Chapter 10 - Misha
The sun has set by the time I leave my office.
The day has been a blur of phone calls and security briefings, of maps and contingency plans and the grim calculus of war.
Alexei's team traced Sergei's message to a burner phone purchased in Las Vegas—useless for tracking, but confirmation that he's being careful.
Methodical. The kind of enemy who doesn't make mistakes.
The reinforcements Dmitri sent have settled into their positions—twelve men, all veterans, all capable of killing without hesitation.
They've integrated with my existing security, doubling patrols, adding layers to the perimeter defense.
The estate feels different now, charged with a tension that wasn't there before.
I should eat. Should sleep. Should do any of the practical things that keep a body functional for combat.
Instead, I find myself walking the corridor toward the main hall, my mind still churning through threat scenarios, when I see her.
Bianca is standing near the foot of the stairs, still wearing the cream sweater from this morning, now smudged with dirt. Her hair has come loose from its tie, dark curls falling around her face. She's holding something in her hands—a small tin box, rusted and old.
She looks up when she hears my footsteps. Our eyes meet.
"I found something," she says. "In the greenhouse."
I stop a few feet away, my gaze dropping to the box. It's familiar, somehow—the shape of it, the faded floral pattern on the lid. A memory stirs, too distant to grasp.
"What is it?"
Instead of answering, she closes the distance between us and holds out the box. "It was buried in one of the pots. Under the roses."
I take it from her. The metal is cold, rough with rust. I pry open the lid.
Inside, wrapped in yellowed cloth, is a journal.
My heart stops.
I know this journal. I've never seen it before, but I know it—the cracked leather cover, the swollen pages, the faint smell of earth and decay. It belonged to my mother. It has to have.
I open it carefully, and her handwriting spills across the page like a voice from the grave.
Russian. Elegant cursive, the letters slanting right the way she always wrote. I can't read the words—my vision has gone blurry, unfocused—but I don't need to. The shape of her script is enough. The loops of her л, the sharp points of her ж. I'd know her handwriting anywhere.
"There's an inscription," Bianca says quietly. "On the inside cover. In English."
I turn to the front of the journal. The inscription is there, just as she said:
For my garden, my sanctuary, my hope.—Maria Kashkin, 2007
2007 .I was thirteen. Dmitri was fifteen. Anna was still a child. Our mother was still alive, still tending her greenhouse, still believing that she could grow beautiful things in the shadow of our father's empire.
Two years later, she was dead.
"I thought you should have it," Bianca says. "It belongs to you. To your family."
I look up at her. She's watching me with an expression I can't quite read—not pity, not curiosity. Something quieter. Something that doesn't demand anything from me.
"Thank you." My voice comes out rough, scraped raw by something I can't name.
She nods. Doesn't push. Doesn't ask questions about my mother, about what happened, about why a journal buried in a pot of dead roses has shattered my composure more thoroughly than Sergei's threats.
"I should clean up," she says, glancing down at her dirt-stained hands. "I just wanted to give you that first."
She turns and walks away, leaving me alone in the corridor with my mother's words in my hands. I watch her climb the stairs, her footsteps soft on the worn carpet, until she disappears around the corner.
Then I stand there for a long moment, the journal heavy in my grip, trying to remember how to breathe.
I make it to my room before I fall apart.
Not crying—I don't cry. Haven't cried since I was fifteen, standing over two coffins, promising myself I would never be that vulnerable again. But something cracks open in my chest as I sink onto the edge of my bed, the journal heavy in my lap.
The room is dark. I haven't bothered to turn on the lights. Moonlight spills through the tall windows, casting long shadows across the floor, turning everything silver and black.
I open the journal again. Force myself to focus on the words.
The first entries are what I expected—notes about the greenhouse. Which plants needed more sun, which ones were struggling, which ones had bloomed unexpectedly. Sketches of flowers, garden layouts, ideas for new arrangements. The mundane details of a woman's private sanctuary.
