Chapter Mia
Mia
I don't sleep.
Not really. I do the thing where you lie in the dark with your eyes closed and your body horizontal while your brain absolutely refuses to cooperate. Instead, it runs the same footage on a loop that gets slightly worse every time. The kitchen. The smell. His hand on my wrist. The sound. The blood.
I give up around five and just lie there watching the ceiling instead.
It's a very nice ceiling. High, corniced, the plaster a shade of warm ivory in the morning light.
The room itself is beautiful. Big, quiet, furnished in the way that means someone with real taste made real decisions rather than just pointing at the expensive option in a catalogue.
There are books on the small shelf by the window.
An actual painting on the wall, not a print.
Linen on the bed so smooth and fresh it feels not quite real.
I'm lying in a beautiful bed, in a beautiful room, trying not to think about the murder I committed.
By the time the sky behind the curtains shifts from black to grey, I've gone through it enough times that it's started to feel less like replaying and more like filing.
Like my brain is slowly, reluctantly, moving it from the category of things that are happening right now into the category of things that happened, past tense, finished.
I don't know if that's healthy or not. I suspect a therapist would have opinions.
Since I don't currently have access to a therapist, I'm going to call it progress and move on.
I should be more troubled by the fact that I followed a stranger to the middle of nowhere without a fight.
That I handed him the whole disaster the moment he said tell me from the beginning and sat there listening with those dark eyes and that expression that gave nothing away, and somehow made me feel like the information was safe to share with him…
But I'm mostly just exhausted and faintly, distantly grateful, which probably says something about my state of mind that definitely needs a therapist.
There's a soft knock at the door just after seven.
I pull myself upright, push the hair out of my face, look down at myself. I’m still in the shirt, still a complete disaster, and say "come in.”
The woman who opens the door is the same small, warm, woman who I saw last night.
She is somewhere in her sixties, with grey hair pulled back and the particular energy of someone who has run a large household for a very long time and has very clear feelings about how things should be done.
She's carrying a folded pile of clothes, and she smiles at me without any of the careful wariness I might've expected from someone who clearly knows something unusual is going on.
"Good morning," she says with a slight accent. "I'm Pavlina. Mr Dubovich asked me to find you something more comfortable to wear." She sets the clothes on the end of the bed. "Breakfast will be ready downstairs when you are."
I look at the clothes. Jeans, a soft grey jumper, underwear still in its packaging. All roughly the right size.
"Thank you," I say. "These are…how did you know the size?"
She gives me a look that says I've been doing this a very long time, sweetheart. "Lucky guess," she says, and leaves me to it.
The shower is extraordinary. The water pressure alone nearly makes me emotional, which tells me quite a lot about my current resilience levels.
I stand under it for longer than is strictly necessary.
I keep my eyes closed as the almost-too-hot water runs over me, soaking my hair and skin, washing away everything that happened.
When the water runs clear I finally take a deep inhale and think: okay. Okay.
I feel more human when I get out. Less like a person things are happening to and more like a person who might be capable of making a decision.
The jeans fit. The jumper is soft in a way that tells me it’s more expensive than anything I’ve ever worn before.
When I look at myself in the mirror, I look like myself again, mostly.
A version of myself that hasn't slept and has slightly hollow eyes but is otherwise functioning. Which will have to do.
I find a comb in the bathroom cabinet. Drag it through my hair. Pull it back into a loose ponytail.
I look at the woman in the mirror for a moment, take a deep breath, and head downstairs.
The house is quiet, and my feet are silent on the stair carpet.
The hallway at the bottom is all dark wood and clean lines, a wide front door at one end, a corridor running back toward what I assume is the kitchen.
I can smell coffee. Real coffee, the kind that requires actual equipment and intention, not the pod-machine kind.
I follow it.
There are voices before I reach the door.
Low. Male. More than one. I slow without meaning to, the way you slow when you realise, you're about to walk into something you weren't expecting, and I stop just short of the doorway.
I should announce myself. I should cough or knock or simply walk in like a person who belongs here, which I don't, but still.
I don't.
"—she can't stay here indefinitely." A voice I don't recognize. Younger, slightly impatient. "Vinzlee's people are already asking questions. Gregor says there were two cars outside the house at four this morning."
"Zakhar and my men were there by midnight," Iosif says.
I'd know his voice now anywhere, that particular quality it has, low, unhurried, each word placed with the precision of someone who doesn't waste them.
