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Chapter Thirty

Petyr

I van’s blue Lada rattled, the engine idling like it had fallen asleep with one eye open. We sat in the dark outside his apartment building. The light was on in the kitchen window. Dimitri was home, and he didn’t know I was coming.

Ivan shifted in his seat, sighed, and reached beneath the driver’s side. There was a hollow clunk, and then he straightened with a dusty bottle of red wine in his hand. It was cheap, probably Georgian, with a label that had been peeling off since Khrushchev was in office.

“Here,” he said, passing it over. “If you have to get my son a little drunk to say yes, do it.”

I took the bottle. My fingers curled around its neck like I was afraid it might run off if I didn’t hold tight. I wanted to say something like, I won’t need this, or He trusts me, or He loves me enough to listen, but none of it felt real in my mouth.

Ivan’s hand landed on my arm, steady and warm.

“I’m not a cruel man, Petyr,” he said. “I know this is your last night with him.”

I stared straight ahead at the building like it was a firing squad.

Ivan continued, voice low and final. “Make the best of it.”

My throat tightened. I opened my mouth, but no words came. There was nothing to say that didn’t sound like begging, or lying, or both.

He turned in his seat, locked eyes with me. “Make this the best night of my son’s life,” he said. “It’s what he’ll remember you by.”

I nodded once, like my head was the only part of me still capable of movement. Then I got out of the car and gently shut the door.

Ivan didn’t say goodbye. Just put the Lada in gear and rolled off into the dark like he hadn’t just put the weight of the world into my hands.

I stood on the sidewalk with the bottle cradled to my chest, then turned toward the building and started walking.

Pressure was already building behind my eyes, like the bones of my face were trying to hold back a flood. Fuck. No. Not now. If Dimitri saw me cry, he’d know. He’d know I wasn’t coming with him, that this was a goodbye.

I swallowed hard and took the stairs one at a time, slow and quiet, each footstep a countdown. In my head, Waltz No. 2 by Shostakovich played—that dreamy, off-kilter melody that always filled my chest. It was there now, uninvited, beautiful, and so fucking cruel. It rose in my ribs like a tide.

I remembered asking Ivan, just twenty minutes ago, Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll do to you if they find out? What about your wife?

He’d sighed, lit a cigarette with steady hands. “If everything goes according to plan, no one will even notice he’s gone. Not for months. We’ll say he got work on the pipeline. Or ran off to Riga. Something.”

And if they did notice?

Ivan had shrugged. “Then I’ll survive. That’s what we do.”

But Dimitri wouldn’t. Not after what the police had already done to him.

And I couldn’t let him go through that torture again.

I had Vera and her family’s influence to save me, but Dimitri had nobody, just his parents.

And despite Ivan’s self-assurance, I feared what the state would do to him and his wife if they discovered Ivan had engineered his son’s defection.

I wanted to ask Ivan how he’d come up with his plan. But then I remembered that the less I knew, the better.

My fingers tightened on the wine bottle as I reached the landing. It was the first time in all our months together that we were about to be truly alone. Free, in some cruel, fleeting way.

And of course, it was also the last.

I stood in front of the door for what felt like forever. My fist was raised to knock, but it just… hovered. I couldn’t move.

How am I supposed to lie to him? He’ll see right through me.

The music in my head swelled again. Strings, lilting and aching. My eyes burned.

If the shoe were on the other foot, he’d lie to me too. To save me.

I took a breath. Then another.

And I knocked.

My chest seized with every creak of the wood floorboards behind the door. Then it swung open with the drama of a curtain pulled back for the last act, and there he was.

Dimitri.

He looked like he’d seen a ghost. Then he grabbed me like a drowning man grabs for the surface, like I was oxygen and mercy and every answer he didn’t know he needed. He yanked me inside and slammed the door behind us with the flat of his hand.

“What are you doing here?” His voice cracked.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The waltz had started up in my head again, that relentless swirl of strings, an elegant ache behind my eyes.

My gaze flicked to his face and caught the constellation of bruises fading slowly into yellow and violet dusk.

I had the irrational, selfish urge to kiss every one of them until they disappeared.

I smiled instead, the best I could muster, and said softly, “I heard your father got called in to work tonight. Emergency shift. Poor bastard.”

