xix.

The next morning, Kai's arms were around her. His face was pressed lightly to her nape, breaths falling through the tangle of her hair, and Eri felt no pain: no sense of unraveling through her sinews to suggest that Kai had killed her and brought her back in the night; none of the tenderness that came with bruising or the stiffness of having been used. Just him holding her. And the sheets falling about their bodies. And his fingers stroking drowsily along her skin.

Eri shuffled uneasily out of his hold to sit. His hand drifted down her back, the other finding a place in her lap, and he lay curled around her defenseless and silent. Eyelids fluttering in frail sleep. Hair a fine, brown mess like a little boy's. Through a fugue, Eri stared at him – this soft, foreign Kai – and felt a vague sense of loathing quite similar, though more clear-headed and rational, to what she'd felt for Chrono just the night before.

She'd gone to bed without another word to Chrono; it was clear he hadn't said anything to Kai. Otherwise, the sighs drifting out from Kai's chest would not have been so content, and he would not have huddled himself about the bed in search of Eri's closeness. His foot touched hers. His hand closed around the material of her pajamas.

In a moment of long-sufferance, Eri trailed her fingers across his scalp and frowned.

Waking up to Kai was a very different sort of difficult to going to bed with him. Where at night he was often irritable and demanding – wanting answers to questions he'd stewed upon throughout the day, wanting sex, wanting Eri to put socks on because her feet were cold then wanting her to take them off because now it was too hot – he was always debilitatingly clingy in the mornings. Leaving the bed was near impossible without first pandering to some confused, childlike need of his to be cuddled (for lack of a term more suitable to someone like him).

Some days Eri minded it less than having to sleep with him. Some days she hated it in equal measure. Today though, she felt nothing for the feel of Kai's hair between her fingers and how he murmured her name with bleary affection. He was warm. He was familiar.

"Stay with me."

He spoke in his sleep sometimes.

"I'm hungry," Eri said, not so much hungry as she was simply empty.

Kai hummed. "Come back when you're done then."

She said she would, and he let her go. The corridors were dim and cold, making it hard to say what hour it was. Eri, hugging herself against the chill, walked painstakingly slow to the kitchen and considered the raw feeling in her stomach – as though she'd been scraped out, made hollow like a wooden girl. She imagined that, and almost laughed.

She was a matryoshka doll, painted to be pretty and with space for other smaller dolls to fit safely inside of her. Maybe a little less pretty. A little more splintered or dirty.

At the foot of the staircase, Chrono's study door was open. It wouldn't have been anything suspicious had it not been for the fact that the light was on. More than that, coming close, Eri could hear Chrono speaking to somebody, low and raging, and in Russian. Despite knowing that eavesdropping would get her into trouble, she stopped outside his door and strained to listen.

"–going to hurt her if he finds out," he was saying. "No. No, that's not the point. We've already been over this, Anya. The problem was that you knew what she was doing and you didn't stop her. The fact that you didn't say anything to me is another story all its own."

Anya.

Chrono was breathing hard, and slurred his words strangely when he spoke again. "This is not the same thing and you know it. You loved me before Dimitri even– Oh, yes, go ahead. Go ahead and just try to deny it. You always do."

Numb all over, Eri peered around the doorframe into the study. Chrono was on the phone, his back to the door and his hand harshly clasping his hair. A bottle of sake from his and Kai's store was on the table, largely empty and with the lid missing.

"Excuse me?" he spat into the phone, and jerked his head on his shoulders as though to snap his own neck. "You knew exactly what he was doing to her. The whole time. Don't be so high and mighty. If it weren't for Kai's bullets and your cunty father-in-law extorting our profits, you wouldn't have that big fucking diamond on your finger, would you?" He hadn't spoken to Anya so darkly before. "No, you listen to me, my love. If something happens to Eri – I said listen – we all know you only tolerate Dmitri because of the money involved in being his wife – but if something happens to Eri, do you know what money he'll have then? A hell of a lot less, I can assure you."

Spinning around, looking awful and unsteady, Chrono swiped the bottle from his desk and gulped. His face was flushed brilliantly. His eyes were swollen, glassy, like he hadn't slept in days. Crashing backwards into his chair, so clumsily Eri was certain he would either miss his mark or send the chair tumbling right out from under him, he went quiet for a long time. Frozen, he listened, and sighed a vehement, miserable sigh.

"I'm sorry. Please don't – my darling, please don't cry. I didn't mean it like that."

It was a strange thing to hear, someone asking Anya not to cry. She was like the angels one saw outside of Russian cathedrals or in graveyards: carved to perfection and stone cold. Anya didn't cry. She made others cry.

Suddenly, through the understanding lens of retrospection, Eri remembered that night they'd watched Swan Lake in Fukuoka. How Chrono had cried then.

