Chapter 18
Anya
The childhood bed still sagged in the middle where I'd spent twenty-six years curling into myself, trying to become small enough to disappear.
Same scratchy sheets that smelled like the lavender detergent Elena used—prison-issue comfort that fooled no one.
I sat in that familiar hollow, knees drawn up, and cataloged the systematic destruction of everything I'd become in three weeks of freedom.
Day one started with Marina.
Viktor had waited exactly three hours after Ivan drove away before beginning his performance.
Long enough for the adrenaline to fade, for the reality to sink in—I was back, the Volkovs couldn't reach me, and my father held all the cards.
He'd entered my room with theatrical precision, every movement calculated for maximum impact.
"Let's see what my daughter brought home from her . . . adventure."
The bag sat on my dresser where the guards had placed it. Viktor went through it methodically. Clothes first—the soft things Ivan had helped me choose, tossed aside with casual disgust. Toiletries, examined and discarded. My laptop, confiscated immediately "for the investigation."
Then he found them.
Marina emerged first, purple and perfect, the whale who'd kept me safe through panic attacks and regression and the terrifying freedom of being allowed to be small. Viktor held her up between two fingers like she was contaminated.
"My brilliant daughter needs stuffed animals?" His voice carried that particular blend of disappointment and disgust he'd perfected over decades. "Twenty-six years old, two PhDs, and this is what the Volkovs reduced you to?"
"Papa, please—" The words escaped before I could stop them, the wrong words, weak words that confirmed everything he already believed about my corruption.
"Please?" He examined Marina with clinical interest, fingers finding her seams. "You're begging for a toy? This is what three weeks with those degenerates accomplished? They turned my accomplished daughter into a child?"
"It's not—Marina isn't just—" But how could I explain? That the whale represented safety I'd never known? That holding her meant I could access parts of myself that had been locked away since before memory? That she was proof someone—Ivan—thought I deserved comfort?
Viktor's fingers had already found the weakest seam, the one along Marina's belly that I'd worried sometimes when anxious. He pulled, and the thread began to give.
"No!" I lunged forward, couldn't help it, hands reaching for Marina like she was a living thing that could feel pain.
Viktor backhanded me casually, not hard enough to leave a mark that would show, but sufficient to send me stumbling back onto the bed.
While I pressed my hand to my stinging cheek, he continued his destruction with methodical precision.
The seam split. White stuffing spilled onto the Persian rug that had been in this room since before I was born, landing like snow on the deep red pattern.
Marina's button eye popped off, rolling under the dresser with a soft clicking sound. More stuffing, pulled out in handfuls while Viktor delivered his analysis.
"The Stockholm syndrome is worse than reported. You've imprinted on objects like an institutionalized patient. We'll need extensive therapy to undo this damage."
Day two was the coloring book.
I'd hidden it under my mattress, but Viktor's guards were thorough. They found it during their morning "inspection," delivered it to Viktor like evidence of a crime.
He burned it in the fireplace while I stood there in my nightgown, forced to watch.
Each page curled and blackened, taking with it the peaceful hours I'd spent choosing colors while Ivan worked nearby.
The purple-to-blue sunset I'd been so proud of.
The underwater scene where I'd finally understood how colors could bleed into each other to create something new.
"Art therapy," Viktor mused, poker stirring the ashes. "They manipulated you through crafts projects. Reduced your brilliant mind to kindergarten activities. The psychological manipulation is fascinating, really—how quickly an isolated adult will regress when offered pseudo-parental approval."
He was rewriting my history, turning healing into sickness, love into manipulation, safety into Stockholm syndrome. And part of me—the part trained by twenty-six years of his voice—started to believe him.
Day three brought interrogations.
"Did Volkov force you into this 'Little' persona?" Viktor sat across from me in the study, taking notes like a psychiatrist. "Did he threaten you? Withhold affection unless you complied? Use your anxiety medication as leverage?"
