Chapter 10: f
The cold woke her. The blanket was heavy, but the room held a deep, stone-chill. Vanja opened her eyes to gray light filtering through the small window. For a moment, she was nowhere. Then the memories returned in a sickening cascade: the drive, the pine woods, the relentless way Bahri had taken her against the car, the solemn faces in the oda, the map of death she had spread before them.
And the guard outside her door.
She turned her head. The door was closed. She listened. A soft, regular breath, the faint creak of a floorboard. He was still there.
A different shame crept over her, warmer and more insidious than the fear. Her body felt used, sore between her legs, her skin imprinted with the memory of his hands. Yet beneath the soreness was a treacherous hum, a cellular recognition. She pushed it down, sat up. Her nightshirt, stained and crumpled, smelled of him, of pine, of sex. She needed to wash. She needed to think.
There was a quiet knock, not on her door, but on the one at the end of the hall. She heard Bahri rise, his joints popping, and his muted voice. A woman’s voice answered, low. Minutes later, he opened her door just enough to slide in a ceramic bowl of warm water, a rough cloth, and a simple, clean dress of dark blue wool, folded beside a pair of thick socks.
“Ten minutes,” he said, his voice hoarse with sleep, and closed the door.
She washed quickly, the water turning gray. The dress was scratchy but warm, hanging loosely on her frame. It smelled of lavender and attic. When she emerged, Bahri was waiting, leaning against the wall. He looked exhausted, shadows like bruises under his eyes. He didn’t touch her. He just gestured downstairs.
The main room was full of quiet morning activity. The mother, whose name she learned was Haxhere, was at the wood stove. Two young women, perhaps wives of the men she’d seen, were sorting beans at the table. They glanced at Vanja with open, unreadable curiosity. The air was thick with the smell of fresh bread.
Adem and Shaban were in the oda. The door was open. Adem saw her and nodded for her to enter. Bahri followed and took a seat on a cushion against the wall, part of the council, part of the guard.
The mood was different from the night before. The shock had settled into a grim, practical tension. A large map of Kosovo was spread on the low table, weighted at the corners with cups.
“We need more information,” Adem said, without preamble. “And you should probably stay.”
Vanja’s pulse spiked. “I can’t stay. They will look for me.”
“Stojanovic is in Metohija,” Adem stated, his finger tapping a region on the map west of Pristina. “Leading a special unit in ‘cleansing operations’. Then he will have duties in Podujevo. His pattern is known. You have a phone in your apartment. You will call him. Or your family friend, Pendic. You will tell them you are safe, that you needed time away after a… personal crisis. A woman’s matter. He will believe it, or he will choose to.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, the frustration boiling over. “It won’t end there. If I go back, I am trapped in his world. I can’t help you from there. And if he suspects anything—”
“I know,” Adem interrupted, his voice calm but final. “But we need to know what you know. All of it. Not just Prekaz. Not just one attack. The shape of it. The sequence. You have seen the photographs, you said. So you have seen the album. We need to read it with you.”
She looked at their faces. Shaban’s, aged and sorrowful but resolute. Hamez’s, burning with a need to fight. Adem’s, the unmovable mountain. Bahri’s, averted, staring at the map as if it were on fire. They weren’t asking. They were stating a new reality. Her value was her knowledge. Her safety was now their concern, a logistical problem in a coming war.
A strange calm descended on her. The historian’s calm. The archivist of doom.
“Okay,” she said, her voice flat. “Okay, I see.”
Adem nodded, a gesture of grim gratitude. “Anything else we need to know? Now. Today.”
She took a breath, sifting through the terrible timeline. “You are planning to attack Šćepanović in December. The judge in Lipjan.”
A ripple. Hamez shifted. It was a closely held plan.
“It’s a mistake,” Vanja continued. “His convoy is heavier than you think. It will be an ambush, but it will turn into a massacre… of your men. You will lose six. You will gain nothing but a tightened noose around Drenica.”
Adem’s jaw tightened. He gave a single, slow nod. The confirmation was chilling.
“Anything we can do for you?” Shaban asked, his old voice gentle. The question surprised her. In this calculus of survival, her personal needs were a decimal point.
She thought of the kind-faced man in Pristina, the one link to her mother’s stories. “Yes. Mitar Pendic. Please make sure nothing happens to him or his family.”
