Master Loki (Masters of Midgard)

Chapter 1

Polina

I’d always imagined freedom would arrive with a quiet sense of dignity—perhaps a signed offer letter, a glass of wine raised in celebration, a plane ticket bought with my own money. Instead, it came wrapped in rough hands and silent nods, courtesy of my father’s security team.

So much for dignity.

The moment I stepped out of the gallery’s sun-drenched atrium, two black-suited shadows flanked me and ushered me toward the waiting car like I was some rogue asset gone off-script. No warning. No apology. Just leather seats and locked doors.

I crossed my legs slowly in the jet’s cabin, smoothing my skirt as if I had all the time in the world, though my pulse fluttered like a trapped bird in my throat.

“If Daddy dearest wants a grown woman to play dress-up and drape on his arm like a living doll,” I murmured, staring through the tinted window, “he really ought to invest in a professional. I believe they call them escorts.”

Dimitri said nothing from across the aisle. Vlad stood at the front of the plane, murmuring something to the pilot with that unreadable calm he’d perfected years ago.

“I’m not happy about this, Vlad,” I called, my voice cutting through the low hum of the engines.

He turned. Even now, after all these years, those ice-blue eyes startled me. They were arctic, beautiful, distant, and sharp enough to wound. I remembered having a schoolgirl’s crush on that gaze once. Back when I believed coolness was mystery and silence meant depth.

Back when he was the only one who ever bent my father’s rules to sneak me cupcakes or let me stay out an hour past curfew.

“I know, Koshka,“ he said gently, using the childhood nickname that once made me giggle and now felt like a leash. “But you know your father.”

I did. That was the tragedy of it.

Still, I swallowed the bitter response rising in my throat and buckled myself in with deliberate grace. My phone buzzed. A message bubble from my father’s number flickered with the telltale dots of a reply... and then vanished.

No message followed.

I stared at the blank screen for a long beat before tossing the phone into my purse like it burned. “What’s going on?” I demanded, more to the air than to anyone in particular. “What could possibly be so urgent that I get dragged away like some prized possession?”

Dimitri gave me a glance laced with the kind of pity that always made me feel both childish and invisible. He returned his attention to his phone without a word.

The silence pressed around me like velvet and steel.

“Come, Koshka. Don’t be a sourpuss.“ Vlad’s lips twitched, his idea of levity.

I turned my gaze on him slowly, the kind of look that could peel paint from a wall.

“Forgive me if I’m not in a laughing mood.

I only had to cancel three appointments with senior curators at three world-renowned art institutions today.

But I’m sure whatever Father wants trumps the career I’ve worked years to build. ”

Neither man responded, though I caught a flicker of something in Dimitri’s jaw, guilt, perhaps.

I exhaled through my nose, slow and controlled. “He really should hire someone else to play his charming accessory. I hear mistresses make excellent arm candy and don’t come with the inconvenient burden of a brain.”

That got their attention. Both men blinked at me, their expressions unreadable.

“Polina,” Dimitri said at last, careful and quiet. “We all answer to someone. In this case, it’s your father.”

“Speak for yourself,” I muttered, turning my gaze to the window, where clouds drifted like indifferent gods. My reflection shimmered in the glass, polished and composed. The picture of control.

Inside, I burned.

As soon as the seatbelt sign dimmed, I stood, moved to the small, polished bar at the rear of the cabin, and poured myself a glass of vodka—clear, cold, and unforgiving.

It was barely past nine in the morning. Somewhere, it was 5 PM.

Somewhere, someone was allowed to live their life without permission slips and bodyguards.

I took a long sip, feeling the burn kiss my throat.

Vlad and Dimitri exchanged a look behind me but said nothing. They knew better.

There was a time I wasn’t so alone in these battles. A time when someone had stood between me and my father’s endless need for control. My mother. My North Star. My harbinger of warmth and color in a house full of locked rooms and cold expectations.

She had died when I was ten. I had clung to Vlad’s stoic presence then, not because he smiled or spoke much, but because he stayed. He was the one who carried me out of the wreckage, both literal and otherwise, the day she died.

My father said it was an accident. But even as a child, I could hear what the servants whispered when they thought I was asleep. Not an accident. Revenge.

I took another drink, and the burn this time felt like a kind of justice.

An accident. I shook my head.