My mother's sketches were always beautiful.
Even these rough drawings—quick studies of roses and ferns and flowering vines—have an elegance to them, a sureness of line that speaks of practice and patience.
She could have been an artist, in another life.
Instead, she was a Bratva wife, tending her garden in the spaces between violence.
As I turn the pages, the entries shift. Become more personal.
Dmitri came to the greenhouse today, she wrote in an entry dated March 1995.
He stood in the doorway for ten minutes before he would come inside.
He's so like his father—all that strength, all that control, and underneath it a fear of softness.
I worry for him. I worry that this life will harden him until there's nothing left but stone.
I turn the page.
Misha brought me flowers from the garden.
Wildflowers, the kind that grow along the wall where the gardeners never bother to weed.
He said they reminded him of me—growing where they're not supposed to, refusing to be tamed.
I laughed, but I wanted to cry. He sees so much, my Misha.
Too much for a boy his age. I pray this world doesn't break him.
The words blur. I blink hard, forcing them back into focus.
I remember that day. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen. I'd found a patch of wildflowers growing in a crack in the wall—stubborn things, pushing up through stone, blooming despite everything. I'd picked a handful and brought them to her, not knowing why, just knowing she would understand.
She'd smiled and put them in a vase on her workbench. They'd lasted for days.
I'd forgotten that. Buried it along with everything else from before.
Anna asked me today why Papa is always angry, another entry reads. I didn't know what to tell her. How do you explain to a child that her father loves her, but that love in our world comes wrapped in violence? That the same hands that hold her at night have done terrible things in the daylight?
I told her that Papa loves us the only way he knows how. That sometimes love looks different than we expect.
I'm not sure she believed me. I'm not sure I believe myself.
I close the journal. My hands are trembling.
My mother. Her thoughts, her fears, her hopes. All of it preserved in these pages, buried in the greenhouse she loved, waiting seventeen years for someone to find it.
For Bianca to find it.
I sit in the darkness, the journal pressed against my chest, and let the grief I've been outrunning for half my life finally catch up with me.
***
The phone rings sometime later. I don't know how long I've been sitting here—minutes, hours. The room is still dark, the only light coming from the moon through the window. The shadows have shifted, grown longer, but I haven't moved.
I check the screen. Anna.
For a moment, I consider letting it go to voicemail. I'm not in any state to talk to anyone, let alone my sister. Anna has always been able to see through me, to find the cracks in my armor that I hide from everyone else. Tonight, I'm nothing but cracks.
But Anna has a sixth sense for when something is wrong, and ignoring her will only make her more persistent. She'll call back. And again. And again. Until I answer or until she shows up at my door, demanding to know what's wrong.
I answer. "Anna."
"You sound terrible." No preamble, no greeting. Classic Anna. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. Long day."
"Liar." I hear movement on her end—pacing, probably. She paces when she's worried, just like Dmitri. "I talked to our brother. He told me about Sergei, about the reinforcements he sent. He also told me about the woman."
"Her name is Bianca."
"Bianca." Anna rolls the name around like she's tasting it. "The one you dated two years ago. The one you've apparently been obsessing over ever since."
"I wasn't obsessing."
"Dmitri says you had her under surveillance for two years."
"That was security."
"That was obsession, Misha. There's a difference." Her voice softens slightly. "I'm not judging. I'm just... worried. This isn't like you. You don't do impulsive. You don't do emotional. And then you spend five million dollars at an auction for a woman you barely know?"
"I know her."
"You knew her for four months, two years ago. That's not knowing someone. That's infatuation."
I think about Bianca in the corridor, dirt under her fingernails, handing me a piece of my mother I didn't know existed. The way she didn't push, didn't pry, just gave and then stepped back. The way she stood in my office this morning and demanded to be included, not shielded.
"It's more than that," I say.
Anna is quiet for a moment. When she speaks again, her voice has changed—less sharp, more careful.
