The Devil's Favourite Obsession

Conversation between Lorian and Olga

A lie which swallowed their truth

Olga didn’t scream, even though every part of her bones urged her to unleash a scream from the depths of her being.

She didn’t throw anything at Lorian, the husband who thought of killing their own blood was better idea rather than paying the debt he inherited from his family.

She remained seated on the couch, feeling paralysed. And she did not lunge at him, claw at his face, or collapse into theatrical weeping, which might have given him something to manage, something to hold, something to soothe with his hands and apologies until the crisis passed and they could pretend it had never been spoken.

She remained on the couch with her legs still resting where he had placed them, her hands still folded in her lap, her cream silk nightdress smooth and unwrinkled across her knees. She looked exactly as she had looked two minutes ago, before the world she had built with this man had been pulled inside out and hung up to dry.

That was what frightened Lorian.

He had witnessed her tears. For years, he had held her through it.

He had prepared for her tears. He had braced for her fury. He had rehearsed this confession in his mind a thousand times across two decades, and in every version, she had wept, and he had held her, and eventually she had forgiven him because that was what Olga did. She pardoned. She swallowed. She folded her pain into the linen of their marriage and put it away in a drawer he never had to open.

But the woman sitting on the couch wasn’t weeping; instead, she looked at him as though she didn’t recognise him... like he had suddenly become a stranger. In her gaze, he saw a deep grief for their daughter and an unmistakable shame for having married him, that every truth she had ever taken from this man’s mouth was worth re-examining.

”Say it again,” Olga whispered.

Lorian’s throat moved. ”Olga, please...”

”Say it again!” Her voice did not rise, nor did it crack. It carried the flat, and calm tone of a woman who was now requesting documentation.

Lorian pressed his back against the window. The cold glass seeped through his shirt and into his spine, and he welcomed it because the room had become unbearable.

”I arranged for her to be taken.” Each word cost him something visible. His jaw worked between sentences as though chewing through glass. ”I paid two men. I told them to take her far from me when I am out with her in the playground, and to make sure it looked like kidnapping so that no one would raise a question, not even Cassian Crown.”

”You told them to kill her.”

”.... Yes! I told them to do whatever was necessary.”

Olga’s fingers tightened in her lap. Her knuckles whitened. A vein surfaced on the back of her right hand, thin and blue, pulsing with the heartbeat she refused to let him hear.

”She was one year old.”

”I know how old she was.”

”She had just learned to say her own name.” Olga’s voice remained level, but something beneath it had begun to vibrate, the way a glass on the edge of a table does before it falls. ”She used to pronounce it wrong. She would say it with the emphasis on the wrong syllable, and you would correct her every time, and she would laugh and say it wrong again because she loved the way you leaned down to her when you corrected her.”

Lorian closed his eyes as Olga’s words pierced his heart with a cruel intensity, even though she was merely reminding him of the memories he shared with their daughter.

”You used to carry her on your left arm. Always the left. Because your right hand needed to be free for your phone, and she had learned to hook her fingers into your collar so she would not slip. She trusted your left arm more than she trusted the ground.”

”Stop.”

”And you handed her over to two strangers... to kill her. Why didn’t you end it yourself? Did you think you were doing something worthy of praise? Or were you too cowardly to act, so you chose the easier path? Do you even deserve to be called a father? Do you have the right to be called ’Papa’?”

Lorian’s fist struck the windowsill. The sound cracked through the room. A glass figurine on the shelf beside the curtain rattled but did not fall.

”I did it to protect her from her worst future!” His voice broke on the last word, and the break revealed something raw and ugly beneath the composure he had worn for twenty years. ”You think I wanted that? You think I slept after that?”

”To me, it looked like you slept very well! And was planning how to raise the second one, to be perfect, while you killed my first child...!” Olga’s words were laced with the poison of a mother who had just discovered that she had married the most despicable coward. ”You carried no guilt with you. While I went to therapy. While I stopped eating. While I could not hold Tatiana when she was born because every time I looked at her face, I saw the daughter I had lost. While I sat in that nursery for six months, rocking an empty crib in the dark, you carried it.”

”You need to understand why I did it, Olga...”

”No! I won’t understand and I do not want to understand. You had every choice!” Her voice rose for the first time. Not a scream. But it was worse than a scream. ”You are a murderer. You lied to me in my face.”

Lorian’s hand hung at his side. His fist had unclenched. His fingers hung loose and useless.

”Why?” Olga’s voice dropped back to a whisper. ”Why could you not give her to Cassian? What was so terrible that death was better?”

Lorian dragged his palm down his face. His eyes were red. Not from tears but from the effort of holding them back, which was somehow worse.

”The arrangement between our family and the Cassian Crowns goes back further than either of us.” He spoke slowly, choosing each word with the caution of a man walking through a minefield he had built himself. ”Before we married, my father had already pledged the firstborn daughter of the next Romanov generation to Cassian Crown as part of a blood debt. The terms were clear and non-negotiable. The girl would belong to him from the day she turned eighteen. How could I possibly accept selling my daughter to someone like Cassian Crown? Don’t you know what whispers circulate in the secret society about him?”

Olga stared at him.

”When you became pregnant with our first child, I prayed for a boy.” His voice thinned. ”Every night. I prayed for a boy, because a boy would void the agreement. And when the doctor told us it was a girl, I felt something die inside my chest that I have never been able to revive.”

”That couldn’t have been the only choice... she was my daughter too...” This Olga stood up as she yelled.

”We do not even know what Cassian would have done to her... I saved her for future torment, Olga. Why don’t you see that? It wasn’t easy for me either...”

The room fell silent.

The clock on the mantle ticked. The curtain swayed. The security lamps outside cast long, pale shapes across the ceiling.

Olga looked at her husband. She studied his face the way she had studied Cixi’s face across the dinner table three hours ago. Slowly. From every angle. Searching for something she could trust.

”And now?” she asked. ”Cassian is dead. Cassian is presumed dead. The debt is dead. Our daughter would have been with us... You killed her because you were afraid of Cassian....” She laughed through her tears... ”For a man who is dead.... did you not feel once to kill yourself after knowing Cassian died... and the sacrifices you made were for nothing, Lorian?”

”I do not know,” he admitted. And for the first time in twenty years of marriage, Olga believed him. ”I did not want to think of my past decision until today....”

Lorian watched her. She walked to the bedroom door, and his chest tightened with the visceral, animal certainty that if she walked through it, something between them would close that could never be reopened.

”Where are you going?”

Olga stopped with her hand on the door handle. She did not turn around.

”To Cixi.”

”Olga, it is midnight. She will be asleep.”

”Then I will watch her sleep.” Her voice was quiet and absolute. The voice of a mother who had waited twenty years and would not wait one more hour. ”And if she is not ours, I will know. And if she is...” Her fingers tightened on the handle. ”Then God help you, Lorian. Because I will not forgive you... You are already dead to me.”

She opened the door and walked through it.

Lorian stood alone in the bedroom. The curtain swayed. The clock ticked. The empty couch still held the faint impression of where his wife had been sitting, and the warmth of her skin was already fading from the cushion.

He lowered himself into the armchair and pressed his palms against his eyes.

The glass figurine on the shelf beside the window caught the lamplight and held it, a tiny, meaningless thing made of crystal that someone had given them as a wedding gift twenty years ago, when their life together had been new and promising and built on foundations he had already decided to crack.