Page 74 of The Fire Beneath the Frost

“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?”

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