Chapter 6 #2
And there it was—the truth under all that rage. She was terrified of the calm, of consequences without violence. She knew how to take a beating. Her body had been trained by years of abuse to process fists and boots and hands around her throat.
But patient discipline? Rules with consequences that didn't involve pain? That was foreign territory that left her no defense mechanisms to deploy.
"Cold shower," I said instead. "Ten minutes."
Her face crumpled like I'd actually hit her. The frustration of being denied even that familiar violence was worse than any punch I could have thrown.
"I hate you," she whispered, but there was something else in it. Not just hate but confusion, like I'd broken some fundamental rule about how the world worked.
She walked to the bathroom with the defeated posture of someone going to execution.
I followed, needing to supervise, to make sure she actually complied.
She knew the routine by now—we'd done this twice before when she'd refused other consequences.
Strip down to underwear and tank top, step under the spray, endure.
She peeled off my henley with mechanical movements, revealing the tank top underneath that was also mine, stolen from my drawer like everything else she wore now. The track pants pooled at her feet, leaving her in boy shorts that had seen better days and my tank top that hung off her frame.
"This is fucked up," she said, but stepped into the shower stall anyway.
I turned the handle to cold, and she gasped as the water hit. Not dramatic, not performed, just the involuntary response of a body meeting discomfort. She pressed her palms against the tile, head bowed, water streaming over her in punishment for breaking things that could be replaced.
"You could just hit me," she said through chattering teeth. "It would be faster."
"I will never hit you. I’m helping you learn.”
"I'm not learning anything except that you're a sadistic fuck who gets off on—"
"On what?" I interrupted. "On teaching you that actions have consequences that don't involve emergency rooms? That you can fuck up without getting bones broken?"
She turned to look at me through the spray, hair plastered to her face, those mismatched eyes wide with something that might have been revelation.
"That's not how it works," she said quietly. "You break things, you get broken. That's the rule."
"My house, my rules."
"Your rules are stupid."
"Eight more minutes."
She turned back to the wall, enduring the cold with a stubbornness that would have been admirable if it wasn't so clearly a survival mechanism.
Her whole body shook, but she didn't ask for mercy, didn't beg for it to stop.
Just stood there and took it because that's what she'd been trained to do—endure whatever came at her.
At the ten-minute mark, I turned off the water. She stood there dripping, waiting for permission or further punishment or something that made sense in her framework of violence and retaliation.
"Get dried off," I said, handing her a towel. "Then clean up the broken glass before Bear steps on it."
"That's it?"
"Did you want more?"
She clutched the towel like armor, water still running down her legs, pooling on the bathroom tile. "I broke your TV. That's thousands of dollars."
"Yes."
"And you're just . . . letting it go?"
"No. You're cleaning up the glass, eating dinner properly, and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Tomorrow you'll help me install the new TV I'll have delivered. You'll learn how to mount it properly, how to run the cables, how to fix what you broke instead of just breaking more things."
She stared at me like I'd started speaking ancient Sumerian. "You want to teach me home repair?"
"I want to teach you that destroying things has consequences beyond getting hurt. Now get dressed. Bear's been hiding under the bed since you started throwing things, and he needs to know you're okay."
The mention of Bear changed everything. Her whole posture shifted from defiant prisoner to worried mother. She wrapped the towel around herself and hurried to the bedroom, calling softly for the puppy.
I surveyed the destruction in my living room.
Three thousand for the TV, maybe fifty for the glasses, nothing for the books that could be picked up and reshelved.
But the look on her face when I'd refused to hit her—that moment of complete confusion when violence didn't follow violence—that was worth any amount of property damage.
She emerged fifteen minutes later in dry clothes (mine, of course), Bear cradled in her arms. She surveyed the destruction she'd caused with something that might have been shame.
"I’m sorry. I'll clean it up," she said quietly.
"I know you will."
And she did, carefully picking up every shard of glass while I held Bear to keep him from helping. She worked in silence, methodical and thorough, cleaning up her explosion like it was a crime scene she needed to erase.
