticed.

Praying they couldn’t read our love on our faces.

That’s what the Party wanted, wasn’t it? Uniformity. Erasure. No edges, no shadows, no love unless it fit inside a wedding ring and a birth certificate. Any spark of individuality had to be stamped out before it could catch flame.

What were we?

A risk.

A glitch in the system.

A fire burning beneath the frost.

And there was no future for that. Not here. Not now.

I sipped my vodka and smiled when someone made a joke, and the laughter roared back like a wave, drowning out the silence between me and Dimitri. But in that silence, I heard the thing I feared most.

Dimitri was slipping away.