Chapter 9: ds
The jeep rattled down the final stretch of dirt road, raising a plume of dust that clung to the dry summer leaves. Burim was at the wheel, his eyes constantly scanning the tree line, but his demeanor was softer than during that first tense drive from the warehouse. Vanja sat stiffly beside him, her knuckles white where she gripped the edge of her seat.
“You look like you are going to a firing squad,” Burim said, not taking his eyes off the road. A faint smile touched his lips. “Relax. They do not bite.”
“I’m not—” she started, then sighed. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“That you slept with him?” Burim chuckled, a low, rasping sound. “The way he looks at you now? Yes. The way you jump every time someone says his name? Also yes.”
Vanja felt heat flood her cheeks. She stared resolutely out the window at the passing oaks.
“You saved his life,” Burim said after a moment, his tone shifting, becoming grave.
“I didn’t,” she whispered, the memory of the news broadcast chilling her. “I just gave a warning.”
“No,” he said, firm. “You did. The sergeant they sent? He is not a gentle man. It would not have been an arrest. It would have been a bullet in the kitchen. We know this.” He glanced at her. “So they know this.”
The weight of it settled on her, heavier than any book. She had changed a footnote. The terror of it was exhilarating.
“They are waiting for you,” Burim continued as the compound came into view—a cluster of stone houses clinging to the hillside. “The family. Hamez, his wife, Adem, Shaban, and Adem’s mother. No one else. Adem insisted it is just them.”
“Oh,” Vanja said, her voice small.
“He cares for you,” Burim said, pulling the jeep to a stop behind the main house where they wouldn’t be seen from the road.
“Good,” she managed, lifting her chin slightly. “I care for him, too.”
“I see that,” Burim said, killing the engine. He turned to her. “Take care. And blush less. His mother has eyes like a hawk.”
Adem was waiting in the shaded courtyard, leaning against the doorjamb of the main house. He looked larger here, on his own ground, more solid. His mother, a small woman with a spine of iron and Adem’s same severe green eyes, stood beside him with Hamez’s wife, Zana. Their expressions were unreadable, a wall of polite scrutiny.
“Go to them,” Burim murmured gently, nodding toward the women. “Eat, drink coffee. Then we will have lunch.”
She nodded, her throat tight, and stepped out. The dust puffed around her shoes. Adem pushed himself off the doorframe but didn’t approach, letting the women’s domain claim her first. His gaze was a physical warmth on her skin as she walked past him.
“Welcome,” his mother said in clear, formal Serbian. “Come. The coffee is fresh.”
Inside, the air was cool and smelled of basil and baked bread. The children—two of Hamez’s and three belonging to Rifat, the brother in Germany—stared at her with open curiosity before Zana shooed them out. The conversation was a delicate dance in Albanian and Serbian, simple questions about her work, her health, the weather. Vanja’s answers were careful, her hands steady as she accepted the tiny cup of thick, bitter coffee.
“Rifat’s wife, she will come next week,” Zana said, switching to Serbian for her benefit as she offered a plate of borek. “She went to visit him in Germany. The paperwork, it is a nightmare.”
Vanja nodded, understanding the unspoken tension—the family, already stretching across borders, preparing for a rupture.
Lunch was a quiet, sprawling affair on a long table under the vine-covered pergola. Shaban, Adem’s uncle, held court. He was a teacher, with a love for history that soon filled the space between plates of grilled lamb and peppers.
“The problem,” Shaban said, pointing a bread crust at no one in particular, “is that everyone reads the treaties but forgets the blood that dried before the ink. The League of Prizren, 1878… they think it was only about borders. It was about breath. About continuing to breathe as ourselves.”
Vanja, chewing slowly, listened. The historian in her hummed with recognition. This was living text.
“It was also,” she found herself saying, her voice clear in the lull, “a profoundly modern political structure for its time. A supra-religious Albanian league. It failed not because the idea was weak, but because the empires arrayed against it were too practiced at division.”
Shaban stopped, his fork halfway to his mouth. He turned his full attention on her. The whole table seemed to hold its breath. Adem watched her, a slow, proud smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
“You know this?” Shaban asked, his eyes sharp.
“I’ve read Šufflay,” she said, referencing the Croat historian. “And Istiromi’s memoirs.”
