Chapter 10: home
The days bled together, a sun-drenched blur of preparation and latent tension. The house became a hive. Women from the village arrived daily, their arms laden with bolts of silk and baskets of dyed eggs. The air thickened with the scent of baking baklava and stewed lamb. Vanja moved through it like a ghost, smiling when required, her Serbian tongue carefully stilled.
Adem was everywhere and nowhere, a constant low hum of activity at the edges. Men came and went at all hours. The casual slap of rifle butts against doorframes became part of the house’s rhythm.
One afternoon, he found her on the back steps, shelling peas into a bowl. The mountains were a purple haze in the distance. He sat beside her, his shoulder pressing against hers. He picked up a pod, his fingers deft.
“Have you ever fired a gun?” he asked, his voice casual.
She didn’t look up. “Once. For New Year’s, with my uncle. In Serbia, I remember my shoulder hurt for days.”
He laughed, a quiet, warm sound. “That is the way of it. Come. Let’s practice.”
“Now?”
“Now. Before my mother puts you to work stitching tablecloths.”
He led her not to the front, where the men gathered, but around the back of the property, down a narrow path to a natural depression in the hillside, shielded by thickets of hawthorn. A few battered tin cans sat on a rotten log. From his waistband, he drew a pistol—a Zastava M70, compact and darkly oiled.
“This is yours,” he said, placing it in her hands. It was heavier than she expected, the metal cool. “You keep it. You learn it. You sleep with it under your pillow.”
The weight of the object, the intent behind it, was a cold splash of reality. This wasn’t a theory. This was a tool for her survival.
He stood behind her, his body caging hers, his arms coming around to position her hands. “Firm grip. Dominant hand here, support hand here. Thumbs forward, down the line of the barrel. Don’t let it jump. You control it.”
His breath was hot on her ear. His instruction was calm, methodical. He showed her the safety, the magazine release, how to rack the slide. The movements were intimate, a deadlier kind of intimacy.
“Sight picture. Front post centered in the rear notch. Put it on the can.”
She aimed, her arms trembling slightly. The world narrowed to the sharp front sight and the rusted tin twenty meters away.
“Breathe in. Breathe out. On the exhale, squeeze. Don’t pull. Squeeze.”
She fired.
The crack was immense, a physical punch in the quiet glen. The pistol bucked in her hands, a live thing. Her shoulder sang with the familiar, deep ache. She missed, the bullet kicking up dirt a foot to the left of the log.
“Again,” he said, his voice unchanged.
She fired again. And again. The noise became a rhythm, the recoil a expected jarring. On the seventh shot, a can leapt off the log with a satisfying ping.
A grin split her face. She turned her head, looking up at him over her shoulder. His eyes were crinkled with pride.
“See?” he murmured, his lips brushing her temple. “You are a natural.”
They walked back as the sun dipped, her ears ringing, the smell of cordite clinging to her clothes like a new perfume. In their bedroom, he took the pistol from her, cleared it, and placed it on the nightstand. He pulled her to him, his hands settling on her waist.
“We marry in less than a week,” he said, his thumbs stroking her hips.
“It will be a lot, won’t it? The people… everything.”
“Yeah,” he admitted, his gaze tracing her face. “But you are more. You are everything.”
He said it so simply. Then his expression shifted, the severity returning, but beneath it, a vulnerability that stole her breath. “I love you, Vanja.”
The words hung in the quiet room. She had known, felt it in every touch, every guarded glance, every brutal, tender possession. But hearing it was different. It was a door slamming shut behind her, locking her into this timeline forever.
“I love you, Adem,” she said, and it was the truest thing she had ever uttered, in any century.
That night, he made love to her with a terrifying, quiet reverence. It was slow, almost sorrowful. He entered her with a sigh, his eyes open, watching her every flutter of expression as he moved within her. It was a vow, sealed in sweat and shuddering breath. After, they slept tangled, her head on his chest, her hand over his heartbeat.
A gray light was just seeping through the shutters when she felt him shift. She clutched at him, half-asleep. “Where are you going?”
“To my old room,” he whispered, extracting himself. “My mother is coming back from my sister’s today. You know she will check.”
Vanja let out a soft, incredulous laugh into the pillow. The fearsome Adem Jashari, sneaking out at dawn to avoid his mother’s scrutiny. He leaned down, kissed her thoroughly, and was gone, a shadow slipping through the door.
The week evaporated.
The wedding day dawned, clear and hot. The compound transformed. Sheep turned on spits over pits of glowing charcoal. The courtyard filled with rows of borrowed tables and benches. Men in crisp plis and women in vibrantly embroidered dresses flowed in from all the surrounding villages. The air vibrated with the wail of the lahuta and the chattering of hundreds of voices.