Dimitri squinted at me. “How the hell could you know that?”

“I know a lot of things.” I set the bottle of wine gently on the side table like it might explode. Then I reached for him and pulled him into my arms like we were gravity-bound to each other. And then I kissed him.

It wasn’t a sweet kiss. It was a kiss full of prayer, of desperation, and the aching need to believe that time might stop just this once. He kissed me back with everything he had, everything he was, and for one moment, I allowed myself to believe that this might be enough.

When we broke apart, both of us were breathless.

“Does it matter?” I whispered. “We’re alone. All night. Let’s not waste a second of it.”

We kissed again, softer this time, like a promise we couldn’t afford to keep.

That’s when Dimitri began to cry.

It started as a tremble under my hands, a strange rigidity in his jaw, and then the tears spilled over, sliding down his cheek as he tucked his face against my neck like he could hide from the world there.

“I missed you,” he murmured, his voice thick. “But Papa won’t let me go back. Says I can’t ever return to the factory. Hell, he won’t even let me leave the damned apartment. I feel like I’m under house arrest.”

I stroked the back of his head, wishing I could cut out my heart and hand it to him like a gift. “You’re not being punished,” I breathed.

“I know,” he said, pulling back just enough to look at me. “It feels like punishment, but there’s something in Papa’s eyes when he says it, like it hurts him too. Like it’s for a good reason. So I’m going along with it. For now.”

He sniffed, swiped at his cheek, and then noticed the bottle. “Hey. Real wine?”

I nodded and told an inconsequential lie. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

Dimitri chuckled. “Well, this feels special enough. Let’s drink.”

He picked up the bottle and padded barefoot into the tiny kitchen.

I followed, each step through that quiet apartment echoing like it was sacred ground.

I couldn’t stop staring at him. Dimitri’s back, his neck, the curve of his shoulder blades under that old threadbare T-shirt.

The strings inside me swelled again. They were relentless tonight.

Rimsky-Korsakov, maybe. Something Dimitri conjured in me whenever he was near.

Dimitri wrestled with the cork. “Stubborn bastard,” he muttered.

I reached past him and grabbed a couple of old glasses from the cabinet. They were both chipped, mismatched, one with a faded Misha the bear from the ’80 Olympics. My fingers shook as I poured, but he didn’t seem to notice.

The wine smelled sharp and dark, like cherries. I handed him his glass, and for a heartbeat we just stood there, side by side, glasses in hand, the silence breathing between us.

And that’s when it hit me.

The only way I was going to survive this night was by making it perfect. Not good. Not decent. But a night that you write down in your bones, that you feel replaying every time someone touches your hand the right way for the rest of your life.

Love.

That was the assignment. That was the only way I could do this. I had to lie to him, convince him to leave, break my own goddamn heart, but also show Dimitri I loved him.

I had always loved him.

Dimitri took my hand like he was afraid I might disappear.

I followed him into the living room, my heart thrumming in time with the waltz still curling through my mind.

The room was dim and cluttered, furnished in that special Soviet style: everything heavy, brown, and built to last longer than most marriages.

A sad little radio sat crooked on a rickety table in the corner.

Next to it, a pot of long-dead violets slumped like it had finally given up hope.

He switched the radio on. A burst of static, then some loud, nasal commentator shouted about a football match. I winced.

“I wish I could find that Kino band’s music,” he said, fiddling with the dial. “You remember? That night at the rock club?”

I closed my eyes for a second. Of course I remembered. That night we were gods. Young and unstoppable, high on music and maybe each other. Until the police snatched us from the sidewalk and tortured us like we were actual criminals.

My stomach twisted. “I want to dance with you,” I whispered. “Find a waltz.”

He kept spinning the dial, and then Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 spilled from the tiny speakers, scratchy but unmistakable. Utterly perfect, like it was planned.

I held out my hand. “May I have this dance?”

He stepped into my arms without a word. We didn’t so much dance as drift across the scuffed linoleum.

Our feet slid more than stepped, our bodies brushing in the smallest ways—his chest against mine, his cheek nearly touching.

The music wrapped around us like silk. Or maybe it was a noose around our necks.

Then the thought came. What if Dimitri agreed to go alone?

What if I told him the truth, all of it? If I could finally stop lying, stop hiding, stop pretending this country had space for us?