Shaban froze. The gentle air vanished. “Why would you ask such a thing?” His voice was suddenly strong, a whip-crack in the quiet room.
Vanja closed her eyes, summoning the story that was her cover, her half-truth. “He is the only family I have here,” she whispered. “He is my mother’s uncle.”
A profound silence.
“What?” said Shaban. The word was a fracture. “You are Slava’s granddaughter? Dana’s daughter?”
“Yes,” Vanja said, bewildered by his intensity. “The one from Basel.”
“Dear God.” The color drained from Shaban’s face. He brought a trembling hand to his mouth. His eyes, fixed on her, glistened, then overflowed. Tears tracked through the deep lines of his cheeks. A sob, raw and unchecked, broke from him.
Vanja stared, utterly lost. “I don’t understand what is going on.”
Adem and Hamez were staring at their father, stunned. Bahri had looked up, his eyes wide on Vanja.
Shaban struggled to speak, wiping his face with a rough sleeve. “He did say you looked like her,” he managed, his voice thick. “But, she had red hair, you know. Fiery. Yours is golden.” He took a shuddering breath. “By ‘him’, he meant the old man. The one you helped in Podujevo. My uncle, Bashkim.”
Realization, slow and cold, dripped down Vanja’s spine. “My… great-grandma?”
“Yes,” Shaban said, composing himself with immense effort. “Vera. What do you know about her?”
The family lore, recited like a fairy tale. “She married my great-grandpa, a Serbian medical student, after the war. They lived in Podujevo until he died, she died in 92”
“What about her family?” Shaban pressed, leaning forward.
Vanja recited the sanitized version. “Albanian. She… cut contact with them. It was too difficult, after everything.”
“That’s not true.” Shaban’s voice was firm now, absolving. “We never cut contact. Never. I was at her funeral in 1995. I saw your grandmother, Slava, as a woman. I saw your mother, Dana, she was beautiful. You were a baby. I held you.”
The room tilted. The rug beneath her seemed to fall away. Vanja’s hands gripped her own knees to steady herself. “What are you saying, Mister Jashari?” Her voice was a thin, shaking thread.
Shaban reached out, his old, gnarled hand covering hers. His touch was warm, solid, real.
“Vera was my sister, child. My older sister.” His eyes overflowed again, but he was smiling through it, a smile of heartbreaking joy and sorrow. “Mitar Pendic is as safe as anyone can be in these times. And he is not your only family here.”
The words hung in the air, reshaping the universe. The compound was no longer just a historical site, a future massacre. It was her great-aunt’s home. The mother at the stove, Haxhere, was her cousin by marriage. The young men with Kalashnikovs were her second cousins. Adem and Hamez Jashari, the legendary commanders, were her great-uncles. Shaban was her great-uncle, her blood.
She looked at Bahri. His face was a mask of shock, his eyes darting between her and Shaban, comprehending the seismic shift. The woman he’d fucked with such desperate fury in a car and guarded through the night was not a Serbian journalist, not a Swiss stranger. She was familje. She was Jashari.
A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat, choked by a sob. All her life, a quiet mystery about her mother’s guardedness, about the old, sorrowful look when Albania was mentioned. The “mixed heritage” her parents called it, undisclosed, uncomfortable. It was never just vague mix. It was this. It was Drenica. It was this house.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered to Shaban. “My mother… she never said.”
“She was protecting you,” Shaban said, squeezing her hand. “The world was different. It was harder. But the blood remembers. Your kindness to my uncle… that was the blood remembering.”
Haxhere appeared in the doorway, her eyes red. She had heard. She came in, ignored the men, and pulled Vanja into a tight, silent embrace. She smelled of dough and woodsmoke. She held her for a long minute, then released her, cupping her face, muttering a blessing in Albanian before retreating, wiping her own eyes.
The military council had dissolved into a family revelation. Adem cleared his throat, the practical commander reasserting himself, but his eyes on Vanja were different. Softer. Terrifyingly responsible.
“This changes nothing,” Adem said, but the words rang hollow. “And it changes everything. You will stay. Not as a source. As family. Under our protection. You will call Stojanovic today. You will tell him you are visiting a sick aunt in Istog. He can verify nothing. It will buy time.”
Vanja could only nod, her mind reeling.
“And you,” Adem said, turning his gaze to Bahri. “You will be her shadow. Her specific guard. Where she goes, you go. This is not a request.”
