Chapter 7 - Bianca
I wake up not knowing where I am.
The ceiling is wrong—too high, too ornate, with dark wooden beams crossing the plaster like the ribs of some great beast. For a disorienting moment, I think I'm still dreaming, trapped in some gothic nightmare where the walls press in and the shadows have teeth.
Then memory crashes back. The auction. Misha. My father.
I close my eyes and count my heartbeats. Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four. Slower than yesterday. My body is adapting, even if my mind refuses to.
The room is cold despite the fire that's been relit in the hearth—someone came in while I slept, and I didn't hear them. The thought makes my skin crawl. I sit up, pulling the heavy silk coverlet around my shoulders, and take stock.
Gray light filters through the tall windows, diffused by clouds.
The glass is old, slightly warped, bending the view of the gardens below into something dreamlike.
Gargoyles crouch at the corners of the window frame—I didn't notice them last night.
They leer at me with stone eyes, their mouths frozen in silent screams.
This whole place is like that. Beautiful and unsettling in equal measure.
I slept, though I didn't expect to. Exhaustion won out over fear sometime after midnight, dragging me under into a black, dreamless void. Now my body aches like I've been running for miles, every muscle stiff with the memory of tension.
I can't stay in this bed. If I stay here, I'll start thinking, and if I start thinking, I'll fall apart again.
The bathroom is as I remember it—white marble veined with gray, brass fixtures tarnished with age, a claw-foot tub that looks like it belongs in a Victorian sanatorium.
I avoid my reflection in the mirror as I strip off the clothes I finally changed into last night.
Soft cotton pants, a silk shirt. Not mine. Nothing here is mine.
The shower is hot, at least. I stand under the spray until my skin turns pink, letting the water pound against my skull, washing away the last traces of the auction house. The soap smells like lavender and something darker—sandalwood, maybe. Expensive. Impersonal.
When I finally step out, I feel almost human again. Almost.
The wardrobe in the bedroom is fully stocked, as Mrs. Novak promised. I open it to find rows of clothes in my exact size—cashmere sweaters, tailored pants, soft cotton blouses. Everything tasteful, everything expensive, everything chosen by someone who was paying attention.
The violation of it settles in my stomach like a stone. Misha knows my size. He's probably known it for two years, filed away in whatever dossier he keeps on me. Height, weight, measurements. Favorite coffee order. Running route. Class schedule.
I grab a charcoal sweater and black pants without looking too closely at the other options. Getting dressed feels like armor, each layer a barrier between myself and this situation.
A knock at the door. I tense, then force myself to relax.
"Come in."
Mrs. Novak enters with a breakfast tray—toast, fruit, coffee, a small vase with a single white rose. The domesticity of it is jarring, like finding a tea party in the middle of a battlefield.
"Good morning, Miss Benedetti." Her voice is neutral, professional. "I hope you slept well."
"Bianca." The correction comes out sharper than I intend. "Please. Miss Benedetti makes me sound like..." Like my father's daughter. Like someone I don't want to be. "Just Bianca."
Something flickers in her eyes—approval, maybe. "Bianca, then. I've brought breakfast. You should eat."
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten in over twenty-four hours." She sets the tray on the small table by the window, her movements precise and unhurried. "Your body needs fuel, whatever your mind might think."
She sounds like one of my professors—practical, no-nonsense, uninterested in excuses. Despite everything, I feel a flicker of something that might be respect.
I sit down at the table and pick up a piece of toast. It tastes like sawdust, but I force myself to chew, to swallow. She's right. I need fuel.
Mrs. Novak moves around the room, straightening things that don't need straightening. I get the sense she's lingering deliberately, and I'm grateful for it. The silence in this house is oppressive, broken only by the creak of old wood and the distant sound of guards patrolling.
"How long have you worked here?" I ask.
"Twenty-three years. I came when Dmitri was eighteen, just after..." She pauses, something shifting in her expression. "Just after the family experienced a loss."
The parents. Misha mentioned them—said his mother taught him to dance, that she "was" a smart woman. Past tense.
"What happened to them?"