"Then let me meet her."
"What?"
"I want to come up. Meet this woman who's got my brother acting like a human being for the first time in seventeen years."
"Absolutely not. Sergei is—"
"Sergei is in Seattle, according to Dmitri's last update. He's nowhere near San Francisco, and your estate is a fortress. I'd be perfectly safe."
"The answer is no."
"Misha." Her tone sharpens again. "You can't keep her locked in that mausoleum with no one but Mrs. Novak and your brooding silence for company. She needs someone who isn't terrifying."
"I'm not terrifying."
A pause. "You're terrifying, brother. It's one of your best qualities. But it's not exactly conducive to making a traumatized woman feel at ease."
I want to argue. Want to tell her she's wrong, that Bianca is adapting, that she doesn't need anyone but—
But what? Me? The man who bought her, who lied to her, who spent two years watching her from the shadows?
Anna isn't wrong. Bianca is alone here, surrounded by guards and ghosts. Mrs. Novak is kind, but she's staff—there are limits to the connection she can offer. And I...
I don't know what I am to Bianca. Enemy, protector, captor. Something in between. Something that doesn't have a name.
"Not yet," I say finally. "The situation is too unstable. But when things calm down—"
"When things calm down," Anna repeats, skeptical. "In our family, things never calm down. You know that as well as I do."
"Then I'll make an exception."
She sighs, a long exhale that carries years of frustration. "Fine. But I'm holding you to that. The moment Sergei is dealt with, I'm coming up there. No arguments."
"No arguments," I agree, though we both know I'll find new ones when the time comes.
"Good." A pause. "Are you okay, Misha? Really?"
The journal is still in my lap. My mother's words, my mother's hopes, my mother's fears. Seventeen years of grief pressing down on my chest like a stone.
"I'm fine," I say.
"Liar," she says again, but gently this time. "Call me if you need anything. And... be careful with her. Bianca. If she matters to you—really matters—don't do what you always do."
"What do I always do?"
"Push people away before they can get too close. Convince yourself that distance is the same as protection." Her voice is soft, the teasing edge gone entirely. "It isn't, Misha. Take it from someone who's watched you do it for seventeen years."
She hangs up before I can respond.
I sit in the darkness, the phone in one hand, the journal in the other, my sister's words echoing in my mind.
Distance isn't protection.
Everyone keeps telling me that. Dmitri. Anna. Even Bianca, in her own way, when she demanded to be included instead of shielded.
Maybe they're right. Maybe the walls I've built aren't keeping anyone safe—just keeping me alone.
I open the journal again, turning to a page near the end. The entries here are shorter, more fragmented. My mother's handwriting is shakier, the lines less elegant. The dates are from early 1999—just months before she died.
I dreamed about the garden last night, one entry reads. I was planting roses, and Misha was helping me, and the sun was warm, and for a moment I forgot what we are. What this family does. I woke up crying.
I want so much more for my children. I want them to know peace, to know love that doesn't come wrapped in blood. But I don't know how to give them that. I don't know if it's possible, in this life.
All I can do is plant my garden and hope. Hope that something beautiful survives.
I close the journal.
My mother hoped for peace. For love. For something better than blood and violence.
She got a bullet instead, on a roadside, seventeen years ago.
But her garden is still here. Neglected, dying, but not dead. And Bianca is trying to bring it back—planting seeds, tending ferns, creating something beautiful in the middle of something terrible.
I stand and walk to the window. From here I can see the greenhouse at the edge of the property, half-hidden by overgrown hedges. There's a light on inside—a lantern, glowing faintly through the grimy glass.
Bianca. Still working, even at this hour. Still refusing to give up.
I watch the light for a long time, the journal heavy in my pocket, my mother's words heavy in my chest.
She found something I buried a long time ago, I think. I'm not sure yet if I should thank her or fear her for it.
Maybe both.
Maybe that's what it means to let someone in.