Chapter 13 - Bianca
I close my bedroom door and lean against it, my heart pounding.
His touch still burns on my jaw. The ghost of his fingertips, tracing a line from my ear to my chin. The way his eyes darkened when I didn't pull away.
I didn't pull away.
That's the part that terrifies me. He touched me, and instead of stepping back, instead of reminding him of all the reasons this is wrong, I stood there like I was waiting for more. Like some pathetic part of me wanted more.
I push off the door and start pacing, my bare feet silent on the thick carpet. The fire in the hearth has died down to embers, but my skin feels feverish. Restless. Like something is crawling under the surface, trying to get out.
I need to think. I need to make sense of this.
Facts. I need facts.
Fact one: Misha Kashkin lied to me for four months. Pretended to be someone he wasn't, let me fall for a fiction, then disappeared without explanation.
Fact two: He watched me for two years without my knowledge or consent. Had people following me, reporting on my movements, my habits, my life. That's not protection. That's obsession.
Fact three: He bought me at an auction. Paid five million dollars for my body like I was a painting or a racehorse. Whatever his reasons, that's what happened.
Fact four: He's killed people. He told me that himself, without flinching, without apology.
The list should be enough. Should be more than enough to kill whatever stupid, inconvenient attraction keeps flaring up every time he's near me.
But there's another list. The one I don't want to think about.
He saved me from Sergei. From a fate that makes my stomach turn every time I consider it.
He's been honest since I arrived—brutally so. Every question I've asked, he's answered. Every truth I've demanded, he's given.
He helped me in the greenhouse. Got his hands dirty, moved heavy pots, told me about his mother. Showed me a version of himself that doesn't fit with the monster I'm trying to make him into.
He touched my face like I was something precious. And when I didn't respond, he stopped. Apologized. Let me go.
I press my palms against my eyes, trying to push back the confusion. This is textbook, I tell myself. Stockholm syndrome. Trauma bonding. He's my captor, my only source of safety in a terrifying situation, and my brain is doing what brains do—forming attachments to survive.
It's not real. It can't be real.
But my body doesn't seem to care about psychology. My body remembers the way he felt pressed against me on the dance floor two years ago. The way his mouth tasted when he kissed me goodbye. The way his hands used to trace my curves like he was memorizing them.
My body is a traitor.
I stop pacing and stare out the window at the dark grounds below.
A guard passes beneath me, his footsteps crunching on the gravel, steady as a heartbeat.
Somewhere out there, Sergei Morozov is planning to take me back.
Somewhere out there, my father is counting his money and pretending he doesn't have a daughter.
And here I am, trapped between two worlds, belonging to neither.
***
Morning comes slowly, gray light seeping through the windows.
I've barely slept—just fitful dozing interrupted by dreams I don't want to examine.
Dreams of hands on my skin, of ice-blue eyes in the darkness, of wanting something I have no right to want.
My eyes are gritty, my muscles stiff from tension.
But I force myself out of bed, force myself through the motions of showering and dressing.
The greenhouse. I need the greenhouse.
Work is the only thing that quiets my mind. The physical labor, the dirt under my fingernails, the simple satisfaction of clearing away dead things and making space for something new. It's the closest I've felt to normal since the auction.
I'm halfway down the stairs when I notice the silence.
The house is always quiet, but this is different. Emptier. The usual sounds of staff moving through the corridors, the distant murmur of voices from the security office—all of it is muted, subdued.
Mrs. Novak appears at the bottom of the stairs, a breakfast tray in her hands.
"Good morning, Bianca. I was just coming to find you."
"What's going on?" I ask. "Where is everyone?"
Something flickers across her face—hesitation, maybe. Or concern.
"Mr. Kashkin left early this morning. Business that required his personal attention."
Business. The word is carefully neutral, but I understand what it means. Something violent. Something he couldn't delegate.
"When will he be back?"
"He didn't say."
