Chapter 41
GABI
When Ivan gets home from work, he seeks us out in the garden.
“How’re you feeling?” he asks as he touches my elbow in a gesture that’s gentle but possessive.
Despite everything I learned about Darya—more like Milana’s interpretation of events; she has no proof—I still want to lean into him.
This whole situation has messed with my head, but I understand I can’t turn cold on him or push him away in disgust. We share and live by the same principle: children should be protected at all costs, never harmed.
If this is the way Darya was when they were little, how would she have damaged the girls as they grew up?
With no care for her children, selling them off to the highest bidder, trafficking them, like I was trafficked, would be par for the course.
There’s another question I fail to understand. How could Darya be like that when she belonged to this man? Everything I’ve experienced with him only leaves me begging for more.
What would it be like to belong to him? To have him touch me like this, freely, to be at liberty to rely on him, to talk to him and open up like I did the other night, belonging to him not only in body as a wife, but in soul, with my heart in his hands?
It would be everything. By the sounds of it, Darya threw it all back in his face.
“I’m fine,” I say, shooting him a soft smile. “They’re good, too.”
We both watch Milana as she helps Katya walk the balance beam, out of earshot. The cooler fall air has brushed her cheeks with a healthy glow, and she laughs as Katya jumps into her arms at the end of the beam and she swings her in a circle with joy.
“She hasn’t laughed like this in months. I thought I’d lost her forever.” His hand slips from my elbow to mine and gives my fingers a squeeze.
Somehow, the gesture is a precious thank you from a man who is too broken to say the words. This—making a difference, helping him, being here for him as he was for me—is going to be my undoing.
“Let’s go have dinner,” I say softly, conscious of the tremor in his fingers as they connect with mine.
We’re being knotted together limb by limb, every day a little more.
I’m not sure if it’s his intentional way of courting me, or if it’s just the way it is between men and women when you take religion’s rules out of the equation.
Maybe it’s me, unfurling in this man’s calm presence and the protection he promises with words and gestures.
For the first time in my life, I feel safe with a man other than my brothers.
We’re a happy bunch heading back to the house, Ivan holding my hand, the girls running ahead with Milana. If they noticed the hands, nobody says a thing.
Yuri gets up from the kitchen island where he’s been working while keeping an eye on us.
“Pakhan.” He stands and slices his gaze to me and Milana.
Oh, something is brewing. He never refers to Ivan as Pakhan unless shit’s about to hit the fan.
“After dinner, Yuri, when the girls are in bed.” Ivan looks from me to Milana, before pointing to the dinner table and tipping his head to Yuri. “Join us?”
Yuri nods, and after washing hands, we all sit down for dinner. It isn’t uncomfortable, but anticipation hangs like a ripe watermelon over the table, ready to drop and burst. All four adults know something needs to be discussed, but what the men don’t know is that the women orchestrated it.
When we head up to the rooms for the girls to have a bath, Milana shoots me a sideways glance. I just shake my head, indicating we shouldn’t talk.
We’re just done dressing them in pajamas when Ivan walks into the room. He picks up the hairbrush, and I watch how gently he brushes Katya’s hair.
“So,” he says. “Who’s ever dreamed of being a flower girl at a wedding?”
Irisha glances up at him, eyes wide. “Me!” She starts jumping up and down. “Me! Me! Me!”
“Is that so?” he says, a smile in his voice. “And what about Katya?”
“What’s a flower girl?” Katya asks, turning her sweet face up to him.
He leans down and picks her up. She circles her arms in trust around his neck, showing how safe she feels with him. I get that, completely.
I catch a glimpse of Milana, where she’s stepped to the side, anxiously waiting for Ivan to drop the bomb she’s been secretly anticipating the whole day.
“Well, at a wedding, little girls in the family throw flowers over the path when a bride walks to her groom. It’s tradition.” He looks at me for confirmation. “Or something like that.”
“Something like that.” I smile. “And afterwards, they hand out rice or flower petals to bless the couple with.”
