My chest tightens. I can see them both, two dark-haired little boys, clutching hands in a pitch black room, listening to the terrifying thunder of their father’s footsteps prowling around the empty house above them.

“Did you want to be alone, too? Like Geneva” I ask, feeling a tug of pity for these little boys I never even knew.

“No,” he says. “I always let him in. He would ask me to tell him stories, so I would make things up. Stupid shit. Meaningless shit.”

There’s an air of self-consciousness about him that I haven’t really seen before. It makes me want to lean in. Cross the space between us and bury my face in his hair. I wonder if anyone has ever held Kolya Uvarov close to their chest and told him everything is going to be okay.

“Like what?” I press.

“I don’t remember.”

“Yes, you do,” I say firmly. “You do remember. Tell me.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because—”

Because I care about you.

“Because I want to know that you’re human. Or at least that you were, once upon a time.”

Kolya sighs, but it comes out like a hiss. “I used to tell him that one day, Otets would be dead and I’d be don, and then we’d go on adventures together. Just the two of us. And there would be no more belts. No more dark bedrooms. No more pain.”

He glances away from me then, but I keep my eyes on his face. He’s aiming that thousand-yard stare into the piano like there are answers written there that only he can see. His jaw twitches ever-so-slightly, the only sign that anything is happening beneath the surface.

If I didn’t know him better, I’d believe the lie. That he felt nothing.

But I do know him better. He feels it. He feels all of it.

“That doesn’t sound like a connection born of survival, Kolya,” I say. “That sounds like love.”

“Call it what you like,” he answers gruffly.

“What happened?”

He glances at me, eyes burning white-hot. “The same thing that happens to most people over time. We changed.”

“Who did the changing?” I ask. “Him or you?”

“We both did. I had to become the don I was meant to be. Doing that meant distancing myself from everyone. Including him.”

He keeps stroking the keys, and the longer I watch him do it, the more I realize that there’s hidden emotion in the gesture.

“But you both kept playing the piano?” I ask.

Kolya nods. “It was the one thing Otets never stopped.”

“Because he loved your mother?” I ask, wondering if I should even go there. It can’t be a coincidence that Kolya has rarely ever spoken about his mother.

The only thing I know about her is that she was the one who had encouraged her sons to learn to play.

“Love was not an emotion that my father understood,” he says coldly. “Maybe keeping her pianos was his method of compensation.”