Читать книгу Hard sex. Rear entrance - - Страница 6

Deep in the night, her personal phone rang with a persistence capable of piercing any armor, even the one Tanya had built around her heart. She slept lightly, as always, ready to leap up at any moment like a predator sensing danger. The alcoholic haze from the evening meeting had dissipated, leaving only a bitter taste on her tongue and a heavy throb in her temples, like echoes of a distant storm. She glanced at the screen. “Mom.” Her heart, long trained not to falter, clenched for a moment, like a fist gripped by pain. Her mother called rarely, and certainly never at three in the morning, when the world was steeped in darkness and silence.

She picked up the phone, her fingers cold as ice.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

From the receiver came a soft, broken sob, followed by a voice she hadn’t heard like this since childhood—weak, trembling, full of unbearable anguish.

“Tany… Leni…”

No more needed to be said. A cold, steel needle stabbed into her chest, under her ribs, and lodged there, freezing her soul. The world didn’t collapse. It froze. It simply ceased to matter, as if someone had switched off the lights, leaving her in utter darkness.

“Lena…?” Her own voice sounded foreign, flat, devoid of emotion, like an echo in an empty room.

“Accident…” Sobs drowned out the words, tearing through the silence. “Ambulance took her… In the hospital… It’s bad… Tanyusha, come…”

She hung up, her movements mechanical, like a puppet pulled by invisible strings. She got out of bed. Walked to the window. The night city burned beyond the glass as if nothing had happened, its lights flickering, indifferent to her pain. Somewhere out there, in one of those hospitals, her sister was dying. Her Lenochka. The only person whose calls she always answered, without irritation, without calculation. The only one she sent money to without a single sarcastic remark, as if trying to atone for her dark, poisoned soul. The only ray of light Tanya had so carefully hidden in the furthest, most guarded corner of her heart, to keep it untainted by her darkness, by her endless battle for power.

She drove to the hospital on autopilot, like a machine programmed for motion. Parking lot, elevator, endless white corridor reeking of death and antiseptic, the scent seeping into her skin like poison. The doctor, weary and detached, spread his hands, his voice dry as autumn leaves. “Traumatic brain injury, internal bleeding… We did everything we could.” Those words sounded like a sentence, like a heavy stone dropping into an abyss.

She entered the ward. Her mother, hunched over, instantly aged by twenty years, sobbed into the blanket, her tears silent but heart-wrenching. And on the bed lay Lena. Her Lena. Weightless, pale as a porcelain figurine, with tubes in her mouth and veins, like a web holding her on the edge of life. A bruise on her cheek, a dark stain on a clean page. But still beautiful. Still that little girl with dimples, who trailed after her, calling in a clear voice, “Tanya, wait for me!”

Tanya approached and took her hand. Cold. Lifeless. She waited for a wave to crash over her. For her to scream, to be torn apart by pain, to collapse to her knees, crushed by grief. But nothing happened. Inside was the same icy emptiness as always, bottomless as a chasm where no light could penetrate. Only the needle under her ribs stirred, causing a dull, aching pain that wouldn’t let go but didn’t break her either.

She stood there, unmoving, not crying, like a statue carved from marble, until the monitor emitted a long, steady beep. A sound, flat and merciless, like a stone falling into mud, announcing the end. The end of everything that tied her to something human.

The funeral was gray, like her soul. The sky wept for her, drizzling a fine, irritating mist that soaked through her clothes and skin, as if trying to awaken something alive in her. At the fresh grave, relatives and acquaintances gathered, their faces twisted with sorrow. Everyone cried. Her mother sobbed, her tears silent but heavy as lead. Aunts whimpered, their voices blending into a mournful chorus. Even her perpetually drunk uncle Igor wiped away a rare male tear, hiding his face in his sleeve.

Tanya stood motionless, like a stranger at this festival of pain. In a strict black suit, dark sunglasses concealing her eyes, she was impeccable, as always. A cold marble monument amid human grief, surrounded by a sea of tears, yet dry as a desert where nothing grew but thorns.

Natasha approached her. The same Natasha she’d kicked out of her office, whose words about friendship still rang in her memory like shards of broken glass. There was no reproach in Natasha’s eyes, only endless pity and pain—the things Tanya hated most in the world.

“Tanya…” She gently placed a hand on her shoulder, her touch warm but unbearable. “Cry. It’ll help.”

Tanya slowly turned her head. She looked at Natasha’s hand, then at her face, and in her gaze, there was nothing but icy emptiness.

“Take your hand off,” she whispered. Her voice was quiet, but it rang with steel, sharp and cold as a blade ready to cut.

Natasha recoiled as if stung, her hand trembling, but she said nothing, only stepped back, dissolving into the gray crowd of mourners.

Tanya stared again at the coffin being lowered into the earth, into the black maw of the grave that swallowed everything she had left. She tried. Tried to force herself to feel. She remembered Lena, so small, giving her a clumsily drawn card, her fingers sticky with glue, trembling with pride. How they laughed together over some silly movie, lying on an old couch, sharing a blanket. How Lena, grown up, spoke to her with gentle concern: “Tanya, you’ve become so prickly. I love you no matter what, but… be careful, okay?”

Nothing. No tears, no lump in her throat. Just the same emptiness. Deafening, numbing, absolute, like an abyss she kept falling deeper into. And a realization, terrifying and final, like a verdict: she couldn’t cry. The mechanism for tears, for pain, for grief, had broken in her. It had atrophied over the years she trained herself to feel nothing but anger and contempt, when she built walls of ice and steel around herself so no one and nothing could break through.

She hadn’t just lost her sister. She discovered she’d lost herself. The part that could mourn. The part that could love. And that loss was more terrifying than any grave, because she was alive, yet dead inside.

When the coffin disappeared into the ground and people began to disperse, Alex approached. He silently handed her a white rose, its petals cold as her heart. There was no fear or subservience in his eyes. Only understanding. And that was unbearable, like sunlight striking eyes accustomed to darkness.

“Leave,” she told him, and her voice finally cracked. Not from grief. From rage. Rage at herself, at this emptiness devouring her from within, leaving nothing but ash.

She stayed at the grave alone. The rain soaked her expensive suit, her hair, her face, its drops cold as her soul. She removed her sunglasses, letting the water stream down her cheeks like counterfeit tears she couldn’t shed. But it was a deception. A cheap imitation, like everything in her life.

She bent down, took a handful of wet, cold earth, and clenched it in her fist. Dirt lodged under her perfectly manicured nails, staining what always remained flawless.

“Forgive me, Lena,” she whispered into the void, her voice hoarse like the wind over a grave. “Forgive me for not even being able to say goodbye like a human being.”

But there was no answer. Only the wind, the rain, and the same icy, silent emptiness inside, which had become her only companion. A part of Tanya died with her sister, but how large that part was, she couldn’t grasp in this tragic moment. She knew only one thing: what remained was merely a shell, a shadow of who she once was, and that shadow didn’t know how to live on.