Chapter Nineteen
Alexei
Katya is three mojitos deep and soaking wet when at last she comes back inside in the evening, testing out a new door with her thumbprint and slipping into the house through a lounge.
She doesn’t care that she drips water all over my floors, that her feet slide on the marble tile.
Her wet shirt clings to her skin. Her wet hair is plastered to her back.
She is less pissed than she was, but still she crackles with a don’t-touch-me aura as she steps onto the carpet.
She knows she has been observed all afternoon.
I have caught a few perfect glimpses of her resentful stare into directly into the security cameras whenever she sensed them following her movements.
She ate the lunch that was brought to her by the poolside, though she scoffed again at her plastic silverware. She wasn’t rude to the staff she encountered. She only ignored them.
By the way her mouth pulls into a scowl as she catches sight of me, I can see that she expected me to find her at some point or another. But she has served herself a great quantity of rum, and she is reckless, less inhibited than she would be otherwise.
“Don’t you have mobstering to do elsewhere?” she asks tartly as she takes a seat on a leather couch with a wet plop.
Christ. Katya and her smart mouth. Mobstering.
“No, koshechka,” I tell her, since she is chattier than usual. “My mobstering is done for today.” The couch she sits on is going to be permanently water-stained, but replacing it will be someone else’s problem. “Did you enjoy your swim?”
“It beat being stuck inside all day.” She turns—away from me, naturally—and lifts her legs to drape them across the couch. Her soaked blue jeans ruin another seat.
“I will take you out,” I tell her, “when I can trust you to be a good girl for me.”
“I’ll pass,” she sniffs. I can’t see her face, but I know she is tilting her little nose up in derision.
“You like my house so much you do not want to leave it?” I chuckle at the brief glare she shoots me over her shoulder. “You enjoy taunting me, Kayta. You cannot expect that I don’t enjoy the same. Are you hungry?”
“Even if I was, I’m not in the mood for company.” She pauses. Adds, “And I want real silverware.”
“Da. As soon as I am satisfied you will not cut my throat in my sleep, you can have real silverware.”
With a scathing sound, she tosses her wet hair. “And I want my own room. Just until I find a way out of this hellhole.”
“Hellhole.” I snicker. “Katya, you spent three hours in the pool making yourself mojitos. To you, this is hell?”
A wild gesticulation of her hands an over-exaggerated manner which suggests that probably she put more rum in her mojitos than the recipe recommends. “It is when I don’t want to be here! And stop fucking spying on me, you creep.”
“Nyet. I like watching you dive.” And drink. And hold her breath as she kicks through the water. And surface with a gasp. And float on her back. “Maybe you need some bathing suits, yes?”
A scathing snort. “Oh, I can have bathing suits, then?”
“You can have many things, koshechka. What do you want?”
“I want to go home.”
“Nyet. Try again.”
An infuriated growl rises in her throat, vicious and full of wrath. She gives another aggravated gesture, her fingers twitching as if she is imagining them around my neck. “I want to go home and live my own life! I want to use my goddamned degree, Alexei!”
Of course she wants to use her degree. She earned this privilege with years of hard work.
I have seen her transcripts, the impressively high marks she earned with her efforts.
“This is something we discuss in future, koshechka,” I tell her.
For her to teach at a public school—this will never be possible.
But a small one, a private one…provided it is properly secured, perhaps this is something that can be accomplished, though the logistics of such a thing will be tricky, even for me.
“I’m not discussing my career choices with you,” she snips resentfully. “I’m not discussing anything with you!”
But she is. Probably she doesn’t mean to. Likely she does not want to. But she has had too much rum, and it conquers her aloofness, though it does not dull the bright burn of her anger. Now it comes spilling out unrestrained.
She vaults to her feet, leaving the wet impression of her body on the leather couch. “Why would I want anything to do with you?” she asks, and there is a note of strained incredulity in her voice. “You killed my brother!”
“You waste your grief on this,” I tell her.
“You give your loyalty to men who do not deserve this from you, men who would never have offered you the same.” She knows this already; I can see it in the hard swallow that rolls down her throat.
