Page 67 of The Fire Beneath the Frost

I leaned closer.“Because I’d cut off my arm just to wake up with Dimitri every morning.”

ChapterTwenty

Dimitri

The sky was a colorless grey again, like someone had wrung out the last drops of paint from the world and left only the cold behind.Papa and I hadn’t spoken all morning—just the clatter of utensils over breakfast and the occasional cough.Now the silence hung between my father and me like the scent of stale tobacco in his car: ever-present, and impossible to ignore.

He gripped the wheel with those blunt, square fingers of his, the ones that had once stitched up the hull of a fishing boat with surgical precision.Hands of a man who’d built everything he had, except, perhaps, a connection with me.

I slumped deeper into the passenger seat, watching Leningrad roll by in smudged pastels and soot.My shoulders ached from a weekend spent brooding over what I couldn’t change.

“You’ve been quiet,” my father said, eyes still on the road.“All weekend.”

I exhaled through my nose, slow and deliberate.“It’s nothing.”

He raised an eyebrow.“The change of season, perhaps?”

“Maybe.”

He grunted.“Most people are happy when spring comes.”

I didn’t reply.What was there to say?Spring meant new life, fresh starts.But for some of us, it only made what we couldn’t have feel sharper, more alive.A mocking promise of warmth I couldn’t reach.

We pulled up to the factory gates.The familiar stink of oil and wet wool drifted through the open window even before I stepped out.I opened the door but didn’t say goodbye.Papa didn’t expect me to.The engine coughed once as he drove off, leaving me in the usual crush of workers lined up to get inside.

Faces blurry with fatigue surrounded me.Everyone dressed the same, moved the same.A herd with nowhere better to be.I scanned the line, my heart stuttering, hoping, stupidly, for just a glimpse of—

No sign of Petyr.

My throat tightened.I stared ahead, jaw clenched, breath shallow.

I knew it wasn’t his fault.On Saturday, when he disappeared so suddenly with Vera’s parents, it wasn’t because he wanted to leave me standing on the street like a forgotten thought.His in-laws had shown up unannounced.Vera’s parents.Big shots in the Party, apparently.People who could make men like me disappear with a signature.

Still, the knowledge didn’t make the ache any easier to swallow.We barely got minutes together these days.A kiss here.A whispered promise there.Once, behind the warehouse, he grabbed my wrist, yanked me into shadow, and kissed me like the world was ending.Maybe it was.We never said it aloud.

Even when we managed something more than a kiss—those desperate, ragged quickies where our hands shook and our breath turned to fog—it always felt like the world would punish us for even that.

Even so, I would’ve given everything I had for one more look into his eyes.I could live on just that.I have lived on just that.

Someone behind me muttered, “You gonna move or stand there all day?”

I blinked.The line had disappeared.The foreman was already barking orders at the next group inside.I nodded once, mostly to myself, and trudged forward into the belly of the beast.

The factory greeted me like always—with noise.Deafening, mechanical, alive in the worst way.The looms sang their endless dirge.Threads of green stretched across the room like a bad dream we kept weaving because we didn’t know how to wake up.

I peeled off my coat, shoved it into the locker, then slid my hat onto the hook.My fingers lingered on the wool for a moment longer than they needed to.Hesitating.Bracing.

When I stepped out onto the floor, my eyes found him instantly.

Petyr.

He stood with Vera—always Vera—and a few other workers near the dye tanks.He was laughing at something.Light bent around him, I swear it did.He leaned in a little too close to Vera, probably playing the part of doting husband for whoever might be watching.

But when his gaze met mine, something in him lit up.

A smile exploded across his face, blinding and sudden, like the sun had cracked open inside him.He broke away mid-sentence and crossed the floor with urgency, slipping between machines like he had somewhere important to be—and he did.He had me.

“Dimitri,” he breathed when he reached me, voice low, charged.His eyes devoured me like he hadn’t seen me in weeks.“I have the most enormous surprise for you.”

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