Chapter 12: The Last Touch
The gray light through the blinds found them tangled, restless. Vanja woke to the heat of him behind her, his body already taut with a sleepless energy. She felt the thick, hard length of his erection pressed against the swell of her ass, a persistent, urgent heat. Before she could turn, his arm slid beneath her neck, anchoring her, and his other hand hooked under her thigh, yanking her leg back, opening her.
His teeth sank into the muscle of her shoulder, not hard enough to break skin, but with a claiming pressure that drew a sharp gasp from her lungs. There was no preamble, no soft exploration. He guided himself to her entrance, still slick from their sleep, and pushed inside with a single, deep stroke that stole her breath.
He fucked her like that, on their sides, his body a cage around hers. It was slow and deep and relentless, each thrust a grinding, full-bodied possession. His breath was hot and ragged against her ear. He said nothing. The only sounds were the creak of the bed, the wet slide of their bodies, the ragged catch of her own breathing as he filled her again and again, his pelvis driving against the curves of her ass.
She could feel the desperate edge in it, the anger and the fear channeled into this raw, physical act. His fingers dug into the flesh of her thigh, sure to leave bruises. She pressed her face into the pillow, biting the cotton to muffle the low moans that tore from her throat with every perfect, punishing stroke. This wasn't about pleasure, not purely. It was a ritual. A reaffirmation of life against the shadow of the graves they’d just escaped. He was marking her, claiming her, memorizing her. She pushed back against him, meeting his force with her own, wanting to be claimed, wanting the bruises, the soreness, the physical proof of his existence.
His rhythm began to fracture, his thrusts becoming shorter, harder. He released her thigh, his hand snaking around to press flat against her lower belly, feeling where he disappeared inside her. “Mine,” he growled, the word rough and guttural. “This is all mine.” He came with a shuddering groan, his body locking against hers, spilling into her with a final, profound pulse.
They lay like that, joined, his softening length still inside her, his hand still splayed over their child. The room slowly came back into focus—the hum of the central heating, a distant car alarm. The feral energy drained from him, leaving a heavier, more familiar weight of dread.
She waited until his breathing evened. “Can’t you stay?” she whispered into the pillow. “Until he’s born?”
She felt him go still against her back. A long moment passed. “He?” His voice was thick, rough with emotion.
She hadn’t meant to say it. It had slipped out, a secret she’d been holding close. “Yeah,” she breathed. “A son.”
He didn’t speak. He withdrew from her carefully, turning her onto her back to look at her face. His eyes searched hers, bright and wide. He placed his hand back on her stomach, his touch now reverent. “A son,” he repeated, as if tasting the words.
“Aguin,” she said, using the Albanian word. His eyes closed for a second, a flicker of pain and fierce pride crossing his face. When he opened them, they were resolved.
“I’ll need to organize things here,” he said slowly, thinking aloud. “There are contacts, fundraisers… things I can do from Germany for a few months. I’ll talk to my father. To Adem.” He leaned down and kissed her hair, her forehead, the corner of her mouth. “I’ll stay as long as I can.”
A rush of relief, so sharp it was painful, flooded her. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him down to her. “Thank you.”
He held her, his face buried in the crook of her neck. After a long while, she spoke the dark, traitorous thought that had been gnawing at her. “I wish he could be born there. In Drenica. In our home.”
He sighed, a heavy, weary sound. “Next one, zemra,” he murmured against her skin. “The next one will be born free, in a free Kosovo.”
The promise was a fantasy, but Vanja knew it might happen, but they clung to it as they rose to face the day. Free for whom, and from what was the question.
The weeks that followed were a strange, suspended reality. Bahri’s presence in the quiet, orderly house was a disruptive force of nature. He was too loud, too big, too restless. He paced the living room like a caged wolf, smoking out the kitchen window despite his mother’s clicking tongue. He spent hours on the phone in his father’s study, speaking in low, urgent Albanian. Agron would emerge looking grim, but with a new light in his eyes—his son was home, and working.
The children adored him. They followed him like ducklings, begging for stories of the mountains, of their fathers and uncles. He told them sanitized tales of hiding in forests and outsmarting patrols, making it sound like an adventure. Only with Vanja did the mask slip, in the dead of night, when he’d jerk awake from nightmares, his body slick with cold sweat, his hand reaching for a rifle that wasn’t there.
Their lovemaking settled into a different rhythm. Less frantic, more deliberate. One afternoon, when the house was empty, he pushed her against the cool wall of their bedroom, hiking her skirt up around her waist. He didn’t bother removing her underwear, just tore the flimsy cotton aside.