A tire blowout on a narrow stretch of road. Rain-slick pavement. Fate. Father recited the official story with such chilling precision that it could almost sound true until you looked him in the eyes.

But I remembered the aftermath too vividly to be fooled. The blood-soaked scarf. The metallic tang in the air. The way he’d gone silent for days afterward, a silence too full of fury to be grief.

And I remembered the servants. Hushed voices behind closed doors. Fragments of Russian words I wasn’t supposed to understand. Ne sluchayno. Not an accident. Otveta. A response. Revenge.

When I gathered the courage to ask him, really ask him, his gaze had turned to steel. The kind of rage that didn’t explode but calcified, cold and sharp and dangerous. I hadn’t waited for him to shout. I’d fled his office, my pulse drumming louder than his silence ever could.

After that, the old staff began to vanish. Quietly replaced with new faces—ones who didn’t carry memories of my mother tucked into the corners of their eyes. She became a ghost in our home, scrubbed from the hallways like dust. Only I kept her alive.

In photographs. In the curve of my cheek that mirrored hers. In the quiet rebellion of wanting something my father hadn’t chosen for me.

He’d become suffocatingly protective since her death. If I left the house, Vlad or Dimitri trailed behind me like well-dressed shadows. University had only been permitted because the guards came too. Independence with a chaperone. Freedom, leased in hours and inches.

I took another drink of vodka, letting the chilled burn stretch through me like winter’s breath. Fourteen years, and still the ache of her absence throbbed like a bone never properly set. Not a sharp pain, but worse. A slow, splintering one.

She never would’ve let him do this to me.

She would’ve stormed into the gallery herself and pulled me out of my interview in tears of joy, not to stuff me in a plane without explanation. She would’ve reminded him that daughters were not dolls to be shelved, or pawns to be moved when convenient.

Instead, here I was, art history degrees in one hand, ambition burning in the other, strapped into a private jet and rerouted across the Atlantic with less courtesy than a corporate intern.

My future had been right there. A foot in the door of the curatorial world. Appointments with institutions I had dreamed of since I was thirteen, walking the Hermitage in silence with a sketchpad in my hand.

And now? Nothing but clouds and guesswork.

If the past was any indication, I knew what waited for me in Philadelphia.

A charity gala. An elite-donor dinner. Some meticulously choreographed social farce where I’d smile until my jaw ached, nod while he boasted about my degrees to aging gallery directors, and pose like I was grateful to be trotted out for display.

Then, when his needs were satisfied, he’d ship me back across the ocean with a thank-you gift and a new silk scarf I didn’t ask for.

I should be grateful. That’s what I’m told. I’ve never known hunger. Never gone without education or opportunity. He paid for my degrees, gave me tutors, flew me to Florence when I said I needed to “see Botticelli in the flesh”.

But every freedom came with a thread. And the more threads he gave, the tighter he wove them around me until my need to discard the calculated lead was no longer of consequence.

I wanted more than gilded captivity. I wanted more than polite applause and curated exhibits. I wanted impact. Passion. My own name on the placard beneath a groundbreaking exhibition, not just in the footnotes of a press release issued by a man who claimed me like property.

He’d been running interference for months. Blocking interviews. Redirecting inquiries. Making calls I was never privy to.

Whatever this trip was, I had to believe it was my last act of compliance. After this, whatever this was, I’d make my case. Calmly. Clearly. One last bid for autonomy before I chose the nuclear option.

Because if he thought he could keep me caged forever, he’d clearly forgotten one thing: I’m her daughter.

We landed just past noon, wheels skimming the tarmac of a private airstrip that hadn’t seen a Customs official in years.

The ride from there to the house was a blur—forty-five minutes of manicured city blocks, historical charm, and the faint scent of summer humidity hanging over Society Hill like expensive perfume.

His latest acquisition loomed like a statement rather than a home.

Georgian architecture with Federalist pretensions with arched windows, wrought iron balconies, and enough columns to imply inherited nobility.

My heels echoed on the marble entryway, every step too loud in a house that had never known me.

“Father?” I called, my voice rising into the vaulted ceilings.

No answer.

Of course.

The house smelled of new money and old secrets—leather polish, bergamot, and something sterile, like freshly painted walls trying to cover old sins. I’d only been here once, shortly after the purchase.