I should feel relieved. His absence means space to breathe, room to think without the constant weight of his presence. But instead, I feel his absence like a missing tooth—a gap where something used to be, impossible to ignore.
I hate that I feel it. Hate that I've become so attuned to him that his absence registers in my body before my mind can catch up.
I take the tray from Mrs. Novak's hands. "Thank you. I'll eat in the greenhouse."
She nods, and if she thinks it's strange that I'm taking breakfast to a half-dead garden, she doesn't show it. "I'll have lunch sent out as well. It's supposed to rain this afternoon—you'll want to come inside before the storm hits."
I carry the tray through the house and out the back door, across the terrace and down the gravel path. The morning air is cold, heavy with the promise of the rain Mrs. Novak mentioned. The sky is the color of old bruises, swollen and threatening.
The greenhouse is warmer than outside, the grimy glass trapping what little heat remains from yesterday's sun. I set the tray on the workbench and survey my progress—the cleared aisles, the salvaged plants, the pots waiting to be filled with new soil.
It's starting to look like something. Not beautiful yet, but alive. Possible.
I eat mechanically, barely tasting the toast and eggs, my mind still churning through everything that happened last night. His touch. My response. The question I couldn't answer.
What am I to you?
I don't know. That's the problem. I don't know what he is to me either.
After breakfast, I throw myself into work with more aggression than usual. Ripping out dead plants, scrubbing pots until my arms ache, hauling bags of soil from the shed. I want to exhaust my body so my mind will shut up. I want to feel something other than this constant, gnawing confusion.
It doesn't work. The questions follow me through every task.
What do I actually feel for him? Is it real, or just proximity and trauma? If I had other options—if I could walk out the front gate right now and go back to my apartment, my school, my life—would I still feel this pull?
I don't know. And not knowing is unbearable.
I'm elbow-deep in a pot of dead soil when my fingers again hit something that isn't dirt.
Paper. Old, fragile, wrapped in what feels like oilcloth.
I pull it out carefully, brushing away the debris. The oilcloth falls apart in my hands, revealing a stack of envelopes, yellowed with age, tied together with a faded ribbon.
Letters.
I shouldn't read them. They're not mine—they're someone else's private correspondence, buried here for reasons I can only guess at. But my hands are already untying the ribbon, already pulling out the first envelope.
The handwriting on the front is masculine, bold. Maria, it says. Just the name, no address.
I open the letter.
My darling Maria,
The days without you are endless. I tell myself that this work is necessary, that I'm building something that will keep our family safe.
But at night, when I lie awake in strange beds in strange cities, all I can think about is the way you looked the morning I left.
Standing in the garden with the sun in your hair, refusing to cry even though I could see how much you wanted to.
You are the strongest woman I know. Stronger than me, certainly. I would have crumbled long ago without you to come home to.
I know this life is not what you wanted. I know you dream of something quieter, softer, a home without blood on the doorstep. I wish I could give you that. But this is what we are, what we were born into, and all I can do is love you as fiercely as I know how and pray that it's enough.
It will always be you, Maria. In every lifetime, in every world, it will always be you.
Yours eternally, Alexander
Alexander. Misha's father.
I sit back on my heels, the letter trembling in my hands. Love letters. Hidden in the greenhouse, buried in a pot of roses, preserved for decades.
Evidence that even in this violent world, real love existed.
I read the next letter, and the next. Alexander’s words are passionate, aching with longing, full of promises and regrets.
He writes about missing her, about counting the days until he can come home.
He writes about their children—Dmitri's stubbornness, Misha's sensitivity, Anna's laughter.
He writes about wanting to be a better man, about fearing he'll never be good enough for her.
Sometimes I wonder if you would have been happier with someone else, one letter reads.
Someone who could give you the peaceful life you deserve.
But then I remember the way you look at me when I come home, and I know—selfishly, perhaps—that I would rather have you in this broken world than lose you to a better one.
You asked me once if I regret the choices I've made. The violence, the blood, the things I've done in the name of this family. The truth is, I regret all of it and none of it. I regret the man it has made me. But I cannot regret the path that led me to you.