“I wanna do that!” Irisha cries out. “So badly!”
“And me!” Katya echoes.
“Who is getting married?” Milana asks, and in the quiet that follows the question, you could hear a pin drop.
“Funny question, actually. You are.” He boops Katya on her nose and then Irisha. “And you two get to be the flower girls.”
“What?” Milana says softly, her question drowned in the excitement that follows.
The girls babble over each other about the flowers, dresses, crowns—crowns?—which Ivan answers on a very high level, just to keep them happy, as brother and sister lock gazes.
“Who?” she asks, finally getting a word in sideways.
Ivan lowers Katya to her feet. “Luca Scalera, Gabriella’s brother.” He shoots me a glance, and I widen my eyes in mock shock. “I believe he’s next in line to get married.” He takes a deep breath. “You need a change of scenery. This is the only one I can give you.”
When Milana turns away to wipe at her cheek, trying to hide her tears of joy, no doubt, from Ivan, she leaves it open for him to interpret her reaction in any way he pleases.
“When?” comes her soft voice, muffled by her hand.
“Friday.”
A shudder runs through me. It’s so soon, merely two days away. Given Milana’s circumstances, it can’t be soon enough.
“What?” she says, panic in her voice.
“Luca will look after you, Milana,” I say, stepping in with a touch to her shoulder. To be honest, I know him the least of all my brothers. We hardly spent time together, but if he’s anything like Stephano, his identical twin, she’ll be in the best of hands. “I promise. If he doesn’t—”
I let the thought hang, feeling a blush rise to my cheeks as Ivan’s intense stare settles on me. If he doesn’t take care of her—if Ivan doesn’t take care of me—it’s supposedly war.
“You four, meaning you two”—he says as he points to me and Milana—“and Irisha and Katya have two days to sort out dresses and all that. We can bring someone in with their dress inventory, or you can keep it simple and let Kostya buy you something. Spend whatever you feel like. Yuri will see to it.”
“Kostya? Buying a wedding dress? Ivan! Have mercy on the poor man,” Milana protests. “Can’t we go into town and sort ourselves out?”
“No.” His answer brooks no argument. “Come, Milana. We’re going to see the Pakhan to share the news. Could you put the girls to bed, Gabriella?”
“Sure.”
They’re still arguing when they descend the stairs, their voices growing fainter with each step as Milana gives Ivan every inch of uphill she can muster, trying to wheedle out of an arranged marriage she’d connived all by herself. Ivan would expect nothing less, and she’s only playing her part.
But the old Pakhan. Ivan and Milana’s dad…
Does this mean he is here? In this house?
This massive battleground of a mansion with so many rooms and corridors, I still don’t know a quarter of it.
All the eyes I felt on me this entire time.
Ivan did promise he’d introduce me to him soon.
I can’t believe it, but after these past few days, I could start believing anything.
The prospect of being flower girls has injected the girls with a new burst of energy, and for a long time, there’s clambering over the bed, jumping on it, playing with pillows and plushies, and talking about fairy tales in which every single girl gets married to the prince at the end of it.
“Your story doesn’t end with you marrying a prince,” Irisha says when they’ve finally exhausted themselves enough to drop to the pillows.
Watch this space I want to joke, but don’t find it funny right now. “My story isn’t finished. That was one of my many chapters.”
When Ivan walks in minutes later, eyes on me where I’m with the girls on either side of me on his bed, deep into a counting book, I feel my pulse everywhere in my body.
His gaze eats me up, inch by inch, and I feel how every fairy tale princess must have felt in that moment her world tipped into her prince’s arms. From Cinderella, swept from poverty to riches overnight, Sleeping Beauty, like me, stored away in a religious slumber where nothing is allowed, to Snow White, choking on her stepmother’s evil poison only he can free her from…
I’m on the edge of something even I don’t fully grasp yet.
The promise of being touched by a man who knows what he’s doing.