Bahri’s head snapped up. He met Adem’s stare, then his eyes flicked to Vanja. A complex storm raged in them: duty, shock, possession, shame. He gave a sharp, military nod. “Yes, sir.”
The day passed in a surreal blur. Vanja made the call from the phone in the kitchen, a heavy, black rotary model. Her hand shook as she dialed Marko’s direct line. It rang, then a voice she didn’t recognize answered, barking. She left a message with his adjutant, her voice carefully frayed: she was unwell, needed air, was staying with a relative in Istog for a week. She would call again. Please don’t worry.
She hung up, feeling filthy.
Later, they sat around the map. She talked. She named names, dates, ambush sites, informants. She described the escalating cycle of atrocity and reprisal that would grip the province. She told them of the Račak massacre, of the NATO ultimatum, of the bombs that would fall on bridges in Belgrade. She poured out the poisoned future, and they drank it, their faces growing harder, grimmer.
Through it all, Bahri was a silent statue in the corner, watching her, his assignment now a sacred, intimate trust.
Night fell again. The household retired. Vanja was shown to a different room, a slightly larger one with a proper bed. It was Haxhere’s daughter’s room, she was told, away at school in Tirana. Family photos smiled from the dresser.
She lay in the dark, the weight of the day crushing her. The door opened. She knew his step.
He closed it, locked it. He didn’t speak. In the dark, she heard the rustle of his clothes, the soft thud of his boots. The mattress dipped as he sat on the edge of the bed.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice low.
She turned. He was just a darker shape in the darkness.
“All day,” he began, the words struggling out, “I looked at you and saw a ghost. A beautiful, impossible ghost who knew too much. Now…” He exhaled, a shattered sound. “Now I look at you and I see my commander’s great-niece. I see a woman I took against a car like a whore. I see a woman I was ordered to protect with my life.”
He leaned closer. She could smell the sweat and smoke on his skin.
“It makes me want you more,” he confessed, the admission torn from him. “It is a sin. It is a sickness. Tell me to leave.”
She didn’t. She reached out in the dark, her fingers finding the rough stubble of his jaw. She pulled him down to her.
This time was different. There was no frenzy, no performative roughness. It was a solemn, desperate claiming. He kissed her slowly, his tongue exploring her mouth as if memorizing its shape. He peeled the wool dress from her body, his hands reverent and trembling. When she was naked, he just looked, his breath hot on her skin.
“My beautiful ghost,” he murmured. “My family’s curse.”
He kissed her breasts, his mouth closing around a nipple, sucking hard until she gasped. He moved down her body, his lips and tongue mapping her stomach, the curve of her hip. He pushed her legs apart and buried his face in her cunt, but this time it was worship, not consumption. He licked her with a slow, torturous devotion, bringing her to the edge, then backing away, again and again, until she was writhing and begging in broken Albanian.
“Please… Bahri… I need…”
He rose above her, his cock rigid and hot against her thigh. He guided himself into her, sinking in with an infinite, stretching slowness that made her cry out. He filled her completely, then stilled, buried to the hilt, his forehead resting against hers.
“You are mine,” he breathed, not a question, but a prayer. “In this sin. You are mine.”
He began to move, a deep, rolling rhythm that was almost peaceful. Each withdrawal was an agony, each slow thrust a profound relief. The bed creaked softly. He kissed her tears as they fell.
“I will die for you,” he muttered into her skin, his pace increasing infinitesimally. “Not for the cause. For you. Do you understand?”
She didn’t. She couldn’t. She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, meeting his rhythm. The pleasure built not in a spike, but in a vast, swelling wave. It felt like drowning in honey, slow and sweet and suffocating.
He felt her internal flutters begin. “Come for me, fati im,” he growled. My fate. “Soak my cock. Let me feel you.”
His words, filthy and tender, broke her. She climaxed with a silent, open-mouthed scream, her body convulsing around him in pulsating waves. The intensity of it pulled his own release from him; he came with a deep, shuddering groan, spilling into her, his body collapsing onto hers, his weight a final, comforting anchor.
He stayed inside her, softening, for a long time. Then he carefully pulled out and gathered her against him, her back to his chest, his arms locked around her. She was adrift in a sea of impossible contradictions: safety and extreme peril, family and lover, past and future.
