Chapter 22 - Sofia
Two hours of silence, and now the lakehouse emerges from morning mist like something from a Russian fairy tale. My legs are stiff from the drive, from sitting beside Alexei while he gripped the wheel and said nothing, lost in whatever ghosts already haunted him before we even arrived.
The wooden structure rises from the fog, wraparound porch, traditional Russian architecture softened by obvious neglect.
Even from here, I can see the tactical disadvantages: too many windows, multiple entry points, isolated location with no backup routes.
My hand drifts unconsciously to my thigh where my knife should be, finding only the soft fabric of my dress.
Alexei cuts the engine. Neither of us moves.
"It's been empty for years," he says, voice rough from disuse.
I follow him up creaking porch steps, noting each sound for future reference.
Third step groans, fifth is silent. My fingers trail along the railing where initials are carved deep into the wood.
M.V. in Cyrillic script, the cuts worn smooth from years of touching.
The ghost of Mikhail greets us before we even enter.
The front door sticks, swollen from humidity. Alexei shoulders it open, and I note the lock is ancient, pickable in seconds. No security system. We're completely exposed here.
The smell hits immediately. Pine and lake water, something floral gone stale with time. Dust motes dance in shafts of morning light streaming through grimy windows. Everything is frozen, preserved, a museum to boyhood summers that ended in blood.
Alexei's shoulders tense, but he doesn't speak.
He moves through the space yanking white sheets from furniture like he's unveiling corpses.
Each revelation shows worn leather couches, a chess set mid-game on the coffee table, some pieces tipping over at the intrusion.
The sight makes my chest tighten with guilt that's become my constant companion.
Photos line the walls. Two boys and a girl growing up in sepia-toned summers. Gap-toothed grins, fishing poles, birthday cakes and bonfires. Mikhail everywhere, laughing, building, existing in ways he never got to finish.
My body responds to Alexei's grief inappropriately, the way it always does. The controlled violence in how he tears away dust covers makes heat pool low in my belly. Even devastated, even here in his brother's sanctuary, I want him. The recognition makes me hate myself a little more.
I stop at the window where a bonsai sits, branches skeletal, soil cracked like broken promises. The ceramic pot is beautiful, hand-painted with tiny cranes, but the tree itself is beyond saving.
"Mikhail's," Alexei says behind me, close enough that I feel his body heat. "He brought it here every summer. Said the lake air was good for it."
I touch one brittle branch and it crumbles to powder between my fingers. Like everything else Mikhail touched, dead because of me.
The bookshelf draws me closer. Architecture volumes, spines cracked from use.
I pull one free and sketches flutter out.
Buildings that exist only in pencil and dream, impossible structures reaching toward skies they'll never touch.
One photo slips free. Mikhail at maybe seventeen, laughing, his arm around someone who's been carefully cut from the frame. The cropped edge is worn soft.
"Father said architecture was weak. Impractical," Alexei says, his voice carrying that particular roughness that makes my nipples tighten beneath my dress. Even grief looks good on him, and I'm sick for noticing.
"But he kept the books."
"He kept everything that mattered. Even the things that could get him hurt."
Like me? The thought rises unbidden. Did he keep me secret even though it got him killed?
I drift to what must have been Mikhail's room, checking sightlines from the hallway.
Too exposed, no cover if someone enters.
Inside, it's a shrine to an eighteen-year-old's interrupted dreams. More architecture books, a drafting table with an unfinished sketch still taped to it, a half-built model of something that might have been a concert hall.
The bed is made with military corners, waiting for someone who'll never mess them up again.
"He'd stay up all night drawing," Alexei says from the doorway, filling the frame in a way that makes me hyperaware of my lack of weapons, my lack of defense against what he does to my body just by existing. "I'd find him passed out at that desk, pencil still in hand, drooling on his blueprints."
The image makes me smile despite the crushing weight in my chest. "What else?"
"Everything. Nothing." Alexei moves past me to open windows, his cologne mixing with lake air.