But still she denies this knowledge, as if she can make it untrue only on hope alone.
As if she can will this circumstance to be something other than what it is.
She hopes, in the desperation of one bereft of love for so long, that she can change this somehow.
That perhaps in time, the family that has so long denied her will embrace her instead.
She yearns foolishly for this futile thing.
That soft heart must be from her mother, because it is certain she did not get it from her papa. It is a shame that Katya has lost her so young, that there was no one else who cared for her enough to fill that void in her heart.
She jabs a finger at me in accusation. “You don’t tell me how to feel,” she says, and her voice is tight with that hope that will ruin her in the end. “You don’t know my family!”
I know them better than she has ever been allowed to do.
“You do not know them,” I say, gently. “I have Nicola’s phone.
He was a very stupid man; careless, lazy.
He kept his passwords saved, not even encrypted.
For fuck’s sake, he used his birthday as his lock code.
” I scoff. “So yes, koshechka, I know better than you. I know the things he said of you, the things your papa said of you. When I tell you that you should not waste your grief on him, there is reason for it.”
Her eyes glitter. Her chest hitches. She says, as she dashes the back of her hand over her eyes, “I don’t believe you.”
“For what reason should I lie? I do not have to lie to you now, Katya.” Because she is already mine. There is no longer any need for such deceptions.
Her chin firms, notching up in challenge. “Show me, then. Show me, if you’re not lying.”
Fuck. “Koshechka, I will never show you this.” It would kill her, I think.
Kill that fragile part of her that still hopes.
Hurt her in a way one can only be hurt by someone who is loved.
And she does love them, the father and brother who have never deserved this, despite their callous disregard.
It is best she knows only the least part of it, so she spends no time agonizing over this.
So she wastes no more of her heart upon them.
“Then you’re a liar,” she says, and she dismisses me without another word, storming past me in the full grip of her fury once more, leaving only a trail of pool water in her wake.
∞∞∞
For three days, I see her only on the security feed.
She wakes before I do in the morning, and she is asleep before I return.
If I allowed such a thing, she would sleep on a couch, since no other bedroom has been made available to her.
But she knows I will only carry her back, and the fight isn’t worth the inevitable loss.
She swathes herself in her blue jeans, in her thick sweaters, and she buries herself beneath the covers on the opposite side of the bed.
Still she searches for vulnerabilities in my security.
Sometimes she tries to engage the staff in conversation, as if by endearing herself to them she might find someone willing to risk their life to set her free.
She hunts for loose bars in my fence, for places where the razor wire might be not so thick.
She searches rooms for forgotten items, for misplaced things that might aid her escape.
She devotes half of her day to these tasks, like it is a routine she observes. And the rest of the day—
She swims. She wears the bathing suits I had placed in the drawers for her.
She eats the meals that are brought to her and scoffs at her plastic silverware, her meat cut up already into bite-sized pieces.
She makes herself fruity cocktails. Then she comes inside, still dripping, and finds some new room to wreck.
Sometimes she thumbs through books in the library, folding down the corners of pages and handling expensive volumes carelessly in her wet hands.
Sometimes she watches TV, turning up the volume so loud she annoys anyone who gets within thirty feet.
Sometimes she peppers the staff with questions until they flee from her presence.
She makes a menace of herself like this will induce me to release her.
Like this will make me decide she is not worth the trouble she causes.
Instead, I watch her antics on the security feed like a glutton.
Like I am starved for the sight of her. This is easiest from the security room, when I can easily follow her progress from one camera to the next upon the array of monitors.
But sometimes, when I am otherwise engaged in business, I find myself pulling up the feed on my phone, scanning the cameras for her.
Until the day comes that I cannot find her at all.
It comes during a fraught online meeting with one of my brigadiers at home in Moscow, who has an enforcer in need of discipline.
He has become too proud and too loose with his words, which could easily fall into the wrong ears.
This is something I let Anatoli handle on my behalf while I lend only my presence and authority.