He hears heavy boots running across the porch moments before a pounding starts on his study door.
He's barely offered a bored, "Enter," before one of his Knights appears, out of breath and looking as if he'd rather be anyone but the fabled, ill-fated messenger.
"It's your sister-"
"Bog nakazyvayet menaya." (God is punishing me.)
He hears her voice the moment the door opens, follows the sound of it down a hallway.
"-stop! Tell me how I can help you."
" U menya yest', chtoby poluchit' yego!" ("I have to get it out!")
"Please let me have that. Iris-"
He finds Tommy crouching in the narrow doorway of the bathroom, reaching a hand inside.
The tap in the bathtub is still running, water cascading down into the floor and soaking the tiles.
It trails around pieces of mirrored glass that grind to powder beneath his shoes as he pushes past the other man.
Tommy tears his eyes away from the crouched figure across the room long enough to glance at the dark shape looming between them.
"Doctor's on his way," he says.
"Pozhaluysta pomogite." ("Please help me.")
"What's she saying? Honey, I don't understand you-"
"'Ira."
He ignores everything except her.
He focuses on the panicked way her shoulders are pressed against the wall like a trapped bird's wings against a window, how she doesn't seem to notice the water soaking into her open robe or the glass beneath her knees.
The swell of her abdomen is weeping in dozens of crimson crosshatches and there's blood under her fingernails and a shard of glass from the broken mirror clutched in her hand.
When he says her name again, he imagines the look in her eyes is the same as what must haunt the butcher after the killing blow.
"Pozhaluysta, pomogite mne, Alexsei." ("Please help me, Alexsei.")
"YA zdes'. YA pomogu tebe." ("I'm here. I'll help you.")
"U menya yest', chtoby poluchit' yego." ("I have to get it out.")
Her intention is clear and her taunt skin depresses under the determined edge of the glass.
"Give me that!" His words come out harsher than he intends and her eyes narrow at him.
"I'll help you," he promises.
"Liar!"
Her anger is as sharp as the shard that cuts an arch into the skin near her navel.
She hisses in pain and he falls to his knees, beseeches her as vehemently as he ever did the Lord: "Pozhaluysta, ne Ushibsya . . . Pozhaluysta, yemu bol'no." ("Please don't hurt yourself . . . Please don't hurt him.")
"I have to—I have to-"
Her fists meet her flesh within a sickening sound.
"You put it here."
"You don't want to hurt our son."
"I saved you and I killed them."
She lays all her sins at his feet but he begs her forgiveness: "Prosti menya." ("Forgive me.")
If he could find her hand in the freezing dark of the river, surely he can find her before she slips beneath these murky waters.
He grabs her wrist but not before it lashes out.
His arm burns as Tommy tries to step between them.
She swims in and out of consciousness.
There's a face she doesn't recognize sometimes and, sometimes, a voice that she does.
When they talk, it's about her and not to her, the words floating somewhere just above her.
There's a sting in her arm and a voice telling her to rest as if she had any other choice.
She recognizes her brother's head tilted in prayer, that it's his hands that are wrapped around hers, though there is a steady throbbing in her palm.
There's also a tear in the sleeve of his shirt-one of his best-and a stiff ring of something that looks suspiciously like dried blood around it. She can mend the rip but the stain will be harder to erase if it sits.
She tries to sit up, ready to chastise him for his carelessness, but winces as soon as her neck lifts off the pillow.
His eyes meet hers before closing again. He carefully kisses the back of her fingers, holds them against his lips so she can feel him say, "You're awake," even though it sounds more like a question than a statement.
She wants to ask her own questions but her tongue is thick and doesn't cooperate.
"It was a very trying evening," he says, and she remembers the same tired tone warning her not to cut her feet-but the water had been so red and his eyes so dark.
The next time she wakes, it's to the sharp smell of iodine and Justin hovering over her.
The blood is gone from his arm and he's clean-shaven and collected.
She might have imagined the damage from before.
But he looks at her warily and raises her gown without speaking. When he brings the rag down to her skin, it stings like she's fallen into a bed of ants.