Mrs. Novak is quiet for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is careful. "That's not my story to tell. If Mr. Kashkin wishes you to know, he'll tell you himself."
Fair enough. I take another bite of toast, chewing mechanically.
"This house," I say. "It's very..."
"Gothic?" A hint of a smile crosses her face. "Yes. It was built in the 1890s by a shipping magnate with a taste for the dramatic. The Kashkin family acquired it forty years ago. Dmitri's father used to say it suited their temperament—all shadows and sharp edges."
I look around the room with new eyes. The heavy velvet curtains, the ornate moldings, the gargoyles at the windows. It does suit them, I realize. This house is beautiful the way a predator is beautiful—all elegance and danger wrapped in darkness.
"Misha," I say, and the name feels strange on my tongue. "What was he like? Before?"
Mrs. Novak pauses in her tidying. "Before?"
"Before whatever happened to his parents. Before he became..." I gesture vaguely, unable to find the right word. A killer. An enforcer. The man who bought me.
"He was softer," she says quietly. "Not soft—the Kashkin children were never that.
But there was a lightness to him. He smiled more.
Laughed, even." Her expression grows distant.
"When his parents died, the lightness went out.
He became the man you see now—all control, all discipline.
The walls went up, and they never came down. "
Until me, I think. Until he met me at that gala and something cracked.
But I don't say that. I'm not sure it's true, and even if it is, I don't know what it means.
"Thank you," I say instead. "For telling me."
Mrs. Novak nods and turns toward the door. "Is there anything else you need?"
"Yes." I set down the toast, my appetite gone. "Am I allowed to leave this room?"
She pauses, considering. "You can go anywhere inside the estate walls. The house, the gardens, the grounds. You're not a prisoner."
Just a bird in a very large cage.
"Thank you," I say again.
She leaves, and I'm alone with the gargoyles and the cold gray light.
***
The house is a labyrinth.
I spend an hour exploring it, committing the layout to memory the way I'd memorize the chambers of a heart.
Entrance hall with its marble floors and sweeping staircase.
East wing, west wing, a maze of corridors connecting them.
Drawing rooms with furniture draped in white sheets, libraries thick with dust, a conservatory where dead plants wither in cracked pots.
The place feels abandoned, even though it isn't. Like a body still breathing but no longer truly alive.
I find the study where Misha and I talked yesterday, the door standing open. I don't go in. The memory of that conversation is too fresh—his voice saying a lot, the way he didn't flinch when I asked if he'd killed people.
Instead, I keep moving, drawn toward the light at the end of the corridor.
The back of the house opens onto a terrace, stone balustrades lined with more gargoyles, their faces worn smooth by decades of rain.
Beyond it, the gardens stretch toward a high stone wall topped with iron spikes.
The wall encircles the entire property, I realize—a perimeter of old stone and modern surveillance, keeping the world out.
Or keeping me in.
I descend the terrace steps and follow a gravel path into the gardens. The air is cold and damp, thick with the smell of salt and decaying leaves. I can hear the ocean somewhere beyond the wall—a low, constant roar that sounds like breathing.
The gardens are overgrown, I realize as I walk deeper. The hedges have been trimmed recently, but the flower beds are choked with weeds, and the fountains are dry, their basins filled with dead leaves. Whoever tends this place focuses on security, not beauty.
I pass two guards on my circuit of the grounds. They watch me but don't stop me, their faces impassive. Testing the boundaries, I walk closer to the wall, close enough to touch the cold stone. No one intervenes.
You're not a prisoner, Mrs. Novak said. But the wall is still there. The guards are still there. And somewhere beyond them, Sergei Morozov is planning to take me back.
I shiver and turn away from the wall.
That's when I see the greenhouse.
It sits at the far edge of the property, half-hidden by overgrown hedges and a tangle of dead vines. Victorian ironwork, glass panels fogged with age and grime. One of the doors hangs open, creaking softly in the wind.
I shouldn't go in. It's probably not safe—the structure looks like it might collapse at any moment. But something about it pulls at me, a recognition I can't name.