Just before dawn, as the first birds began to call, a new wave of nausea rose in her, acidic and urgent. She disentangled herself and stumbled to the washbasin in the corner, retching dryly. She’d blamed it on stress, on the shock.
But as she leaned over the bowl, trembling, a colder, more certain knowledge settled in her gut. The missed period. The fatigue she’d ascribed to dread. The sudden, violent sensitivity to smells.
The timeline was wrong. Impossible. But her body, this traitorous, beautiful vessel stuck between times, told its own truth.
She was pregnant. In the heart of a compound destined for slaughter, guarded by a man sworn to a cause that would get him killed, carrying a child whose father is an Albanian militant. A child of two bloodlines that history was about to drench in fire.
She rinsed her mouth, the water freezing. She looked at Bahri, sleeping deeply in the tangled sheets, his face, for once, unguarded. She looked at her own reflection, pale in the dark window.
The ghosts weren’t just in her dreams anymore. She was making one.
She was making one. The thought was a cold, flat stone in her mind. She walked back to the bed, her bare feet soundless on the wooden floor. She stood over him, watching the rise and fall of his chest in the graying light. The fighter, the believer, the man who fucked her like he was digging a grave for them both. She put a hand on his shoulder, shook him gently.
His eyes snapped open instantly, pupils wide and dark, hand twitching toward where his pistol lay on the floor. He saw her, and the combat readiness bled away, replaced by a sleepy confusion that made him look young.
“What’s wrong?” he mumbled, his voice gravel.
Vanja sat on the edge of the mattress. The words felt like shards of glass in her throat. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
His body went utterly still. The sleep vanished from his face. He pushed himself up on his elbows, the blanket pooling at his waist. “You?” he asked, looking at her as if she’d spoken in a forgotten tongue.
“And yes it is yours,” she said, the statement stark and unadorned. “I never had sex with Stojanovic.” A brittle, humorless sound escaped her. it was the truth.
He stared. A muscle in his jaw ticked. Then he flung himself backward, sitting up fully, running both hands through his sleep-tangled hair. “Fuck,” he breathed, the word explosive in the quiet room. He looked at her, eyes wide with alarm. “I didn’t mean it’s not mine. I meant, fuck, they will kill me. We are not married yet. Fuck.”
The practical terror in his voice was almost comforting. It was real. It was of this world.
“Yet,” she asked, the syllable hanging between them. “As if you were planning to marry me soon.”
“Not soon,” he said, his gaze dropping to the woven blanket. “After the war ends.”
She froze. The air left the room. This was what he did with his wife in the other timeline. Waited for the war to end. A ghostly parallel, a echo from a future that might now never be, squeezed her heart. Her hand instinctively went to her stomach.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked, her voice thin. “I’m not even sure I can get an abortion now.”
His head jerked up. “You are not getting an abortion.” The words were not a suggestion. They were a decree, iron-clad. “We will get married. And you’ll go to my parents. To Germany, until you give birth. You need to be safe.”
She looked at him, this man arranging her exile with the same efficiency he planned ambushes. “And you, my personal guard?” she teased, though it felt hollow. “Left here?”
A faint, grim smile touched his lips. “I’ll talk to Adem now.” He swung his legs out of bed, naked, and reached for his trousers. “Wish me luck.”
She managed a small, shaky laugh. “Hopefully he does not kill you. I would rather not raise a fatherless child.”
He leaned over, his scent of sweat and sex still on him, and kissed her forehead. A dry, chaste press of lips. He smiled, a real one this time, brief and blazing. Then he nodded, pulled on his shirt, and was gone.
She heard his boots on the stairs, then the murmur of early morning voices below. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders, waiting. The nausea had subsided, leaving a hollow, fluttering anxiety. She thought of Germany. Neutral ground. Safety. A nursery in a clean suburban house, far from the smell of damp concrete and old incense. It was a mirage, too perfect to be real.
Downstairs, the voices grew louder, then lower. She couldn’t make out words. A door closed. Silence for a long time. Then footsteps, coming back up. They were heavy, deliberate.
Bahri entered. He closed the door and leaned against it. His expression was unreadable.
“Well?” she whispered.
