She studied his face, and when she spoke, her words were mere whispers. “I just want you to love me again.”
He put his hand on her arm, the uninjured one. “I never stopped loving you, Nadia. Even when I thought you’d abandoned me. Under all the hurt, the love never went away.”
She looked down, blinking rapidly. “Even knowing what those men did?”
He took her hand and brought it to his mouth, pressing his lips into one of the scabs lining the back of her fingers. “I only hope you can forgive me for doubting you and not finding you sooner.”
She nodded. Her emotions weren’t so hidden now. Relief and joy washed over her face, and she gave him a smile, one that contained forgiveness and hope. He pulled her onto his lap and wrapped an arm around her waist. With his other hand, he caressed her cheek. He hesitated to do more. She was wounded, and hard months and a plummet into an icy river had left her body frail.
She leaned into his hand. “You can hold me a little tighter, Filip. I’m not going to break. Not now that I have you again.”
One of her hands went to the back of his neck, and her fingers brushed across his skin. He’d missed her touch, craved it, longed for it with an ache that never lost its intensity. He pulled her closer, and when their lips met, Filip knew everything was going to be all right. He felt in her an exact mirror of his own sentiments: love, desire, and a determination to forge ahead together. Their time apart hadn’t destroyed what they’d built. Love remained, powerful and resilient, and it would carry them forward.
They sat in the back of the train, but before long, someone noticed their kiss and the men around them began to cheer. Filip didn’t let that distract him from his efforts at reacquainting himself with his wife’s mouth. But the emotion that cheer represented fit the moment perfectly. He had Nadia. And together they were going to their new country.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Anton stood outside another institution in Vladivostok, the fourth he’d visited that day in an attempt to find his son. Filip and Nadia were searching, too, as a pair because Filip didn’t want to leave Nadia by herself. He didn’t trust Russia anymore, if he ever had.
The city was clogged with refugees. The American military presence was withdrawing, and that created an air of uncertainty tinged with panic. Men in uniforms from a dozen nations wandered about, speaking in a variety of tongues, using assorted currencies, and believing in a wide range of ideologies. The women were almost as diverse, but often more desperate than the men. Few could spare thoughts for anything other than survival. What chance did a boy like Marek have in a city like this?
A harried woman glanced his way when he came inside the wooden building. “May I help you?” The words were accented Russian. This particular orphanage was run by the American Red Cross, and by the look of things, they were withdrawing along with their army.
“I’m looking for my son.” Larisa had told him which hospital Marek had been admitted to. Marek’s name wasn’t on the list of patients who had died there, but the list was sprinkled with entries like “unknown woman, approximately 20 years old, died Sept. 30, 1918,” and “unknown infant, male, died Feb. 9, 1919.” The nurses at the hospital said they would have turned over a healthy, unclaimed child to an orphanage. Marek might be dead, but Anton couldn’t give up until he’d searched every cot in Vladivostok.
“His name?”
“Marek Tothova. He’d be twenty months old. His mother died last summer. Typhus.”
The woman pulled a list from a drawer and studied it. “If his mother died of typhus, are you sure the boy didn’t as well?”
“I never heard.”
“We have five unclaimed boys about that age. No Mareks, but two are without names. What does your son look like?”
“He was only three months old when I last saw him.” Anton braced his hands on the desk. “Brown hair. His eyes were blue when he was a baby, but I hear that can change, and my wife’s eyes were brown.”
“That’s not much of a description. And none of them have hair at present. We’ve shaved their heads to prevent lice.”
“Maybe I’ll know him if I see him.”
“We can’t let you take the wrong child.”
He struggled to remember anything else that might identify his son. “He had a blanket. It was red and white.” Veronika had chosen the fabric to match the legion’s colors: red like blood and white like snow. In the course of a typhus epidemic, the blanket might have been burned. Or it might have simply been washed, because if Vladivostok was anything like the rest of Siberia, a replacement would be hard to find.
The woman told him to wait. What were the chances that one of the boys was Marek? He needed a miracle. Filip had gotten one when he’d found his wife again. And Dalek had gotten one when he’d survived Orlov’s shot. Were there any miracles waiting for him, or was heaven, like every supply officer in Russia, out of stock?