A profound silence followed, broken by Shaban’s sudden, booming laugh. “She has read Šufflay!” he announced to the table, as if presenting a rare jewel. “Adem, where did you find this one? She is wasted in an archive.”
The tension broke. Even Adem’s mother offered a thin, approving smile. The meal continued, the talk flowing easier now, weaving around her. Vanja felt a strange sense of fitting, a key sliding into a complex, rusted lock.
Later, when the afternoon sun slanted long and golden, Adem took her hand. “Come,” he said. “I want you to see it.”
“See what?” she asked, letting him lead her away from the main house, up a slight incline toward a newer, larger structure of pale stone and dark timber.
“Our house,” he said simply.
Her heart stumbled over the possessive. Our. He pushed the heavy wooden door open. The interior was cool, spacious, and mostly empty. Sunlight poured across wide-planked floors, illuminating floating motes of dust. The smell of fresh-cut pine and mortar filled the air. It was a shell, full of pure, staggering potential.
“It’s huge,” she said, honestly.
“Fit for many children,” he said, a low laugh in his voice. He was watching her reaction closely.
She pushed him lightly on the shoulder, a reflexive, playful gesture. “You’re impossible.”
He grabbed her wrist, his move fluid and fast. The playfulness vanished, replaced by a heat that was instantly familiar. He pulled her against him, her back to his front, his arm a tight band across her ribs. His other hand came up to cup her jaw, tilting her head. He kissed her.
It was deep and consuming, a reclaiming. She moaned into his mouth, the sound vibrating between them. Her name, Adem, was a prayer and a curse on her lips. All the careful tension of the day, the polite conversation, the watchful eyes, shattered under the weight of his tongue sliding against hers.
He walked her forward, never breaking the kiss, until her knees hit the edge of a large, low divan piled with wool blankets in the center of the empty main room. He broke away, breathing hard. “I have thought of nothing else,” he growled, his voice rough. “The taste of you. The feel of you clenching around my cock. For days.”
His words were filthy, explicit, and they liquefied her spine. He stripped her with a frantic, efficient urgency. Her blouse buttons flew. Her skirt and underwear were yanked down her legs. The cool air of the empty house whispered over her bare skin, followed by the searing heat of his palms, mapping her as if memorizing territory.
He pushed her down onto the blankets, his own clothes a frustrating barrier. He tore at his belt, shoved his trousers down just enough to free himself. He was already brutally erect, the head flushed dark and wet. He didn’t wait. He didn’t ask.
He gripped his cock, stroking it once, twice, his eyes locked on her naked form splayed below him. “Look at this pussy,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Perfect. So fucking perfect and mine.”
He knelt between her thighs, pushing them wider with his knees. He rubbed the broad, slick head of his cock through her folds, gathering her wetness, teasing her entrance but not entering. The sensation was maddening. She arched her hips, seeking him.
“Please, Adem.”
“Please what?” He pressed the tip just inside, a shallow, torturous invasion.
“Fuck me,” she begged, the crudeness falling from her lips easily here, in their private, hollow temple. “Please, just fuck me.”
With a guttural sound of triumph, he drove forward, burying himself to the hilt in one relentless stroke. She cried out, the fullness a breathtaking shock. He held there, his body trembling with the effort, his forehead dropping to hers.
“Every time,” he panted against her lips. “Every time, it feels like the first time. Like tearing you open all over again.”
Then he moved. He set a devastating, rhythmic pace, each thrust pounding deep, the base of his cock grinding against her clit with every push. The divan scraped across the wooden floor with their force. The sound of their bodies meeting was obscenely loud in the empty space—skin slapping skin, their ragged breaths, her sharp, choked cries.
“Whose is it?” he demanded, his voice a harsh rasp. He hooked an arm under her knee, hiking her leg higher, opening her wider, sinking even deeper. The new angle made her see stars. “Whose cunt is this?”
“Yours!” she gasped. “Yours, Adem.”
“Again.”
“Yours! It’s yours, it’s always been yours.” The truth of it, temporal and impossible, tore from her.
He fucked her harder, faster, his control splintering. His fingers dug into the flesh of her hip, sure to leave bruises. She could feel the coil within her winding to a breaking point, a white-hot wire of pleasure pulled taut.
“Come for me,” he ordered, his rhythm becoming erratic, brutal. “Come all over my cock. I want to feel you drown it.”
