He knows, as he and Antonina ride back to Angelkov from the dacha, that his mother was wrong. He was not a good son, and he is not a good man. Antonina’s smell is on his skin. When Antonina allowed herself to stop being a countess and simply be a woman, he lost the tight control he’d maintained for most of his life. Watching her sleeping, he felt a desire to protect her, to take away the pain. The pain of a betrayal that is his own doing. And in spite of the way she had spoken to him before she turned and walked from the dacha an hour earlier, his feelings for her haven’t changed. As they ride side by side in silence save for the sucking of the horses’ hooves in the mud, the cawing of crows, he wants her to smile at him the way she did in the candlelight in the dacha. Seeing her now, clutching Mikhail’s coat—all she has of him—he remembers her ten years younger, in the flogging yard holding her baby with such fierce protectiveness. Grisha knows she trusts him implicitly. It pains him to think back to the previous day in Tushinsk.
What do You think about The Lost Souls Of Angelkov?