“Adem understands,” he said. He walked to the small dresser, opened the top drawer, and rummaged beneath folded cloth. He pulled out a small, velvet box, dark blue and worn at the corners. He didn’t open it. Just held it in his palm. “He asked if I had a ring. Said if not, they could…”
“I have the ring,” Bahri said, his voice echoing in the quiet room as he repeated his own words to her. “I was planning to marry her after the war.”
He finally looked at her. The defiance in his eyes was a live thing. “Good,” he said, again mirroring Adem. “We’ll accelerate things.”
Vanja swallowed. “Stojanovic will be pissed.”
A slow, dark smile spread across Bahri’s face. It was all teeth, no warmth. A predator’s smile. “Yes,” he said, the satisfaction in his voice palpable, vicious. “He wanted you. And I got you. Funny how that works.”
He crossed the room and knelt before her on the rough floor. He opened the box. Inside, on a bed of faded white satin, was a ring. It was simple. A gold band, with a small, clear stone that caught the weak dawn light. Not a diamond. A piece of quartz, perhaps, uncut, nestled in a claw setting. It looked ancient, like something dug from these hills.
“It was my grandmother’s,” he said, his voice soft now. “From the mountains. She said it was a piece of the mountain’s heart.” He took her left hand. His fingers were calloused, his grip firm. “It is not a rich ring.”
“It’s perfect,” she said, and meant it.
He slid it onto her finger. It fit, cool and heavy. A claim. A totem. A piece of the coming war, now locked to her body. He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed the stone, his lips rough and hot.
Then his other hand came up, cupping the back of her head, pulling her into a kiss that was all possession. His tongue pushed into her mouth, demanding a response. She gave it, biting his lower lip, tasting the sharp, metallic hint of blood. He growled, pushing her back onto the bed, the blanket falling away.
“I need to feel it,” he muttered against her neck, his hands shoving the borrowed dress up her thighs. “I need to be inside you while I know.”
He didn’t bother undressing her fully. He yanked her underwear down, the fabric tearing at the side seam. He fumbled with his own trousers, freeing his cock, which was already thick and rigid. He was rough, hurried, a man sealing a pact. He positioned himself at her entrance, wet from his earlier worship and her own terrified arousal.
“Look at me,” he commanded.
She opened her eyes. His face was inches from hers, his dark eyes burning.
“You are my wife,” he said, and drove into her.
It was a brutal, deep penetration, a reclaiming of territory. She cried out, her back arching. He didn’t pause. He set a punishing, rhythmic pace, each thrust slamming her body up the mattress. The bedframe hammered against the wall with a frantic, wooden clatter.
“This is where I put my child,” he grunted, his breath ragged in her ear. “Right here. In this cunt. My cunt.”
The obscenity, the raw ownership, sent a shock of white-hot pleasure through her. She clawed at his back, her new ring scraping his skin.
“Yes,” she hissed. “Yours. Fuck me. Fuck your baby into me.”
He groaned, a sound of pure animal triumph. He hooked his hands under her knees, pushing her legs back towards her shoulders, opening her wider, sinking impossibly deeper. The angle was intense, devastating. She could feel every ridge of him, the hot, slick friction pushing her to the edge.
“Come on, fuck,” he panted, his rhythm faltering. “Come with me. Now.”
He didn’t have to ask. The coil snapped. Her orgasm ripped through her, a silent, seizing tsunami that clenched around his thrusting cock in viscous waves. He shouted, a muffled curse into her shoulder, as his own release erupted, pumping into her, jet after hot jet, filling the space he’d just declared his own.
He collapsed, his weight pinning her, both of them slick with sweat, lungs heaving. The room smelled of sex and pine and impending dawn. The ring on her finger felt like a brand.
After a while, he rolled off, lying beside her, staring at the ceiling. “The ceremony will be tomorrow,” he said, his voice flat with exhaustion. “Simple. Here. Then Haxhere’s cousin will drive you north. A route is arranged. You will be in Germany in three days.”
Vanja lay still, feeling his seed leak from her onto the sheets. A journey beginning where one ended. A life beginning as a war geared up. She was a vessel now, for history, for blood, for a future utterly unwritten.
Downstairs, she heard the distinct, lethal sound of a Kalashnikov’s bolt being racked. Then another. A morning ritual in the house of her family. The ghosts she carried—the ones from her dreams, the one in her womb—stirred.
The stone on her finger caught the light, a tiny, captured piece of the mountain, cold and hard and unyielding.