Page 43 of The Fire Beneath the Frost

My hands were shaking, so I folded them tightly in my lap to hide it.

The silence hung again, stretching long enough for my brain to start spinning.My eyes were glued to the carpet, worn thin in a trail between my father’s chair and the kitchen, and I thought about what I’d said outside.I thought about Petyr’s hand against the small of my back.I thought about the life I’d admitted out loud, and how there was no way to take it back.

My father leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“You don’t have to explain,” he said, his voice lower now.“Not to me.”

My throat tightened.I wasn’t sure I could explain.Not in words, anyway.Not without risking it all.Petyr’s safety, my own.The fear was back, coiling around my ribs.

“I wasn’t going to,” I said, voice hoarse.

A beat passed.Then another.

“But you want to.”

That got me.I met his eyes—really met them—and for a terrifying second I saw no judgment there.Just...recognition.

Like he’d lived this moment himself, once.Long ago.In a world just as gray, just as cold.

He sat back, resting his head against the chair.“You’re angry,” he said simply.

I blinked.“Of course I’m angry.”

“At me.”

“Yes.”

He nodded.“You think I had choices?That I just didn’t take them?”

I didn’t know the answer.

He sighed.“Maybe I was a coward.But I know what it’s like to want something that no one says you’re allowed to have.”

The room spun a little.I felt dizzy, like I was leaning over the edge of a very steep, very sudden cliff.

“What are you saying?”I asked.

He didn’t look at me.Just stared at the far wall, where an old photo of Lenin still hung—faded, frame chipped.A relic from another time.

“I’m saying,” he murmured, “that you’re not the first in this family to feel trapped.”

My mouth went dry.My heart pounded so hard I could hear it echoing in my ears.

“Why didn’t you ever—” I started, then stopped.Because I already knew.The answer was etched into every wrinkle on his face, every silence at the dinner table, every night he’d slept on the couch.

Because it wasn’t safe.

Because it still wasn’t.

He looked at me again, and this time his eyes were shining with something I couldn’t name.Regret, maybe.Or a grief too old to hold.

“I don’t want that for you,” he said.“If there’s even a small door open—take it.Get out of this place before it slams shut again.”

I swallowed hard.“You mean...leave?”

He didn’t say yes.But he didn’t say no either.

We sat there in the quiet, surrounded by peeling wallpaper and the smell of cabbage soup, and for the first time in my life, I saw my father not as an obstacle, but as a man who’d been shaped—maybe broken—by all the same things I was trying to fight.

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