When she looks down for the cause, she sees furrows, red and angry, starting to scab, a small line of stitches next to her navel, and bruises, some older and fading to yellow near her hips, some livid blue and purple and terrifying, across the curve of her stomach.
Justin leans and blows across one of the cuts, mimicking all the times she'd fixed split lips and scraped elbows.
"Your sweet belly's going to match my back."
I saved you and I killed them.
She catches his arm, focuses his attention.
God is punishing me.
"Why am I here instead of at home?"
"Nothing you need to concern yourself with now. Just rest." His voice is placating but she is not one of his sheep.
"Tell me."
"The police have been at your house," he says finally. "There was an attack last night."
"What?"
"I've explained everything to them. They won't be worrying you with it. Not in your condition and with the shock of it all."
He seals the bottle and stands.
"My Knights of Jericho caught the fiend on the road. He's been turned over to the authorities."
The lies fall so easily off her brother's tongue but the bruised ring around her wrist matches his hand, the bright red trails across her abdomen, the dimensions of her own fingers.
Her husband is conspicuously absent from Justin's story and her bedside.
When she wakes again, clear-headed but with throbbing temples, she learns she is a widow.
No one expects her to attend the funeral, so she doesn't.
Iris drops to her knees and screams while down in the valley below her brother falters in his sermon, but only briefly.
Lightning-from heat and never rain-strikes the edge of camp and starts a fire.
He's spent hours—days—worrying about the fate of her mind, her soul, but always after.
He's thought very little about the act itself, that sorrow greatly multiplied carries through walls and etches itself into everything around it. That no amount of pacing or praying or bargaining will lessen her pain.
Women die in childbirth every day, women who are younger than her, women who have bloomed and glowed, not hollowed and faded.
He's haunted by the idea, by the threat of something else, something more terrestrial, lurking in the recesses of their blood that combined will come to light.
She screams again and it doesn't sound human.
Then the house is silent. All the agonized fury gutted like a candle flame between impatient fingers.
At her door he hears her voice, alive and impatient-"Give him to me"-and a wail.
She looks like she's fallen out of his nightmares and it freezes him in place.
Her hair is plastered to her forehead and her neck, clinging to damp skin blanched of all its color save for the bruise-colored hollows under her eyes. Her thighs are stamped with blood, the sheets beneath her soaked through.
There's no way she has survived this unbroken.
But it's his Irina who looks up from the squirming bundle on her chest and smiles, who brings a hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh that turns into a sob.
"Out," he says and the doctor, the nurse, mindlessly follow his command until they are alone.
He wipes the sweat, her amber hair, from her brow, reverently kisses her cheek and tastes the salt of her tears, kisses her mouth and breathes awe and devotion against her lips.
Her voice is worn hoarse when she asks, "Do you remember? Like I taught you to hold my dolls."
The tiny figure curls wrinkled and red limbs towards a chest no bigger than his father's hand.
God himself had never created life so divine.
She pours secrets into his ears, their story as only they know it in their mother tongue.
"Otets i dyadya."
She kisses one hand and then the other, repeats the game.
"Mat' i tetya. Syn i grekh."
Father and uncle.
Mother and aunt.
Son and sin.
He is not jealous of his own son.
Still, having been the sun around which Iris's attention had orbited his entire life, the abrupt shift of that focus to their son is disorienting.
She's a wonderful mother. Isaac has rarely been out of her arms and, to his knowledge, never out of her sight. He's never even been alone with him. He's held him certainly, marveled at every minute detail of the infant for hours, but always with Iris at his side.
Even with his sister's single-minded devotion to their child, he can't help but remember her desperate resolve that awful day when she begged to be rid of him before he was even born. It doesn't help that the vague, frightening images he has of his own mother from his early childhood have long since been replaced by Iris's face.
He wonders if the guarded way they watch each other with Isaac is perhaps unnatural, but he has no frame of reference by which to measure the compulsion.
Iris doesn't need to know that his men have orders to watch her too, that she's not to leave the house without someone following close behind—not that she's gone farther than the yard to fetch something from the clothes line.
