Page 146 of Winterveil

Dr. Iver lifted his gaze to hers. “You already know more than you think. You just have to remember.”

“I’m not in the mood for riddles.”

“Very well.” Dr. Iver pressed his mouth into a thin line. “Come home with me, and I’ll tell you everything.”

Nadiya tensed in shock. He phrased it as if she had a choice. Did she? What if she stayed here, recovered, and then went to New Jersey to look for her family? It was just a short trip across the Hudson River.

But would they even want her back? Would they want the girl she was now, her body scarred, her hands stained with blood? The girl who had been such a coward that she had fled instead of comforting her dying father? Feeling a bolt of alarm, Nadiya patted the bedsheets, searching for her father’s cross. Her gaze scanned the room and she deflated with relief when she saw it glinting on the bedside table.

Then thoughts of her family slipped away from her. Giselle’s voice wove its way through her mind instead.

I love you. She’d spoken the words with such fierceness that Nadiya had to believe her. It had transfigured everything: Nadiya’s entire world reshaping itself around the sound of Giselle’s laugh, the soft pink flush that painted her cheeks when she smiled.

“Where is she? Giselle?”

“She’s safe,” Dr. Iver said. “At Valeran.”

And then everything became easy after all. A lightness descended on her, like the gentle sweep of silk across her skin.

Nadiya pushed herself up into a sitting position. When she reached for the sling, Dr. Iver didn’t stop her.

“I want to go,” she said, swallowing. “I want to go home.”

Dr. Iver rose. He leaned over and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “As you wish.”

Forty-Six

Spring 2037

The hallways were familiar, but they were endless. Klaudia turned and turned, her bare feet cold against the marble floor. Lightbulbs flickered in their fixtures, warring with the shadows, casting the corridors in a sickly chiaroscuro.

On the walls, paintings gleamed in their gilded frames. Modernist charcoal sketches. A bleeding-red Rothko. Klaudia paused in front of one: Goya’s famous monstrosity, Saturn Devouring His Son. Light danced off the child’s headless corpse. But the Titan’s gaping maw absorbed the light, swallowing it along with the infant’s flesh. The rest of the canvas was all murk.

She was a little girl again, visiting the art museum with her mother. She felt small, unsteady on her legs. Except when Klaudia reached out for her mother’s hand, her fingers found only empty air.

In Russian, she called out: “Mama? Where are you?”

No one answered. The darkness seemed to pulse around her.

Skin prickling, Klaudia continued down the corridor. When she turned the corner, it became the hallway of her old Brooklyn apartment, with its creaking floors and peeling paint. A damp, musty smell thickened the air. She remembered setting mousetraps, chasing endless cockroaches as they skittered into the cracks on the wall.

Once a mouse had gotten caught and chewed through its leg to escape. Klaudia had followed the trail of blood and found it limping across the kitchen floor. She had frozen, seized with both pity and disgust.

Her father had shouldered past her, picking up the mouse by its tail. He placed it, still squirming, in a plastic bag, and pounded it with a meat cleaver, while Klaudia stood in the corner, quietly weeping. He dropped the blood-soaked bag in the garbage but for days the kitchen reeked of death.

Next time, Klaudia picked up the wounded mouse and placed it in the freezer. Within minutes, the cold stopped its heart. She slipped the body into the garbage herself and scrubbed the blood from the floor, and her father had never known.

Klaudia turned the corner, and now she was in the corridor of her Upper West Side apartment. The parquet floors were polished weekly by a cleaning lady. The fixtures were mahogany and gold, but somehow this apartment let in even less light. Klaudia had to squint as she made her way down the hall.

Suddenly, the wall shook, paintings rattling. Klaudia tensed. She could hear familiar voices on the other side. Her mother, sobbing and pleading. Her father, his voice a rasp, saying in Russian, “Don’t be so dramatic, Irina.”

Klaudia closed her ears to the sound. She had learned her lesson about stepping between them. Her mother had begged her to never try it again.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Klaudia remained frozen in place. She knew this predator’s tread.

He slunk toward her, half-cloaked in shadows. His face was a shock of white in the darkness. Klaudia couldn’t move; the animal part of her mind had taken over and she was a rabbit, hypnotized by a serpent’s stare. His scales glittered and his teeth flashed.

“Papa,” she started, stumbling back. “Pozhaluysta—”