A forgotten place. A neglected thing. Something that used to be beautiful, before it was abandoned.
I push through the overgrown entrance and step inside.
The air is different here—warmer, humid, thick with the smell of earth and rot.
Plants crowd the narrow aisles, most of them dead or dying, their leaves brown and curled.
But here and there, something green pushes through—a fern unfurling in a crack, a vine climbing toward the broken glass roof, life persisting despite the neglect.
I find a wrought-iron bench near the center, half-buried under dead foliage. I brush it clean and sit down, the metal cold through my pants.
And finally, I let myself fall apart.
Not crying—I cried myself out last night.
This is something deeper, something quieter.
I sit with my hands in my lap and let the weight of everything settle over me.
My father's betrayal. My brothers' complicity.
Twenty-one years of believing I was loved, or at least valued, when really I was just an asset waiting to be liquidated.
The heart compensates. I told Misha that, two years ago, full of naive optimism about resilience and healing. But some damage can't be compensated for. Some wounds are too deep, too fundamental. You don't recover from learning that your entire life was a lie.
You just... keep going. Because the alternative is stopping, and stopping means dying, and I'm not ready to die.
Not yet. Not like this.
I don't know how long I sit there. Long enough for the light to shift, the clouds thinning enough to let weak sunlight filter through the grimy glass. Long enough for my hands to go numb with cold.
Long enough for footsteps to crunch on the gravel outside.
I look up as Misha appears in the doorway, his broad frame silhouetted against the gray light. He's dressed simply—dark pants, a black sweater that stretches across his shoulders. His face is unreadable.
He doesn't speak. Neither do I.
We just look at each other across the expanse of dead plants and broken glass—two people trapped in a situation neither of us fully chose. The silence stretches, thick and heavy, filled with everything we've said and everything we haven't.
I break first.
"I can't just sit in that room and wait." My voice comes out hoarse, scraped raw. "I'll lose my mind."
He steps into the greenhouse, careful to avoid the debris on the floor. Stops a few feet away from my bench, close enough to touch if either of us reached out.
"What do you need?" he asks.
The question catches me off guard. I expected demands, conditions, rules. Not this—not him standing in front of me with something almost like deference, asking what I need as if my answer matters.
"I don't know," I admit. "Something to do. Something to focus on besides—" I gesture vaguely at everything. The greenhouse, the house, the wall, my whole shattered life.
He nods slowly, processing. "You were studying for an exam. Cardiovascular pathology."
The reminder is a knife to the chest. My exam. My career. Everything I worked for, gone in a single night.
"That life is over," I say flatly.
"It doesn't have to be."
I stare at him. "What?"
"I told you before—I can arrange for you to continue your education. Transfer your credits, set you up at a medical school here. It would require security adjustments, but it's not impossible."
"You want me to go to class while a crime lord is hunting me?"
"I want you to have options." His jaw tightens. "I want you to have something that's yours, that isn't about me or your father or any of this. If medicine is that thing, then we'll find a way to make it work."
I search his face for the lie, the manipulation. I don't find it.
"Why?" I ask. "Why do you care what I want?"
He's quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is low.
"Because you asked me once what makes you different.
Why I had patience with you, when I don't have patience with anyone.
" He holds my gaze. "I still don't have an answer.
But I know that watching you disappear into that room, watching you give up—that's not something I can do.
Whatever else is between us, I won't be the reason you stop fighting. "
The words land somewhere I wasn't expecting. I look away, blinking hard.
"I need to think," I say.
"Take whatever time you need."
He turns to go, then pauses at the doorway.
"This greenhouse," he says. "My mother used to tend it. After she died, no one had the heart to keep it up." He looks around at the dead plants, the broken glass, something distant in his expression. "If you wanted to fix it—bring it back—you could. It might give you something to do."
Then he's gone, his footsteps fading on the gravel, leaving me alone with the ghosts of things that used to grow.
I sit in the silence for a long time, turning his words over in my mind.
I won't be the reason you stop fighting.
I don't trust him. I don't forgive him. I don't know if I ever will.
But maybe—maybe—I can survive this.