His command was the final trigger. The orgasm ripped through her, a silent, seismic convulsion that clenched around him in relentless, rhythmic pulses. Her vision whited out. The sensation tore a raw scream from her throat.
Feeling her convulse around him broke his last restraint. With a final, deep roar, he slammed into her and spilled his release. He pulsed inside her, hot and endless, his whole body shuddering as he emptied himself deep into her womb.
He collapsed on top of her, his weight a crushing, beloved anchor. They were both slick with sweat, gasping for air in the dusty sunlight. He was still inside her, softening. Slowly, he rolled to the side, taking her with him, keeping them joined. He brushed the damp, tangled hair from her forehead.
He brushed the damp, tangled hair from her forehead. His breathing slowed, syncing with hers in the quiet. The only sounds were their hearts and the distant cry of a crow.
Sunlight shifted across the floor, painting their tangled limbs in gold. Vanja traced the scar on his shoulder, a ridge of white against his olive skin. He watched her finger’s path, his expression unguarded.
“What do we do now?” she asked, her voice hoarse.
“Whatever you want,” he said, his thumb stroking her cheekbone. “But you know, once the word goes out—and it will—you won’t be safe in Skenderaj.”
She nodded, the reality a cold stone in her gut. Her apartment, her research, the fragile normalcy, all of it was already ash.
“I’ll… you want me to come here?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said, no hesitation. “You’ll be safe.”
“I have a cat,” she said, the mundane detail absurd.
“Cecilia,” he supplied, a faint smile touching his lips. “Of course I know.”
“You can bring her. My mother loves cats, has three of her own.”
“Cecilia is a house cat,” Vanja said, feeling foolish.
“Good thing we have a huge fucking house,” he said, his smile widening. “Next week, we’ll go to buy furniture. Think about what you like.”
“Just like that?” she asked, the sheer velocity of it all making her dizzy.
“I almost died last week,” he said, his voice dropping, the humor gone. “Now I’m alive, with the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. So yes, just like that.”
She smiled, then, a real one that hurt her cheeks.
That night, back in her Skenderaj apartment, she called Dragana. The line crackled with static. “I’m leaving for Serbia next Thursday,” Dragana said, her voice thin with worry. “It’s not safe here anymore. You should come.”
Vanja watched Cecilia curl on the sofa. “I can’t,” she said, the words final. “I’m staying.”
The silence stretched. “It’s him, isn’t it?” Dragana finally sighed. “The Albanian from Prekaz. Vanja, be careful.”
“I will,” Vanja lied. She was sad but glad her friend would be safe.
That week, Adem took her to a sprawling, dusty warehouse in the Albanian-majority part of Mitrovica. It belonged to the famed carpenter, a cousin of someone. The air was thick with the scent of sawdust and fresh-cut beech.
He let her decide. She pointed to sturdy, simple designs for a huge kitchen table, chairs with woven seats, and beds of solid dark wood. He merely nodded, telling the carpenter in rapid Albanian to make it all. He paid in cash from a thick roll of Deutsche marks.
Later, he came up to her apartment. Cecilia, a regal Siberian, sniffed his boots, then rubbed against his calves. He crouched, scratching behind her ears. A low purr filled the room.
“She likes you,” Vanja said, leaning in the doorway.
“I’m amused,” he said, though his hands were gentle on the cat.
“Once it’s all ready, you’ll move in. A month or so,” he said, standing.
She nodded, wrapping her arms around herself.
“I need to go to Albania,” he said then, watching her. “For a few weeks.”
She froze. The word was a void. Albania meant guns, networks, the hardening of everything.
“I’ll be back,” he said, his hands firm on her shoulders. “If anything happens, or you need anything, call Burim.”
Vanja said nothing. She just kissed him, pouring every fear, every promise into it.
A month later, he returned, the scent of tobacco and distant roads clinging to him. She and Cecilia were packed, boxes of books and clothes by the door. He loaded them into the jeep himself.
She handed him the keys to her apartment. “Give it to your men. For free use.”
He stared at the keys in his palm. “No. This is yours.”
“It’s a gesture of good will,” she insisted. “Let them use it. It’s safe, it’s central. It’s useful.”
He refused at first, his pride a tangible wall. But he saw the logic, the tactical coolness in her offer that mirrored his own. He finally agreed, tucking the keys away. The gesture was noted, a silent transfer of allegiance.
