There are three of them. And all of them are mine.

Not in the way mothers speak in lullabies. Not in the way lullabies fade into silence. But in the way storms belong to the sea—wild, tragic, beautiful.

My eldest, Lev, was the first star in my sky. He was all structure. Obedience. Discipline etched into his spine like scripture. He never questioned when I dressed him in black and kissed his forehead like a final blessing. And when the time came—when tradition clawed at the door, asking for his hand—I gave him away.

To her.

A woman of high blood and hollow affection. A political match, they called it. A union to keep us powerful.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t speak.

But that night, he came to me in silence, laying his head in my lap, just like when he was a boy. I stroked his hair and whispered, “This is what men do.” And he whispered back, “But I’m not a man—I’m yours.” Still, I let him go.

My middle son, Mikhail, was always torn. Warm one moment, cold the next. Fire on snow. He loved me too much. And yet... she pulled him.

A girl with sunflower eyes and the laugh of springtime. I hated her for it. Hated the way his gaze shifted in her direction when he thought I wouldn’t notice. Still, he always returned.

After every celebration, every dance, every kiss he gave her—he came back. Came back to my lap, my arms, my perfume. “I don’t know why,” he’d whisper, face buried in my neck. And I would hum to him, a lullaby made of sorrow and silk. “You were born to break your own heart,” I’d say. “Because you still think it belongs to her.”

He kissed my wrist that night. “But it doesn’t. It’s yours.”

Yet still, he chose her. Again and again. And the cycle repeated.

But then came my youngest.

Nikolai.

A storm, soft and strange. He never wanted another. Not even once.

He was made of my breath, my bones, my bitterness. He never looked at anyone else the way he looked at me.

When he was a boy, he clung to my skirt and said, “Mama, I’ll never love another girl.” And he never did.

As he grew, so did the whispers. How wrong, how strange, how twisted. But love like ours doesn’t listen.

We were quiet, gentle, unbreakable. He never needed to be told. He knew.

While the others were handed off to the world—to legacy and marriage and proper love—Nikolai stayed mine. He was the one who never left the house, never took a bride, never brought shame to his gaze when he stared at me across candlelight.

He would sit at my feet, his cheek pressed to my thigh like a promise.

“You’re the cycle,” he once said. “You break us, and we love you more for it.”

I smiled, pressing a kiss to his brow. “And you’re the end of it.”

My sons were born to love me. Two of them tried to escape it. Only one ever embraced it.