Vanja was dressed by Zana and Adem’s mother in a traditional white xhoke and a shimmering, heavily embroidered velvet vest. Her hair was braided with coins and fresh rosemary. She felt like an icon, a doll, her own identity submerged beneath the weight of symbolism.
The ceremony itself was a blur of ancient words, the taste of sweet sherbet, the firm, dry press of Adem’s hand as he slid the ring onto her finger. His eyes, when she finally dared look into them, held not just possession, but a fierce, blazing joy that made her knees weak.
The feast roared on for hours. Toasts were made to the ancestors, to Kosovo, to the new family. Shaban, already merry, recited epic verse. Adem moved through the crowd, gracious but watchful, always returning to her side, his hand finding the small of her back, a constant anchor.
As night fell, the music grew wilder. Drums pounded. Flames from the fire pits leapt towards the stars. Adem pulled her into the circle for the dance. He was surprisingly agile, his movements precise and powerful. She followed as best she could, the coins in her hair chiming, the world a whirl of smiling faces and swirling colors. In that moment, for the first time, she felt not like an imposter, but like she belonged to the pulse of the night itself.
Later, much later, when the last relatives had stumbled off to borrowed beds and the compound was quiet save for the snoring of men sleeping under the trees, they were alone in their house. The door closed, muting the world.
The solemn groom was gone. In his place was the man who had first taken her in a warehouse, raw and hungry. The day’s pageantry fell away like a shed skin.
He backed her against the heavy door, his hands on either side of her head. His eyes were dark with drink and desire. “My wife,” he growled, the words thick with triumph.
He kissed her, a devouring, messy kiss that tasted of honey and raki. His fingers tore at the intricate clasps of her vest. The fine fabric gave way. He shoved the white dress down over her shoulders, baring her breasts. He ducked his head, taking a nipple into his mouth, sucking hard, his beard rough against her tender skin. She cried out, her fingers scrabbling at his shoulders.
“Need to be inside you,” he muttered against her flesh, his hands yanking the dress down past her hips. It pooled at her feet. He ripped his own traditional sash and shirt open, buttons pinging across the floor. He didn’t bother with the rest. He just freed himself from his trousers, his cock springing out, thick and ruddy and already leaking.
He turned her around, bending her over the back of the new sofa. He pushed her legs apart with his knee. His hand slid between her thighs, finding her wet, always so wet for him. He groaned.
“This pussy is mine now. Officially. In the eyes of God and everyone.” He rubbed the head of his cock through her slick folds, not entering, just tormenting.
“Adem, please…”
“Please what, nuse?” he taunted, using the word for bride. “What does my wife want?”
“Fuck me,” she begged, pushing her hips back against him. “Just fuck me hard.”
With a brutal snap of his hips, he obliged. He drove into her with one deep, penetrating thrust, burying himself to the root. The force knocked the breath from her lungs. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging in, and set a punishing pace.
This was nothing like the slow reverence of the other night. This was a claiming, a celebration of ownership. Each thrust was a raw, powerful slam, the sound of their bodies colliding obscenely loud in the quiet house. The sofa legs screeched against the floor.
“You take my cock so good,” he grunted, his rhythm relentless. “This perfect married cunt, made for me.” He leaned over her, his chest hot against her back, his mouth at her ear. “I’m gonna fill you up. I’m gonna get you pregnant tonight. You want that? You want my child in your belly?”
The explicitness, the crude promise, sent a shockwave of pure arousal through her. “Yes,” she gasped, mindless. “Yes, give it to me.”
His pace became frantic, erratic. He reached around, his fingers finding her clit, rubbing rough, urgent circles. The dual assault was too much. Her orgasm tore through her, a violent, blinding convulsion that clenched around his invading length like a vise. She screamed into the cushion.
Her climax triggered his. With a raw, animal shout, he pistoned into her one last, deep time and held, pulsing as he emptied himself deep inside her. His release felt endless, a hot flood claiming her depths. He collapsed over her, his weight pinning her to the sofa, both of them slick with sweat and spent.
They stayed like that for long minutes, his softening cock still nestled within her, his breath hot on her neck. Slowly, he pulled out. A trickle of his seed leaked down her thigh. He saw it, and a look of profound satisfaction settled on his face.
He carried her to bed. They didn’t speak. There was only the shared heat of their bodies, the slow return of breath, the distant, lonely cry of a fox in the hills.
She woke before him. The first pale light of dawn revealed the wedding clothes strewn across the floor like casualties. The pistol sat, dark and silent, on the nightstand. She looked at Adem’s sleeping face, the severe lines softened in repose. The history books held only his rage, his defiance. They would never hold this—the dark fan of his lashes against his cheek, the quiet trust of his sleep.