“I need to see you,” he rasped, his voice thick. He turned her to face the wall, his hands pushing her shoulders down so her back arched. “I need to watch this perfect ass take my cock while you carry my son.”
He entered her in one smooth, deep motion. She cried out, her fingers splaying against the wallpaper. He set a brutal, focused pace, one hand fisting in her hair, the other gripping her hip.
“You like that, don’t you?” he grunted, his breath hot on her neck. “You like being full of me. Pregnant with my kid and still begging for my dick.”
She was, and the truth of it, the filthy reality, made her burn. “Yes,” she hissed, pushing back against him. “Yes, I do.”
“Whose cunt is this?”
“Yours!”
“And whose bastard is in your belly?”
“Yours!” she screamed, the blasphemy sending a shockwave of pleasure through her.
He slammed into her harder, his body pounding against hers. “Gonna keep you full,” he promised, his voice cracking. “Gonna fuck a baby into you every year. Fill this house with our kids. So many they’ll never be able to wipe us out.”
The orgasm ripped through her, violent and blinding. He followed, his release a hot flood, his body shuddering against hers as he emptied himself deep inside her with a guttural roar.
He held her there, pinned against the wall, both of them gulping air. Slowly, he softened and slipped out. He turned her, cradled her face, kissed her with a shocking tenderness. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love this.” His hand rested on her stomach.
But the outside world was not so easily walled out. Agron brought home German newspapers. The headlines were small, tucked on page five, but they were there: Unrest in Kosovo Intensifies. Serbian Police Clash with Albanian Militants. They watched the evening news on ZDF, the reports from the Balkans growing steadily more frequent, more grim.
One evening, a report showed a segment on Serbian special police, a parade of grim-faced men in camouflage. And there, standing beside a commander, was Marko Stojanovic. Clean-shaven, his hair ruthlessly short, his eyes like chips of ice as he surveyed a training exercise.
Bahri went very still. The can of beer in his hand crumpled with a sharp crack, beer foaming over his knuckles. He didn’t seem to notice. His entire being was focused on the screen.
“He knows you’re here,” Vanja said quietly after the report ended.
“He knows my family is here,” Bahri corrected, his voice deadly calm. “He knows I would come here. He’s counting on it.”
The safe house began to feel less safe.
Late in Vanja’s seventh month, the phone call came. It was Adem. His voice, crackling down the line from a satellite phone, was harder, thinner. The situation was changing. New weapons were arriving via the Albanian border. New strategies. They needed Bahri’s mind, his connections. “The Americans are starting to listen,” Adem said. “Your German papers, your contacts here… they are more valuable if you are here, where the story is happening.”
Bahri listened, his eyes closed. He said little. When he hung up, he looked at Vanja, who was sitting on the stairs, her hands folded over her enormous belly.
“They need me,” he said, simply.
She nodded, the motion slow and heavy. She had known this day would come. The reprieve was over. “When?”
“Two weeks. I’ll see you into your eighth month. Then I go.”
The following days were a quiet, painful preparation. He assembled gear, studied maps that Agron procured, made endless calls. Vanja watched him, memorizing the line of his shoulders, the way he tapped his finger against his thigh when he thought.
The night before he left, they didn’t make love. They lay in bed, his hand on her stomach, feeling their son turn and kick. The baby was active, a relentless, hopeful drumming against the walls of her womb.
“You will name him after your father,” Bahri stated.
“Agron?”
“Yes. Agron Nika. A strong name for a free man.”
She nestled deeper into his arm. “And if it’s a girl?”
He was silent for a long time. “It’s not,” he said finally, a soldier’s superstition. But then he softened. “Lumnije, for my mother.”
She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “You’ll come back. For the birth.”
“I will try.” It wasn’t a promise he could make, and they both knew it.
“If you don’t…” she began, but he pressed his fingers to her lips.
“I will.”
At dawn, he dressed in simple, dark clothes. He kissed his sleeping mother, shook his father’s hand. He crouched and hugged each of the children, whispering promises in their ears.
Vanja walked him to the door. The spring morning was cold and bright, a cruel mockery.
He cupped her face, his thumbs tracing the circles under her eyes. “You are my heart,” he said, his voice rough. “You are my country. Keep him safe.”
He kissed her, a last, searing imprint of his lips on hers. Then he turned and walked down the garden path without looking back. He got into Nexhat’s waiting car. It pulled away from the curb, turned the corner, and was gone.
Vanja stood in the doorway, her hand on the mound of her stomach. Inside her, Agron kicked, a solid, rhythmic thump against her ribs. A tiny, relentless heartbeat against the silence he left behind. The house felt enormous and hollow. The war had taken him back. All she had was the child growing within her and the sharp, metallic taste of a future waiting to be born.