"No." My voice came out steady, though my hands shook in my lap. "I chose it. It helped me process—"
"Process." He wrote something down, pen scratching against expensive paper. "Interesting choice of words. What exactly were you 'processing'?"
The trap was obvious, but I walked into it anyway. "The trauma. From here. From you."
His pen stilled. When he looked up, his pale eyes held that particular coldness that preceded something terrible.
"Trauma. From the father who protected you, educated you, kept you safe from a world that would have devoured an anxious, unstable girl like you.
" He leaned back, studying me. "This is what I mean by manipulation, detka.
They've convinced you that love was prison, that protection was abuse. Classic cult tactics."
Meals became weapons after that. Nothing for twelve hours, then rich foods that made my empty stomach cramp.
Sometimes meals at 3 AM, sometimes nothing for a full day.
I never knew when food would arrive, what it would be, whether I'd be allowed to finish it.
Classic destabilization—destroy routine, create dependency, break down resistance through unpredictability.
The room itself became another form of torture.
Everything soft had been removed while I was at the third interrogation.
My pillows, replaced with one flat thing that offered no comfort.
Extra blankets, gone, leaving only a thin sheet that didn't quite warm me at night.
The curtains had been removed "for my safety," leaving me exposed to anyone who might look up at my window.
And the camera. Mounted in the corner where I couldn't reach it, red light always blinking. Watching me dress. Watching me try to sleep. Watching me pace the fourteen steps from wall to wall—I'd counted, couldn't stop counting, numbers being the only thing I could still control.
I tried to stay "big." Tried to be the controlled, analytical daughter who could survive this through intellect and emotional distance. But trauma doesn't respect intention. At night, alone in the dark with that camera watching, my body betrayed me.
I'd wake to find my thumb in my mouth, sore from sucking.
Catch myself rocking, the motion automatic and desperate.
Realize I'd been counting prime numbers aloud in Russian—two, three, five, seven, eleven—for who knows how long.
The regression was involuntary, my mind seeking the safety of littleness even when I knew it was dangerous.
On day four, Viktor caught me.
I'd been asleep, or thought I was, curled in that familiar hollow with my thumb between my lips. The door opened so quietly I didn't wake until he was already standing over me, phone in hand, recording everything.
"Fascinating," he said, and the word slithered through the darkness like something venomous. "We'll need to show this to the psychiatrists, of course. Evidence of the mental instability. You understand what this means, don't you, detka?"
I pulled my thumb from my mouth, the wet sound obscene in the quiet room. My jaw ached. My body had betrayed me again, seeking comfort in the only way it knew how.
"It means," Viktor continued, sitting on the edge of my bed with the casual ownership of someone who'd never questioned his right to my space, "that I was right.
You're not well, Anya. You need treatment.
Professional help. Somewhere secure, where they can address these . . . regression issues properly."
Somewhere secure. An institution. He was threatening to have me committed.
Iwoke on day five to find Viktor standing in my doorway, studying me with the patient interest of an entomologist who'd pinned a new specimen to his collection board.
My thumb was still in my mouth—I could feel the wetness, the slight pruning of skin, the ache in my jaw that said I'd been sucking it for hours.
The camera's red light blinked steadily, and I knew with sick certainty that everything had been recorded.
"Don't stop on my account," Viktor said, pulling out his phone with theatrical deliberation. "I have enough footage already."
The screen showed me curled in sleep, thumb between my lips, occasionally making small sounds that might have been whimpers or might have been words.
The image was green-tinted from night vision, alien and pathetic.
I watched myself rock slightly, the motion so subtle I hadn't even known I was doing it.
Then the counting started—barely audible Russian numbers, two, three, five, seven, the pattern I'd used to soothe myself since childhood.
"My sources were right about the mental instability." Viktor replayed a particularly damning segment where I'd pulled my knees up, making myself impossibly small. "These episodes of infantile regression—this will be excellent evidence for the annulment proceedings."
"Annulment?" The word came out cracked. An annulment would mean the marriage never legally existed. Everything Ivan and I had built, erased like a calculation error.