When I close my eyes, I see our future. The children grown, the wars behind us, you and I in that greenhouse you love so much.
Growing old together among your flowers.
It's a foolish dream, perhaps. Men like me don't often grow old.
But I hold onto it anyway, because hoping for something beautiful is the only thing that keeps me human.
I press my hand to my chest, something aching beneath my ribs.
This is what the Kashkin family was, before the ambush destroyed everything. Not just violence and strategy. Love. Real love, messy and complicated and fierce.
Misha had this once. Parents who adored each other, who built a family in the middle of chaos, who found something beautiful in soil this bloody.
And then it was taken from him. Violently, brutally, in a hail of bullets on a deserted road.
No wonder he's the way he is. No wonder he built walls so high nothing could penetrate them. He lost everything that mattered, and the only way to survive was to stop feeling anything at all.
Until me.
I never stopped, he told me. Not for a single day.
I thought that was obsession. Maybe it was. But maybe it was also the only way he knew how to feel something again.
I don't know what to do with that. Don't know how to fit it into the neat categories I've been trying to build—monster and victim, captor and captive. He's more complicated than that. We both are.
The rain starts around noon, just as Mrs. Novak predicted. Heavy drops hammering against the glass roof, turning the world outside into a gray blur. I stay in the greenhouse, surrounded by letters and dead plants and the ghost of a love story that ended in blood.
I read every letter twice. By the time I finish, the rain has intensified, drumming so loudly against the glass that I can barely hear myself think. But I don't mind. The noise is almost soothing, drowning out the chaos in my head.
Alexander loved Maria. Loved her desperately, completely, in spite of everything they were. And she must have loved him too, or she wouldn't have hidden these letters here, in her sanctuary, where she could read them whenever she missed him.
They found something real in the middle of something terrible. They made it work.
Does that mean I could too?
The thought ambushes me, unwanted and dangerous. I push it away, but it keeps creeping back. If Alexander and Maria could love each other in this world, if they could build something beautiful despite the blood and violence... what does that mean for me and Misha?
Nothing, I tell myself firmly. It means nothing. Their story ended in tragedy. They both died, gunned down on a roadside, leaving their children orphaned and broken. That's not a love story. That's a cautionary tale.
But my heart doesn't seem to be listening.
***
The rain has slowed to a drizzle by late afternoon when I hear a car on the gravel drive.
I look up, my heart suddenly pounding. Through the grimy glass, I can just make out the shape of a black SUV pulling up to the front of the house. The driver's door opens, and a figure emerges.
Misha.
Even from this distance, I can see the tension in his shoulders, the darkness that clings to him like a second skin. He moves like a man carrying something heavy—not physically, but somewhere deeper. Whatever business he handled today, it's left a mark.
I should stay here. Should maintain distance, protect myself, remember all the reasons I need to keep him at arm's length.
But I'm already standing. Already walking toward the greenhouse door.
The letters are still in my hands—Alexander's words to Maria, evidence of a love that survived impossible circumstances. I think about Misha at seventeen, standing over his parents' coffins, swearing vengeance. About the boy in those letters—the sensitive one, his father called him.
About the man who touched my face last night and then let me go.
I don't know what I'm feeling. Don't know if it's real or just trauma dressed up as connection. But I'm tired of running from the question. Tired of pretending I don't feel the pull between us, the gravity that draws me toward him even when I'm trying to stay away.
I push open the greenhouse door and step out into the rain.
He's halfway to the house when he sees me. He stops, his eyes finding mine across the wet gravel.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. The rain mists down between us, cold on my skin, plastering my hair to my face. He looks exhausted, haunted, like whatever he did today cost him something he can't get back.
Then I start walking toward him.
I don't know what I'm doing. Don't know what I'll say when I reach him, or what any of this means. But my feet keep moving, carrying me closer, and I don't try to stop them.
Whatever this is, I'm done running from it.