The new house in Prekaz was no longer a shell. The massive kitchen table dominated one room, the beds were assembled, the rugs laid. It smelled of wood and wool and newness.
“We marry in the fall,” he said, standing in the center of the living room. His voice was matter-of-fact, a statement of logistics. “Until then, I sleep in the family home, and you sleep in ours.”
“Alone?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“With Cecilia,” he teased, a glint in his eye.
Vanja rolled her eyes, but her heart hammered against her ribs. This was it. The threshold.
He left her there as dusk fell, promising to return in the morning. The house was profoundly quiet, the silence of the Drenica hills pressing against the windows. Cecilia explored, her tail twitching. Vanja walked through the rooms, her footsteps echoing.
She ended up in the bedroom, on the new, firm mattress. She lay there in the dark, fully clothed, listening. An owl called. A dog barked miles away. The house creaked, settling into the hill.
She thought of the blood on her thighs that first time, his shock in the dawn light. She thought of the furniture catalogues, his hands on the small of her back as she pointed. She thought of the apartment keys leaving her possession.
This was no longer research. This was excavation. She was digging a trench in the living earth of history, and she was now inside it.
The resolve, formed weeks ago in her lonely apartment, hardened into something crystalline and cold. She would stop the war. The how was a shifting shadow, but the why was now breathing in the next room, purring on a new rug.
She got up, opened her suitcase, and found the diary. She flipped past the two initial pages of cautious observation. She wrote a single line in the dark, the pen digging into the paper: I am here. I am staying.
The next afternoon, he found her in the kitchen, attempting to make coffee on the new stove. She was fumbling with the unfamiliar grinder. He came up behind her, his body enveloping hers, his hands covering hers on the crank.
“Like this,” he murmured into her hair, guiding her. His beard brushed her temple.
She leaned back into him, letting his strength move her hands. The gesture was intimate, mundane. A shared chore.
Later, he didn’t go to the family home. He stayed. They ate bread and cheese at the huge table, saying little. The tension was different now—a slow burn, a possession that had moved beyond frantic claiming into something deeper, more territorial.
When night fell, he took her hand and led her to the bedroom. This time, there was no urgency, only a deliberate, terrifying certainty. He undressed her slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. He kissed every place he uncovered—the hollow of her throat, the curve of her breast, the inside of her wrist.
He laid her back on the bed and just looked at her, his gaze a physical weight. “Mine,” he said, the word a soft, definitive verdict.
Then he showed her. He used his mouth on her, his tongue licking a slow, torturous path down her belly until he buried his face between her legs. He ate her pussy with a focused, devastating thoroughness, his hands pinning her hips to the mattress as she writhed. He lapped at her clit, sucked her inner lips, fucked her with his tongue until she was sobbing, her fingers twisted in his hair.
She came screaming, her back arching off the bed, a pure, shattered release.
Before the tremors subsided, he was moving up her body. He gripped his cock, slick from her, and guided it to her entrance. He pushed in with one slow, inexorable thrust, filling her completely. He didn’t move.
“Look at me,” he whispered.
She opened her eyes, drowning in his.
He began to move, a deep, rolling rhythm that was less about friction and more about fusion. Each stroke was measured, profound, a piston driving his claim into her very core. He kissed her, swallowing her gasps. The room was dark, the only light from the moon slicing through the shutter.
“You are my wife,” he breathed against her lips, his pace unwavering. “You are my life. Here. In this house.”
“Yes,” she choked out, the union spiritual, carnal, absolute.
He fucked her like that for a long time, until the world narrowed to the sweat-slick slide of their bodies, the slap of skin, their mingled breath. His control was majestic, terrifying. He brought her to the edge again and again, withholding his own release until she was mindless with need.
When he finally let go, it was with a groan that seemed torn from his soul. He spilled into her, his body locking, pulsing, emptying. He held himself there, deep, as if sealing a pact.
After, he did not pull away. He kept her wrapped in his arms, his softening cock still nestled inside her. The night was cool. The house, their house, stood silent around them, a fortress on the hill.
Vanja lay awake, listening to his breathing even into sleep. The past was a ghost. The future was a storm gathering on the horizon. But the present was this: his weight, his heat, the smell of his skin, the faint, metallic scent of sex on the sheets.
She had crossed over. There was no path back. Only forward, into the fire, with him.
Outside, a wind picked up, whispering through the oak trees. It sounded like warnings. It sounded like promises.