"There's nothing to find, and if they do find anything, it will lead them to a woman who overdosed during the night. "
"That's not the point." Another voice, different again. "The point is that you've brought a civilian onto the estate and she's connected to the Vinzlee name and if anyone traces that—"
"No one's tracing it." Flat. Final. "I've handled it."
"You've handled the house," the first voice says. "You haven't handled her."
A silence.
It stretches long enough that I stop breathing for a moment.
"She stays," Iosif says, "until it's safe for her to leave. That's all."
"Iosif." A third voice, different in tone. Older and measured, the kind of voice that's used to being listened to. "We're not questioning your judgment on the security situation. But there's a conversation we need to have."
"No," Iosif says. "There isn't."
"I was clear in my instructions, was I not?" The older voice says.
"Don't." Iosif again. And there it is, the edge underneath the control, brief and bright as a blade catching light. "Don't finish that thought. I know what you're going to suggest, and the answer is no."
Quiet.
"She's a civilian," Iosif says. "She came to my club in shock with blood in her hair because a man attacked her, and she defended herself.
That's all she is. She's not a solution to a mandate I’m not entirely on board with.
" A pause, and then the words come out lower, with a weight to them that makes my stomach do something complicated.
"I'm not going to look at a woman who's already been through something awful and see an opportunity.
That's not…I won't do it. We are not doing that. "
No one says anything.
I press my back against the wall and wait for the right time to walk in.
"Fine." The younger voice, resigned rather than convinced. "But Sasha Vinzlee still needs managing."
"I'll handle Sasha," Iosif says. "She was at the club all night. She sent a few messages to Mia’s phone checking in, but nothing otherwise. It will be easy enough to tell her Mia got sick, stayed home."
"And the Vinzlee vacuum?" someone else asks.
"That," Iosif says, "is an opportunity we can discuss later."
Chairs scrape. The sound of mugs being moved, the quiet logistics of a meeting breaking up.
I push off the wall and take a breath, then walk into the kitchen like I've only just come downstairs, like I heard nothing.
The kitchen is large, and there are six men in it in varying states of post-meeting.
I clock them the second I'm in the doorway: they are all broad and dark-haired, with the same quality Iosif has of occupying a room with their whole body.
An older man, distinguished, with silver at his temples is watching me with sharp, assessing eyes that feel suddenly familiar.
The same shape eyes, I realise, just older and paler.
And against the far counter, facing me, coffee cup in hand, stands Iosif.
He looks different in daylight. Or not different, exactly.
He looks like the same man, same dark eyes, same controlled stillness, but in the corridor last night I was too much inside my own disaster to really see him.
Now, in the thin winter light coming through the kitchen windows, I can see everything.
He's not just large the way men in expensive suits are large.
He's large in the way something structural is large, the way a thing is large when it's weight-bearing.
And it's not just his size. It's the way the room arranges itself around him, even when he's standing still against a kitchen counter doing nothing.
He looks at me when I come in, and something that was still in his face becomes stiller.
"Did you sleep?" he asks.
He knows I didn't. I can tell from the way he asks it in such a precise way, already knowing the answer, asking because it's the right question to open with.
"Enough," I say.
One corner of his mouth moves. The ghost of a smile. "Pavlina made coffee."
I look at the room. At the five other men in it who are now looking at me with varying degrees of curiosity and assessment, and I think about what I just heard through the doorway, and the way he said I won't do it with that weight in his voice, and I wonder what he isn’t willing to do.
"Hello," I say to the room, because something has to be said, and Mia Lawson who is helpful and quiet defaults to polite. "I'm Mia. I'm sorry for the intrusion."
A beat of silence.
One of the men who looks most like Iosif makes a sound that might be a laugh, but quickly suppresses it. One of the others raises an eyebrow. Another one looks at Iosif.
Iosif looks at me.
"You're not an intrusion," he says. And then: "Mia, this is my family."
He doesn't explain further. He doesn't apologize for whatever meeting I've clearly interrupted. He simply takes a sip of his coffee, and the room shifts to accommodate the fact that I'm in it now.
Pavlina presses a mug of coffee into my hands.
“Thank you,” I say and try for a smile as I wrap both palms around it.
I look across the kitchen at Iosif, who is listening to his uncle say something I can't hear and nodding once, and I think about I won't do it, and she's not a solution, and I think about the coat and the shirt and Pavlina bringing clothes in the right size.
I take a sip of coffee and look away before he catches me looking.