The metallic taste lingered for weeks, a constant companion to the slow, heavy expansion of her body. Vanja moved through the sterile German house like a ghost, her world reduced to the circumference of Agron’s kicks and the static-filled radio reports from Kosovo. Her mother-in-law, Lumnije, was a constant, silent comfort, pressing cups of tea into her hands and wordlessly knitting tiny white socks. The children’s laughter in the garden was a distant, foreign sound.
Then, in the deep hour of a rainy August night, her waters broke in a warm gush across the kitchen linoleum. Pain, bright and tectonic, seized the base of her spine. Lumnije’s eyes went wide, then firm. “Now,” she said, helping Vanja to a chair. Agron Senior called the hospital, his voice surprisingly steady. The contractions came fast and brutal, like a vice tightening around her organs every two minutes. They were a different species of pain than anything she’d known—primal, purposeless, and utterly consuming.
Somewhere between the blur of the car ride and the fluorescent glare of the maternity ward, a wild, guttural fear took root. She wanted Bahri. Not his memory, not his child, but him—his hands, his voice, the solid wall of his chest to scream against. The midwife spoke calm, practiced German. Vanja answered in shattered Albanian, begging for something, someone she couldn’t name. The pain stripped her bare, leaving only raw, animal need.
A new voice cut through the chemical air. Rough. Albanain. “Move.” A figure in a dark, rain-slick jacket shouldered past a nurse, his face pale under the lights. Bahri smelled of damp wool, jet fuel, and the cold night. His eyes were black holes of exhaustion, fixed on her.
“You’re late,” she choked out between panting breaths, tears of relief and agony mingling on her cheeks.
“I drove from Tirana,” he said, his voice cracking. He didn’t touch the nurses, just shoved his jacket to the floor and moved to the head of the bed. His fingers laced with hers, his grip bone-crushing. “Push, zemra. Push this little bastard out so I can meet him.”
The next hour was a red-hazed siege. She crushed his hand, screaming curses in Serbian, German, Albanian. He took it all, his forehead pressed to her temple, his voice a steady, low murmur in her ear. “You are a mountain. You are a fucking river. You are mine, and you can do this.” When the final, tearing push came, his words dissolved into a prayer. “Please, please, please.”
A sharp cry, high and furious, shattered the room. The world snapped back into focus—the too-bright lights, the slack relief on Bahri’s face, the slippery, purple howl being placed on her chest. Tiny fists flailed. A thatch of fair hair, plastered dark. Bahri’s hand, trembling, reached out to touch the heaving, miniature back. “Aguin,” he whispered, the word reverent and broken.
He stayed a month. It was a fractured, precious interlude, a life lived in the narrow space between feedings and nightmares. Bahri changed diapers with a soldier’s efficiency, his big hands surprisingly gentle on the baby’s fragile skin. He learned the rhythm of the screams, would rock Agron in the dim quiet of three a.m., humming old partisan songs. During the day, he was on the phone constantly, his voice dropping into a cold, strategic register that made Vanja’s milk let down in a panicked rush.
Their sex, when it happened, was a frantic, silent reclaiming. Two weeks after the birth, he found her in the shower, her body still soft and unfamiliar. He pushed her against the wet tiles, his mouth silencing her gasp. He was inside her before she could speak, one hand braced beside her head, the other gripping the full, heavy curve of her breast. It was quick and desperate, a raw reconnection. “Still mine,” he grunted into her neck as he came, his thrusts urgent and deep. “Still so fucking perfect.” She clung to him, the water pounding on their joined bodies, mourning the closing window of his presence.
The night before he left again, the baby slept in a bassinet beside the bed. Bahri kissed her with a slow, aching thoroughness, his tongue tracing the seam of her lips. He moved down her body, pushing her knees apart. His mouth on her was hungry, relentless, licking and sucking until she fisted her hands in his hair, her hips bucking off the mattress. “Quiet,” he murmured against her thigh, his breath hot. “You’ll wake my son.”
When she was trembling on the edge, he rose up and drove into her. This time was different—slow, deep, almost sorrowful. Each stroke was a deliberate memorization. He watched her face as he moved, his eyes glistening in the dark. She came with a choked sob, the pleasure edged with the visceral ache of impending loss. He followed, his release a hot flood, his forehead falling to her shoulder with a shuddering sigh. He didn’t pull out. He stayed buried in her, as if he could leave some part of himself behind.
“I have bought a camera,” he said later, his lips against her hair. “A good one, from Germany. Send me pictures.”