After a month, he admittedly grows tired of her self-imposed exile to motherhood-and to the guestroom—but the milky smell that clings to her over her perfume suits her in way he'd be reluctant to change.
Despite the attention, Isaac screams like clockwork in the night.
Generally, he's soon hushed and Justin doesn't consider going across the hall but tonight he can hear Iris's voice over the crying.
He's taken aback by exactly how much he has missed the sound of her singing. She'd sang at church, of course, every week, but she'd also sang, sometimes without even realizing it, around their house-as she waited for water to boil on the stove, while she soldiered through more needlework, as she'd dried after the bath.
She's singing to Isaac and slowly pacing the floor with him when Justin lets himself into her room.
"Here," he offers, "let me," and is shocked when she lets him take the baby from her arms without a fuss. It's a testament to just how tired she must be.
"You didn't sleep through a single night until you were two," she says, eventually.
Her head bumps against his shoulder and stays there.
"You were a horrible baby."
He can't help but smile at the way her accent, generally so carefully hidden, slips through and slurs her voice.
She's falling asleep on her feet, swaying against him as he rocks the baby against his chest.
When Isaac's cries have stopped and he's finally fallen asleep again, Justin steers Iris towards her bed with his free hand.
"Lay back down."
She's too tired to argue but when he settles in beside her, the baby's head carefully tucked into the crook of his elbow, she looks mildly startled at the implication.
"No," she says. "We might roll on him."
"I know for a fact that he hasn't slept in that crib yet."
"Go back to your bed."
"Later."
He couldn't count the number of times they'd shared this particular exchange over the years, him coaxing a few more minutes, a few more kisses, out of her despite her caution.
She seems satisfied this time to take the baby from him and to curl herself around the tiny sleeping form, to let him mirror the gesture and press his chest against her back. When his hand hesitates at her hip, she pulls his arm tighter around her.
"He makes us a murder," she mumbles.
"What did you say?"
Her eyes are closed when she explains.
"Of Crowes."
"Norman is coming out later today to meet Isaac."
Justin pats the side of his mouth with his napkin and drops it onto the table.
"Is he?"
"Don't look like that, Justin. Isaac's more than three months old and Norman's never even seen him."
He slides his chair back and stands.
"He's the closest thing he has to a grandfather. Maybe the baby will help smooth things over between the two of you."
"He's made his position very clear."
Norman is charmed by the baby, naturally good with children, but Isaac looks at him warily when he's sat in his lap.
Unused to being held by anyone other than his parents, he fusses to go back to Iris.
She leans over and kisses one of his hands as he reaches for her then smiles at Norman.
"I want you to baptize him."
"Not Justin?"
She shakes her head.
"I'd rather you do it."
Norman turns his attention back to the baby, "I can't imagine your uncle will be happy with that."
There'll be hell to pay for welcoming their son into the family of God this way, she knows, but she says, "I want it to be simple. He'll make a fuss and I just want it done."
She doesn't mention how Justin has already declared that Isaac will be the first one baptized in the new church, despite how long the wait for that will still be, and she doesn't even want to admit to herself that her real motive is avoiding anything that recalls a particularly vivid nightmare of another baby from long ago floating blue and bloated in a river.
"I'd be honored then."
She lays her hand over Norman's and squeezes.
"Thank you. He'll be in Los Angeles next week."
"What a cozy picture the three of you make."
"Justin."
Her smile is forced and so is his in answer.
The way she adjusts Isaac against her shoulder as he sleeps and sweeps a bit of drool from his cherub mouth with her thumb ensures he'll indulge her in this little domestic scene, however.
"Norman," he says, holding out his hand, "It's been too long."
Norman rises to shake his hand, calls him "son" as he had before all the unpleasantness had occurred.
"Your nephew is a beautiful boy, a real blessing."
"That he is."
He takes an earlier train and comes home to a quiet house: it's dark out and the maid has already gone home; Iris should be in her room but he finds it empty.