When she finished, she stood in the center of my damaged living room, looking lost.
"I don't understand you," she said finally.
"That's okay. You don't have to understand. You just have to follow the rules."
The music box sat in pieces on my dining table, its delicate mechanism spread across a felt cloth like autopsy results. I’d decided to check out the internals after Eva had grabbed it. I wanted to make sure that the gear-powered swan would still turn smoothly when the box was opened.
Eva was curled in the corner of the couch with Bear, a book open in her lap that she hadn't turned a page of in twenty minutes.
She kept glancing over, quick looks that she thought I didn't notice.
The same way she thought I didn't notice she'd reorganized my bookshelf by color instead of alphabetically, or that she'd been using my expensive shampoo exclusively while leaving hers untouched.
I picked up the tiny screwdriver, barely larger than a toothpick, and began working on the stripped gear that was preventing the swan from turning.
The mechanism should play Swan Lake—you could see Tchaikovsky's name etched in Cyrillic on the base—but currently it just made grinding sounds like bones breaking.
"What is that?" she finally asked, giving up the pretense of reading.
"Music box you almost broke." I held up the stripped gear to the light, examining the damaged teeth through my magnifying glass. "The mechanism is stripped. Someone wound it too tight, probably trying to make it play when it was already broken."
She set the book aside and padded over in bare feet. Bear followed, tail wagging, though he'd learned not to jump on the table when I was working with small parts.
"You actually fix these?" She stood at a careful distance, close enough to see but far enough to run. Always calculating exits, even after a week of relative safety.
"Like I said, I fix broken things," I said simply, using tweezers to extract a bent pin from the mechanism.
She came closer, suspicious but curious, drawn by the delicate work despite herself. "Why?"
I showed her the tiny gears, each no bigger than her fingernail, explaining how they connected in sequence. "This one turns the cylinder, which has these small pins that pluck the comb—these metal teeth here—creating the notes. One broken tooth, one bent pin, and the whole system fails."
"Seems like a lot of work for something that just plays music for thirty seconds."
"Most beautiful things are more work than they're worth." I realigned a gear, testing its movement. "That's what makes them beautiful."
She watched my hands as I worked with tools that could fit in a child's palm.
The focus required was absolute—one slip and I'd damage it worse than it already was.
It was the complete opposite of my usual work, where force and intimidation solved problems. Here, patience and precision were the only currencies that mattered.
"Where did you learn to do this?"
"My grandmother. She collected them in Moscow, before we came here. Had seventeen when she died, each one different. She taught me to maintain them, said it was important to preserve beautiful things in an ugly world."
"Very Russian of her."
"Very Russian," I agreed, carefully setting the cylinder back in place.
She was quiet for a long moment, watching me work. Bear had settled at her feet, already bored with the delicate operation happening above his eye level.
"My foster mom used to say I was broken," she said suddenly, the words falling into the quiet apartment like stones into water. "The third one. Said my real parents threw me away because they could tell something was wrong with me from birth."
My hands stilled on the gears. I knew about abandonment, about being told you were worthless, but hearing it from her in that flat, matter-of-fact tone made something in my chest constrict.
"I felt like a toy nobody wanted to play with," she continued, not looking at me now, studying the music box pieces instead. "Broken from the factory, not worth fixing."
"She was wrong."
"How would you know?" The question wasn't aggressive, just tired. "You've known me a week. You don't know what I've done, where I've been, what's wrong with me."
"Because truly broken things don't fight this hard to survive." I picked up another gear, showing her how it meshed with its partner. "They don't save dying puppies from dumpsters. They don't try to escape a dozen times in a week."
"Baker’s dozen," she said quietly. "You haven't found the ceiling tile I loosened yet."
I looked up at the ceiling, scanning until I spotted it—a barely visible gap in the third tile from the window. She'd been working on it during her assigned quiet time, probably standing on the arm of the couch when I was in the shower.
"Clever," I said, returning to the music box. "But the attic is locked too."