Nine months later, the phone rang in the quiet Wiesbaden kitchen. Agron was crawling now, a blond, blue-eyed hurricane chasing the cat. Vanja held the receiver between her shoulder and ear, wiping applesauce from her son’s chin. Bahri’s voice was thinner, stretched over a bad line.
“The photos came,” he said. Static crackled. “He looks… he looks like my father. Like me.”
“He has your scowl,” Vanja said, trying to sound light.
A long pause. She could hear men shouting in the background, the distant, percussive thump of something that wasn’t thunder. “Vanja. It’s getting worse here. They are talking about raids. Serious ones.”
“I know.” She looked at her son, who was babbling at a sunbeam. “I’m coming soon.”
“Zemra, you can’t.” His voice sharpened, edged with fear. “It is not safe yet. It is… it is becoming a real war.”
“I know things, Bahri.” Her voice dropped, carrying the weight of a history she couldn’t explain. “I have to come before the dam breaks. I’ll leave him here with your parents. He will be safe.”
Silence again, filled with the hum of distance and danger. She heard him swallow. “Okay.” The word was surrender. He knew there was no stopping her.
In February 1999, the cold in Podujevo bit through her wool coat. The town was a clenched fist, all wary eyes and boarded-up windows. She went to the municipal building first, her heart a hard drum against her ribs. A young Serbian policeman, barely out of his teens, looked at her Swiss passport with suspicion but waved her through.
Marko’s office was spare, military-neat. He stood as she entered, his uniform crisp, the insignia of his rank gleaming. For a second, he was just a man, stunned. “Vanja,” he said.
“We need to talk,” she said, not moving from the doorway.
He blinked, composing himself. “You look beautiful.” He said it plainly, a statement of fact. She did. Motherhood and purpose had honed her, filled out the sharp edges with a fierce, radiant strength. She knew it.
“I’m married now.” Her tone was flat, a fence post driven into hard ground.
“I know.” His gaze flickered, a shadow of the old hunger there, immediately banked.
She took a step forward. “Do you want to kill my husband?” The question hung in the stale air. “The father of my son?”
Marko’s jaw tightened. He looked away, out the grimy window at the gray street. “No.” The word was ripped from him. He looked back, his eyes meeting hers, and there was a terrible honesty in them. “I… I pulled them back. Last month. There was a plan for a sweep near Prekaz. I cited insufficient intelligence.”
The air left her lungs. This was the fragile thread. “Thank you,” she whispered. She turned to leave.
“Take care, Vanja,” he said to her back.
She didn’t answer.
Prekaz was a different kind of cold, but the air smelled of woodsmoke and livestock, not fear. When the old car sputtered to a halt in the Jashari compound, the first person to see her was Hamez’s wife. Her shriek of disbelief brought the entire household spilling out—women in headscarves, children with runny noses, Hamez himself emerging from the barn with a wrench in hand, his face frozen in shock.
Then, a wave of joyful Albanian crashed over her. They swarmed, touching her face, her arms, crying. She was pulled into the warm, dark heart of the house. From her bags, she produced her treasures: letters from the children in Germany, blurred Polaroids of a grinning Agron, cartons of German cigarettes, bars of Swiss chocolate. The children stomped their feet in delight. The women wept over the photos. Hamez took his letter silently, his eyes suspiciously bright, clapping Bahri’s father on the shoulder.
Bahri wasn’t there. He was at a meeting, they said, up in the hills. He returned at dusk, his frame filling the low doorway, his cheeks wind-chapped. He stopped dead when he saw her by the fire, a child on each knee. The room went quiet. He crossed to her in three strides, not touching her, just drinking her in. The firelight caught the gold in his stubble, the deep wells of his eyes.
“You’re here,” he finally said, his voice rough.
“I’m here.”
That night, in their old room in the Jashari house, the silence was a palpable thing. They lay under a heavy wool blanket, the house settling around them. She could feel the coiled tension in his body beside her.
“I went to see him,” she said into the dark. “Marko.”
He went perfectly still. Not a breath.
“He will not harm you,” she continued, the words careful. “He gave me his word.”
Bahri let out a long, controlled exhale. “You believe him?” The question was low, dangerous.
“He loves me.” She said it without vanity, a simple, tactical assessment. “He knows I would hate him forever if anything happened to you. That is a stronger deterrent than any threat.”
Bahri turned onto his side, facing her. In the sliver of moonlight from the window, she could see the conflict etching his face—the primal rage, the grudging logic. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t kiss her. He searched her eyes for a long moment, then pulled her gently into the curve of his body, her back to his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, his face buried in her hair.
They didn’t make love. They held onto each other like survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to the solid fact of their beating hearts in the silent, waiting dark. The war was a clock ticking in the next room. For now, this was enough.