She slipped from the bed, the cool air raising goosebumps on her naked skin. She found her diary, buried in a drawer beneath her new Albanian woolens. She sat by the window and wrote, the pen moving steadily.
October 1991. I am married. I am loved. I am armed. The path is set. I have changed everything and nothing. The first attempt on his life failed. My interference? Perhaps. But the system is grinding. It will try again. I feel it coming like a change in the air pressure before a storm. My role is no longer to observe. It is to stand in the path of the storm. He sleeps beside me, and I have never known such terror, or such peace.
She closed the book. When she turned, he was awake, watching her, his green eyes clear and calm in the morning gloom.
“What do you write?” he asked, his voice rough with sleep.
“The truth,” she said, climbing back into the warmth of the bed, into the circle of his arms.
“And what is that?”
She kissed him, soft and lingering. “That this is where I was always meant to be.”
The truth of her words settled into the stones of the house, into the rhythm of their days. October burned into November, the oak leaves turning the color of rust before falling in brittle heaps. The mountains wore a thin shroud of snow that never reached the valley. Vanja’s life became a new study: the management of a household that was also a fortress.
She learned to cook for twenty men on an hour’s notice, to distinguish the engine sounds of friendly vehicles from unfamiliar ones. The pistol under her pillow was a cold companion she now cleaned weekly without being asked. Her Serbian was a ghost she kept locked in her throat, speaking only Albanian or, privately with Adem, a tangled mix of German and their own intimate language.
One morning, the smell of frying peppers made her stomach clench. She made it to the courtyard pump, vomiting a thin, bitter fluid into the drain. She straightened, wiping her mouth, and found Adem’s mother watching her from the doorway, a laundry basket propped on her hip. The older woman’s eyes didn’t widen. They simply understood.
“How long?” she asked in Albanian, her voice low.
Vanja calculated silently, her mind racing backward through weeks of feverish coupling. The wedding night. The countless nights since. “A month late. Maybe five weeks.”
A slow nod. “Come.”
She was examined on a cot in the old house, the mother’s hands firm and impersonal on her lower abdomen. “You will see the doctor in Mitrovica. But I know. It is there.” She helped Vanja sit up, her grip unexpectedly gentle. “He will be happy. And he will be a terror. They always are.”
Adem returned at dusk, smelling of cold metal and diesel. He was in the middle of recounting a tense meeting in Llausha when Vanja, kneeling by the fireplace to build up the flame, said it without looking at him. “I’m pregnant.”
The room didn’t freeze. It simply emptied of all other sound. She heard the log settle on the coals. She heard Cecilia purring from the windowsill.
He said nothing. She finally turned.
He was standing perfectly still, his knuckles white where they gripped the back of a chair. His face was a battlefield. A terrifying, unconcealed joy fought with a sheer, primal panic that she had never seen in him, not even facing down a Serbian patrol. His gaze dropped to her stomach, still flat beneath her wool dress, as if he could see through it to the fragile, forming thing within.
“You’re sure.” It wasn’t a question. It was a plea for solid ground.
“Your mother is. I see the doctor next week.”
He crossed the room in three strides, dropping to his knees before her on the stone hearth. He didn’t touch her belly. He pressed his forehead hard against her thigh, his breath hot through the fabric. He stayed like that, a man in prayer or surrender. When he looked up, his eyes were bright. “A son.”
“Or a daughter,” she said softly, her hand coming to rest on his hair.
“A fighter,” he murmured, the terror edging back into his voice. He turned his head, pressing a fierce kiss to her hip bone. “This world I am making for them… it is all fire and sharp edges, Vanja.”
“Then we’ll teach them to be fireproof,” she whispered.
That night, his need was different. The raw hunger was there, a constant beneath his skin, but it was layered with a desperate, almost sorrowful tenderness. He undressed her as if unwrapping something sacred. He worshipped her with his mouth, licking a slow path from her collarbone down to the thatch of blonde curls, burying his face between her legs until she came with a broken sob, her fingers fisted in the sheets.
But when he entered her, it was with a measured, profound slowness that felt like a sacrament. He sheathed himself inside her inch by inch, his eyes locked on hers, watching her absorb him. He filled her completely, then stilled, buried to the hilt.
“Do you feel that?” he whispered, his voice ragged. He rocked his hips, a minute, deep grind. “That’s where my child is. Right there. .”
The obscenity of it, the visceral, biological poetry, shattered her. She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. He began to move, a relentless, deep-sea rhythm that spoke of creation more than conquest. Each thrust was a planting. Each groan was a promise.