Even here, even now, my pussy clenches at his proximity.
"He'd collect rocks from the shore, organize them by color.
Taught me to fish even though I had no patience for it.
Built a treehouse that fell down the first storm. "
"And you?"
He pauses, hands full of dusty fabric, and something in his stance makes me want to touch him, comfort him, fuck him until neither of us remembers why we're here.
"I was whoever Mikhail needed me to be. His student, his audience, his shadow." He turns away. "I don't remember if I was ever just myself."
We're on the porch with coffee that's gone cold, watching morning melt into afternoon on the lake's surface. I've checked the perimeter twice. No motion sensors, no cameras, nothing but woods and water. We're alone and unprotected, and the vulnerability makes my skin prickle.
Alexei's phone buzzes against the wooden table. He glances at it and his jaw tightens at whatever name appears. He silences it.
It rings again immediately. Then again. The insistence speaks of emergency.
"You should answer," I say softly, though every instinct screams danger at unexpected calls.
He picks it up on the fourth ring, rising to walk to the porch's edge. "Katya."
I can't hear her words, but I watch his body language shift like watching a building collapse in slow motion. His shoulders draw up. His free hand grips the railing until his knuckles go white. The slight sway, barely perceptible, but I'm trained to notice everything about him.
"When?" His voice cracks.
More tinny words. His head drops forward like someone cut his strings.
"Was she… did she…"
The answer makes him close his eyes, and I know before he says it.
"Ya ponimayu." I understand. The Russian slips out, raw. "Thank you for being there. Spasibo, Katya."
The call ends. He doesn't move, just stands there staring at the lake with the phone dangling from his hand like he's forgotten how to let go.
"Alexei?"
"She's gone." The words come out hollow. "My mother. Early this morning, Moscow time. Katya's been trying to reach me since dawn."
I rise, move toward him slowly, the way Dante taught me to approach wounded animals. Dangerous ones.
"I'm so sorry."
"She died asking for him." His voice breaks completely. "For Mikhail. Katya said she kept calling his name. 'Gde moy mal'chik? Gde Misha?' Where is my boy?"
The Russian makes it worse somehow. More real. My chest constricts with guilt that feels like drowning.
"I should have been there." He still won't turn around. "She begged for weeks. And I chose to stay with you instead."
The weight of that admission settles between us like a blade. His mother died alone, asking for sons who couldn't come. One I helped kill, one who chose me over her final moments.
I reach out to touch his back, but he flinches away like I've burned him.
"Don't." His voice is dangerous now, that edge that usually makes me wet but now just makes me ache. "Just… don't."
Something builds between us, pressure like the air before violence. His shoulders shake with the effort of holding something back, and when it breaks, it's with the force of years.
"My father." He spits the word like poison. "Viktor."
The name makes him switch fully to Russian, words pouring out fast and raw. I understand every bitter syllable: chudovishche, monster. Sdelal yeye, made her. Koleni, knees. Zastavlyal yest' iz ruk, made her eat from his hands. Nakazal, punished.
"He made her kneel." Back to English now, words pulled from him like bullets from wounds. "My mother. Made her kneel for hours during dinner parties. Made her eat from his hand while everyone watched. Like she was a dog. Less than a dog."
My stomach turns, but I stay silent.
"If she looked at another man, even accidentally, she was locked in their room for days. If she spoke without permission…" He stops, grips the railing harder. "The things he did. And she never fought back. Never left. Loved him until the end, or was too broken to know the difference."
He turns to me then, and his face is destroyed. Tears streaming, something shattered behind his eyes that makes my body respond in all the wrong ways. I want to hold him, kiss him, let him fuck the pain away.
"The shoes." His voice cracks. "Making you walk on bloody feet while I watched. Counting each step."
Oh God. The parallel hits like ice water.
"The feeding." He's sobbing now, ugly and raw. "My fingers in your mouth, making you take what I gave you. Just like him. Exactly like him."
