[Harvard University – Poetry Lecture Hall, Afternoon]
The air in the wood-paneled lecture hall hung thick with the scent of old paper and earnest ambition. Viktor Mikhailov sat in the back row, a shadow against the burnished oak. His black turtleneck bore the faint, stretched imprint of tiny fingers where Misha had gripped him that morning in a paroxysm of delight before Yuri peeled her away. Strands of his usually precise dark hair fell rebelliously across his forehead, testament to the same small hands that had yanked with surprising strength. Over the back of his chair lay his crimson Harvard letterman jacket—the only blaze of color in his monochrome world.
Professor Thorne's voice washed over the room, a sonorous river dissecting Keats' "negative capability." Viktor's gaze drifted between the sharp, sparse lines of his own notebook and the broad window overlooking the quad. Below, students jogged endless laps on the manicured path, their laughter a distant hum behind the thick glass.
Circles, Viktor thought, his pen tapping a silent, restless rhythm against the blank page below his half-formed verse. They run in circles, mistaking motion for meaning.
Poetry hadn't always been rebellion. Once, long before the weight of the Mikhailov name became a straitjacket, before the gilded cage of expectations slammed shut, it had been… sanctuary. A quiet corner of his mind where the noise of Dmitri's glacial pronouncements, the wives' venomous whispers, the suffocating pressure of legacy, could be held at bay by the precise architecture of a metaphor, the steady drumbeat of iambic pentameter. Words were stones he could stack into a wall, a fortress against the world.
And then came Misha. The tiny, furious hurricane who demolished walls and rebuilt his world from the rubble.
---
[FLASHBACK: "The Poisoned Welcome]
Moscow. One Year Earlier.
"The prodigal son returns! Anastasia's icy heir!" The toast, dripping with false bonhomie, came from one of Dmitri's countless sycophants. Viktor stood rigid amidst the suffocating opulence of the Volkov estate's grand salon. Ice was in his veins. It was the only defense against the predators circling in silk and Savile Row. Carelessness was a luxury Dmitri Mikhailov's offspring were never afforded. Every smile was a potential blade; every touch, a calculated maneuver.
Ji-Hyun Park arrived as a curated "coincidence," orchestrated by an uncle eager for Dmitri's favor. Viktor saw the calculation beneath her practiced coyness, the ambition glinting behind the kohl-rimmed eyes. Pathetic. Transparent.
The Welcome Party, however, was non-negotiable. A command performance.
Ji-Hyun was patient. She moved through the crowd like smoke, a glass of cranberry juice appearing in her hand, then pressed into his. "You look parched, Vitya," she murmured, her voice like honey laced with ground glass. He'd taken one sip. Maybe two. The taste was faintly off, a metallic tang beneath the tartness he dismissed as cheap mixer.
The world tilted thirty minutes later. The crystal chandeliers fractured into blinding shards. The drone of conversation became a roaring sea in his ears. Cold sweat prickled his scalp.
"Too much celebrating, darling?" Ji-Hyun's voice slithered beside him, her hand suddenly firm on his elbow, steering him away from the crowd, towards the sweeping marble staircase. "Let's get you somewhere quiet."
He woke in a dim, unfamiliar guest room. The silk sheets were cold against his bare skin. His shirt was gone. A crushing nausea heaved in his gut, and his mouth tasted like ash and betrayal. The sour tang of violation coated his tongue.
Ji-Hyun stood by the window, adjusting the strap of her slip dress, backlit by the city's glow. She turned, a slow, vulpine smile spreading across her face. "You were… very enthusiastic."
Viktor didn't speak. The ice in his veins turned to arctic fire. He pushed himself upright, ignoring the vertigo, the pounding in his skull, and reached for his phone on the nightstand. His voice, when it came, was a rasp of broken glass. "Get out. Before I call security. Before I do something irreversible."
The smile vanished, replaced by a flicker of fear before she masked it with disdain. She left without another word.
He broke it off the next day with a terse, three-line email. Vanished from Moscow for weeks, holed up in a remote dacha, the silence broken only by the crackle of the fire and the furious scratching of his pen across paper – poetry as exorcism. When he returned to Harvard, the ice had refrozen thicker, harder. A necessary carapace. He thought the chapter was closed. Buried.
Until the storm.
Until the Louis Vuitton carrier on his penthouse doorstep.
Until the flimsy note: "She's yours. DNA enclosed."
---
[PRESENT: "The Blank Page"]
Back in the Cambridge lecture hall, the present snapped back into sharp, almost painful focus. Professor Thorne had moved on, assigning free verse. "Dig deep," he urged. "Find the raw nerve."
Viktor stared at the pristine white page in his notebook. His pen hovered, poised but paralyzed. How do you capture the universe-altering force of a six-month-old girl? How do you translate the scent of her scalp after a bath, the weight of her trust as she slept against his chest, the terrifying, exhilarating vulnerability of loving something more than your own next breath? Poetry had been a fortress. Misha had turned it into… something else. A hearth? A language too vast for words?
The student beside him, a perpetually anxious sophomore with horn-rimmed glasses, leaned in slightly. "Dude," he whispered, eyeing Viktor's clenched fist around the pen. "You okay? You look… like you're about to declare war on that paper."
Viktor didn't turn his head. "I am always prepared for war," he replied in low, unaccented English, his gaze still fixed on the terrifying blankness.
His phone vibrated silently in his pocket. A distraction. He slid it out beneath the desk. A photo filled the screen. Misha, strapped into her high chair in the penthouse, beaming with yogurty triumph. The white goop was smeared across her cheeks like tribal warpaint, plastered in her dark curls, coating her tiny fists. Pure, unadulterated, messy joy.
Yuri's text followed: She demanded tribute. Then launched the first wave. Your tiny warlord.
A sound escaped Viktor. Not a laugh, not quite. A sharp exhale, almost a gasp. But the corners of his lips, those perpetually stern lines, lifted. Unbidden. Unstoppable. A crack in the ice, flooded with sudden, unexpected warmth.
He looked down at the blank page. The war was over. The poem wouldn't be a blade or a barricade. It would be… a blanket. Woven from the impossible, terrifying, perfect threads of this new reality. He touched the screen, tracing the yogurty smile of his daughter.
The pen finally touched the paper. He wrote a single word, not in Russian, but in the language of his chosen sanctuary, his new comfort:
Misha.
The rest, somehow, would follow.