“My seed took root in you,” he chanted against her lips, his pace intensifying. “My blood in your blood. You’re full of me, Vanja. Permanently.”
He came with a guttural cry, surging into her, his body convulsing as he spilled. He held himself there, pulsing, as if trying to fuse them into one singular, protected organism. Later, splayed across the sweat-damp sheets, his large hand splayed possessively over her lower belly, he spoke into the dark.
“Hamez still watches you.”
“I know.”
“He thinks you are a complication. A risk.” He said it flatly. “He is not wrong.”
“But I’m your complication,” she said, tracing the scar on his shoulder.
“You are my center,” he corrected, his voice finally softening into sleep. “The only fixed point.”
The doctor in Mitrovica confirmed it with a detached smile and a warning about stress. Driving back through the bleak winter landscape, Adem was silent, his focus on the road absolute. Only when they were within the borders of Prekaz, the familiar hills rising around them, did he speak.
“No more risks. You don’t go to the market. You don’t walk alone past the creek. The gun stays, but you use it only if death is at the door. Understand?”
“I’m not an invalid, Adem.”
“You are carrying the future of my family,” he snapped, the terror flashing again, bright and hot. “You are everything. So you will follow these rules, or I will tie you to this fucking house myself.”
She saw it then, the true shape of his fear. It wasn’t just for her, or the baby. It was the utter helplessness it provoked in him. He could control so much—men, territory, the movement of weapons. He could not control the silent, miraculous division of cells inside her, or the random violence of a world hurtling toward war.
She placed her hand over his on the gear shift. “I understand.”
He let out a long, controlled breath, turning his hand to grip hers. The next morning, he left for a week in the remote villages of the Sharr, consolidating loyalties. The house felt cavernous without him. Hamez took over, his presence a quiet, watchful bulwark. He brought her honey for her tea, shot a rabbit so she would have fresh stew, but his eyes held a persistent, unasked question.
One afternoon, she found him in the courtyard, meticulously cleaning his rifle. She sat on the steps nearby, mending a shirt of Adem’s. The silence was companionable, strained only by the underlying current of his doubt.
“You know the story of our great-grandfather,” he said, not looking up from the barrel. “The one who held the pass at Deçan for three days with twelve men?”
“I’ve heard it,” she said, her needle moving steadily.
“He was betrayed. By a man he trusted. A man who married a woman from a valley his family had a blood feud with.” Hamez looked at her then, his eyes kind but unyielding. “The woman was not evil. She was just a woman, from a different place. Her loyalty was split. In the end, the heart cannot serve two masters, Vanja. It breaks, or it chooses.”
She met his gaze, letting the needle go still. “My heart is not split. It is here, in this earth. It is in your brother. It is in this child.” She placed a hand on her stomach, the gesture still new, still shocking. “There is no other master.”
He held her look for a long moment, then gave a single, slow nod. It wasn’t full trust. It was a truce. He went back to cleaning his rifle. “Good. Then when the storm comes, you will not waver.”
The storm’s first drops fell in late January. A police patrol, bolstered and aggressive, tried to raid a house in nearby Likoc. Adem’s men were waiting. The skirmish was short, brutal, and left two policemen dead. Retaliation was guaranteed. The air in Prekaz tightened, becoming thin and electric.
Adem returned, his energy darker, more focused. He spent hours with his men in the old house, maps spread across the table. Vanja would bring them coffee, feeling their eyes skip over her swollen breasts, the new, subtle curve of her belly beneath her dress. She was a living vulnerability, a symbol of what they were now fighting for, and what could be so easily shattered.
That night, he came to her smelling of tobacco and cold wind. His hands were rough as he pulled her against him, his kiss demanding and bruised. There was no slow reverence now. It was the need for affirmation, for life, in the face of the death he knew was coming.
He bent her over the kitchen table, scattering papers. He hiked her dress up around her waist, yanked her underwear down. He entered her from behind in one brutal, perfect thrust. She cried out, not in pain, but in sheer relief at the connection.
“Tell me you’re mine,” he grunted, pounding into her, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to mark. “Tell me this cunt, this womb, is all mine.”
“It’s yours,” she gasped, the table edge digging into her belly. “It’s all yours, Adem.”
“They want to take it all,” he snarled, his thrusts becoming frantic, piston-hard. “They want to erase us. They can’t. I won’t let them. I’ll fill you with so much life they’ll drown in it.”
He fucked her with a furious, hopeless intensity, as if he could seed the future itself inside her. When he came, it was with a shout of anguish, spilling into her depths like a man casting his final anchor. He stayed slumped over her, his breath heaving, his face buried in her hair.
She felt it then, as his tears soaked into the fabric of her dress. The great, terrible terror of a man who had everything to lose.