"Alexei…"
"The collar." He can barely get the words out. "At the gala. Displaying you. Showing everyone you belonged to me."
His knees give out. He collapses onto the porch, body shaking with sobs that sound like they're being torn from his chest. The sound is horrible, beautiful, and my pussy clenches even as my heart breaks.
"Ya stal im. Ya stal ottsom." I became him. I became my father.
"I'm sorry." He gasps between sobs. "Sofia, I'm so fucking sorry. The basement, the knife, every time I made you feel small. I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"
I drop beside him on the rough wood, taking his face in my hands. He tries to pull away but I'm stronger than I look.
"Look at me." My thumbs brush tears from his cheeks. "Alexei, look at me."
His eyes finally meet mine, pale and shattered and beautiful in their destruction.
"You're not him," I say firmly.
"I AM…"
"You stopped." I keep his face trapped between my palms. "You're here, on your knees, sobbing and apologizing. Did Viktor ever apologize?"
"Nikogda." Never.
"Did he ever recognize what he was doing as wrong?"
"No. He thought it was his right."
"Then you're not him." I shift closer, our foreheads touching, his breath hot against my mouth. "You saw what you were becoming and stopped. That's the difference."
"How can you forgive me?"
"I forgive you because I choose to," I say.
We stay there on the porch until his sobs quiet to shuddering breaths. When he's empty, wrung out and hollow, I help him to his feet.
Inside, I make him eat. Badly cooked eggs that would make Maria weep, but he chokes them down anyway. We sit on the old couch while afternoon light slants through dusty windows.
He tells me about his mother before Viktor broke her. Her laugh, her terrible violin playing, the Russian lullabies she'd sing. The woman she could have been.
"She would have liked you," he says suddenly.
"You think?"
"She always hoped I'd find someone strong enough to fight back."
He takes my hands, grip desperate. "I will never treat you that way again. Never. You'll never kneel unless you choose to. Never fear me. I'll spend whatever time we have earning what you've given me."
The promise settles between us, heavy and real.
That night, we make love in the bed that was never Mikhail's but feels haunted anyway. It's nothing like before. No violence, no games. His hands tremble as they relearn my body without possession. When he enters me, it's with a gentleness that makes me cry.
After, tangled in sheets, I check the windows one more time. Still unsecured, still vulnerable. Tomorrow we'll have to face Moscow, funerals, consequences. But tonight, in this lakehouse full of ghosts, we're just two broken people holding each other together.
My knife rests under the mattress where I transferred it from my thigh holster when we arrived, muscle memory from all those nights in Alexei's bedroom. Even in his arms, even feeling safer than I've ever been, I'm still who Nico trained me to be.
It's terrifying and perfect and completely fucked up.
Which makes it exactly right for us.
His hand slides up my thigh in his sleep, fingers tightening possessively even in dreams. My body responds instantly. Nipples hardening, pussy clenching with that familiar ache. I realize with dark satisfaction that his promise to never make me kneel again doesn't mean he's stopped being dangerous.
The thought makes me wet, makes me press back against him until I feel his cock hardening against my ass. He stirs, not quite awake, but his hand moves higher, fingers brushing the heat between my legs. Even unconscious, even broken by grief and guilt, he still owns my body's responses.
"Sofia," he murmurs, half-asleep, and there's something in his voice. Possession, need, that edge of violence that will never fully disappear.
Good. I don't want it to.
Because the truth is, I need him dangerous. Need that threat always lurking beneath his tenderness. It's what makes my heart race, what makes me feel alive in ways nothing else can.
His teeth graze my throat, and I arch into him, already imagining tomorrow. How grief might sharpen his edges again, how his promises might bend but not break, how I'll let him take me apart and put me back together in ways that would horrify anyone who claims to love me.
My fingers drift to the mattress edge where my knife handle rests, not for protection but for the reminder. I'm choosing this. Choosing him. Choosing to kneel when he inevitably asks again, despite his promises.
Because some hungers can't be tamed, only fed.
And we're both starving.