"Wait!" He shot forward in his seat. The sake fell out of his hand and did a wet, glassy tumble across the floor. "Wait, no, don't go!"

Had Eri been too cruel to him? Was it unfair to assume that he had no idea how she felt about Mirio?

"Anya, I'm so sorry. Let's talk this over. Please. Let's– I love y–"

The way he was cut short made it seem as though his bones had all cracked at once in a sick chorus of crunching. Or perhaps that the earth had split into two and swallowed him whole. An age passed in which Chrono just sat there, phone to his ear with no one on the other end. He dropped it eventually. Hands free and quaking visibly, he buried his face and began to sob like Eri had seen no man sob before – blubbering, making sounds like it hurt to breathe while his back heaved beneath his coat.

It hurt to watch.

Eri stood in the doorway now, bemused and entirely unhidden.

"Kurono-san…"

He snapped his head on his shoulders again, face wet and contorted as he looked at her, as he spluttered her name.

She parted her lips to say something, but nothing came out. The two of them stared at each other, and Eri realised she could easily have been staring into her own future. At least some version of it. "Would– would you like to–" she took a breath, aching under Chrono's dizzy gaze. "Can we have hot chocolate?"

"Hot chocolate?"

"Yes please."

He blinked at her like she was mad. "Yes. Yes, hot chocolate would be nice."

Indeed, hot chocolate would have been nice. But this morning, Chrono's hands were unsteady. The sugar bowl slipped from his fingers and left a crystalline mess of white across the floor, the shrill clang of porcelain meeting tile making Eri shiver; he swore bitterly under his breath, and poured too much milk into Eri's cup; he made himself a coffee, and burned himself when he tried to drink it.

Outside, the sky had only just begun to fade into a dreamy, dreary grey. It cast about the kitchen a haunted sort of look which Eri supposed was appropriate, and the lackluster hue made Chrono look paler than a dead man. He glared into the too-hot coffee. Despite sitting right next to each other, he seemed to forget that Eri was there until moments of self-consciousness made his eyes flicker towards her – at which point he'd sip more carefully from his mug, making a thoughtful sound before looking away again.

Eri's hot chocolate went cold quicker than it should have. It was too rich to drink like this, slathered with dairy.

"Are you angry, Kurono-san?"

"I'm furious."

"With me?"

"Yes. With you. But not with you. I don't know." Sharply, he slammed his mug onto the table and ignored the spillage. "I don't think we should tell Kai about this."

Eri waited for him to say more. He didn't. "Why not?"

"It would break everything."

"Okay."

"His heart, I mean. He has one too."

Eri couldn't be sure about that. "Okay."

Chrono wasn't able to settle his focus on her, try though he did. "But this is the condition," he muttered. "You won't ever, ever see that man again. Ever. This time, I'll know if you do."

The ultimatum didn't come across as earth-shattering or as final as Chrono had surely intended for it to be, likely because Eri and Mirio had already said their goodbyes. Not forever, Eri reminded herself. But still, with their promises shielding themselves away in her matryoshka-layered heart, she was able to muster out a weakly truthful, "Alright." After a moment, she added, "I'm sorry."

"Eri," Chrono placed his hand on hers; his touch was icy, "please try to love him."

"I can't."

"I know. But please try."

"After everything he's done?"

He looked pained and sad, and a little like he would be sick across the table. "Yes. Even with that. He doesn't know how to do anything else – he doesn't know how to show you that he loves you."

"This isn't what love looks like."

"You remember Anna Karenina, don't you?" Chrono gave Eri's hand a squeeze, and said in Russian, "There are as many kinds of love as there are hearts. Remember?" Abandoning the coffee and Eri, he stood feebly. "I'm going to bed now. Don't tell Kai I spilled the sake."

Eri frowned. "And the sugar?"

"Oh, yes. Right. Just tell the maids to clean it all when they get here."

Then it was Eri alone, two barely touched cups on the table and the morning taking on a more yellow tinge. Chrono's footsteps receded down the corridor with an odd drag. Somehow, Eri imagined still being able to smell the alcohol on his breath – she conjured up before herself an image as though Chrono hadn't just left, his face all puffy and weighed with feeling, imploring her to try. Please just try, as though it could possibly be so simple.

She didn't like that he'd quoted Anna Karenina. Or rather, she didn't like that he'd used her favourite book to convince her of a lie.

Although, then again, was it really a lie? Perhaps not. Maybe Kai's supposed love was just a sick, sad truth which only reared itself in painful ways. Eri thought of him waiting for her now in their bedroom, quiet and not so frightening when he was veiled thinly by sleep. When he held her fast against him and breathed in her smell like she was a flower for the picking. He'd never told her before that he loved her. What would he say if she asked? She didn't really want to know. And instead of going back to him, she spent the full hour before the maids arrived sitting quietly by herself at the kitchen table.