Isaac isn't in his crib and a familiar panic lodges itself in his throat.
He's about to call her name, when he hears the shower turn on and Iris humming to herself.
"Now what are you doing in here?"
The baby is in his bed, pillows tucked around him so he won't roll off.
He's rolled to his stomach, though, and raises his wobbly head at the sound of Justin's voice.
He picks him up and smooths down the tuft of hair that's sticking out from where he'd been sleeping.
"I think you've grown in the last week."
He moves Iris's robe out of his chair so he can settle Isaac on his knee, tilts his head and then again to catch his son's wandering gaze.
"Now where did your mother take you yesterday? Hmm."
It could have been nothing, a trip into town or a simple visit to Norman's.
The man assigned to look after Iris had proven incompetent. The call to say she'd gone out was appreciated but the fact that he hadn't known where she'd gone was not. He's already been replaced.
"Justin!"
He looks up at the doorway in time to see his sister raise a startled hand to her chest.
"I didn't think you'd be home until tomorrow."
The same hand clutches at the knot of the towel wrapped around her when he smiles.
Her skin is flushed from the warm shower and her hair falls to the top of her shoulders, a few shades darker than usual now that it's wet.
His eyes fall to the bottom of the towel laying against her damp thighs.
When their eyes meet again, her cheeks flush even more.
She looks for her robe and he nods in its direction.
" Someone has been sleeping in my bed."
He bounces his knee and Isaac kicks his legs out, happily.
"I believe the bear in that story was very unhappy about the arrangement, but I don't mind."
"I've missed you," she admits.
And he's missed her, missed this.
"I know." He tastes the exact spot her neck becomes shoulder. "I could smell you on my pillow."
He feels her chest move beneath his even though he doesn't hear her laugh.
"Old habits."
Her hair is still damp and spread out against the pillow in question when he stares down at her.
"I'm here now."
"You are," she agrees, but he feels her strain up against him to reassure herself, the same way he's been taking in every soft curve and harder edge beneath him. She smiles up at him, adding, "and Isaac is fed and asleep."
He laughs now.
"Miracle of miracles."
He raises off her just enough for her to ruck her gown up to her waist and to slide his own pajamas out of their way.
Given the hungry kisses she's peppering along his jaw, the desperate way she's biting at his throat and her very presence in his bed again, he doesn't expect her to cry out in pain, or for the sound to carry through the house as it does.
"It'll get better," she promises through gritted teeth.
He's not sure which one of them she's reassuring.
He's also not sure he could have stopped even without her permission.
Her nails dig into his shoulders just as a familiar cry starts from across the hall.
"Stay," he says, trapping her wrists on the pillow above her head in one of his hands, when she starts to struggle.
Her body is tense for the wrong reasons, but she nods finally, says, "Don't stop."
He finds her breast through her gown, mouths it until the fabric has gone transparent.
It's over quickly and the baby is still crying.
He's surprised—but pleased—when she whines, "Please," and guides his hand between them. "He'll stop soon."
She's warm and slick where he touches-from his release and not her own-but that only makes him more determined to persuade her reluctant body to follow.
He traces his finger over her until she bites her bottom lip and crooks a knee; he licks at her throat and bites down on an earlobe, whispers a torrent of crude encouragements into her ear.
Her toes dig into the sheets and he can't help but bait her: " Better ?"
"I can think of"—her hips lift off the mattress to press harder against his hand and her eyes meet his in open challenge—"a better way for you to use your mouth than teasing me."
When she starts to sit up, after, he nudges her back and says, "I'll get him."
"She was mine first you know."
Though he's worked himself red-faced in his fit, the baby hushes almost the moment Justin lifts him out of the crib, just as he knew he would.
When he goes back to his room, bouncing a happier baby in his arms, Iris has turned on the lamp and propped herself against the headboard.
She holds out her arms.
"He's fine," Justin scolds.
"He was probably frightened."
"You've spoiled him."
The way Iris raises her eyebrow and looks at him, he has to smile and admit to the boy in his arms, "She's spoiled us both—but whose fault is that?"