Chapter 6 #3
"Figured." She sighed, but there was something lighter in it, like admitting the escape attempt had relieved some pressure. "Three padlocks visible from the gap. You really don't trust anyone."
"Nope. When there’s something that matters to me and people want to hurt it, I don’t trust anyone.” I began reassembling the mechanism, each piece clicking into place with satisfying precision.
"So I matter?"
The question hung between us, more dangerous than any escape attempt.
"You matter to Bear," I said instead of answering directly.
She looked down at the puppy, who was now gnawing on her sock while it was still on her foot. "Yeah, well. We're both broken toys nobody wanted."
"No." I wound the music box key carefully, three full turns. "You're survivors. There's a difference."
The mechanism engaged, and suddenly the swan began to turn. Swan Lake played in delicate, tinny notes, the melody perfect despite the weeks of silence. The swan rotated slowly on its base, wings spread, neck arched in eternal grace.
Eva's face transformed. The careful blankness she wore like armor cracked, revealing wonder underneath. She reached out, almost touching the swan, then pulled her hand back like it might burn her.
"It's beautiful," she whispered.
"Just needed someone to see past the damage."
She looked at me then, really looked at me.
"I should go to bed," she said suddenly, stepping back. "Bear needs his medicine in the morning."
"Eva."
She paused at the hallway, not turning around.
"The ceiling tile was clever. But next time, check for motion sensors in the attic."
"You have motion sensors in your attic?"
I gave her a look.
She laughed then, soft and genuine. "Of course you do."
Midnight found me nursing a vodka in the living room's darkness, staring at the destroyed TV as though I could will an episode of The Sopranos into existence.
The apartment felt different at this hour—settled into itself, breathing quiet and steady like it had finally accepted its new occupants.
Even the city outside had quieted to a distant hum, Manhattan's heartbeat slowed to something almost peaceful.
She emerged from her room like a ghost, Bear padding behind her on sleepy paws.
She'd stolen another of my t-shirts—the black one with Cyrillic text she couldn't read that said "Moscow Rules" across the front.
It hit her mid-thigh, making her look simultaneously younger and older, vulnerable and dangerous in that particular way she had.
"Can't sleep?" I asked, though it wasn't really a question. I'd heard her moving around for the past hour, the soft sounds of restlessness I'd come to recognize.
She shook her head, settling on the opposite end of the couch with her knees pulled up, the space between us carefully measured. Bear climbed into her lap with a satisfied huff, already falling back asleep.
I poured a second glass without asking, sliding it across the coffee table. The vodka caught what little light there was, clear as water but infinitely more honest.
She took it, sipped, made the face everyone made their first time with real Russian vodka. "Christ. What is this, paint thinner?"
"Beluga Gold. Eight hundred dollars a bottle."
"Expensive paint thinner." But she took another sip, smaller, letting it burn down slow. "Russians and your vodka."
"Italians and their wine. Irish and their whiskey." I raised my glass slightly. "Everyone has their poison."
"What's mine?"
"Self-destruction is my guess," I said without thinking, then watched her flinch like I'd slapped her.
But she laughed, dark and bitter. "Fair."
We sat in oddly comfortable silence, the kind that came from two people who'd seen each other at their worst and decided to coexist anyway.
The vodka warmed my chest, loosened thoughts I usually kept locked down tight.
She was beautiful in the darkness, those magical eyes catching city light from the windows.
"What's your plan?" she asked suddenly. "With me. You can't keep me here forever."
"Why not?"
She gestured vaguely at the apartment, at herself, at the general insanity of the situation. "Because that's insane. Because you have a life, a job, a family who's going to start asking questions. Because eventually someone will notice I'm missing."
"My brothers might notice," I admitted, the vodka making honesty easier. "They'd want to know about you. About the USB."
"So tell them."
"They'd make a deal with the Morozovs. Trade you for peace, maybe territory, definitely money."
Her face went pale, the glass trembling slightly in her hand. "But you won't?"
"No."
"Why?"
The question I'd been avoiding all week. Why was I protecting her? Why was I risking everything—my position, my family's trust, potentially my life—for a girl who'd bitten me, destroyed my property, and openly plotted escape every single day?
I didn't answer because I didn't know. Or maybe I knew but couldn't say it. That something about her called to something in me, two broken things recognizing each other across all the damage.
"Tell me about the foster homes," I said instead.
She pulled Bear closer, like he was armor against memories. "Why?"
"Because I'm drunk enough to listen and you're drunk enough to tell."
She was quiet for so long I thought she wouldn't answer. Then the words came, slow at first, then faster, like a dam breaking.
"Twelve homes in ten years. The first one, I was eight.
They had three biological kids and took in fosters for the money.
I got the basement room, which flooded whenever it rained.
They'd forget to feed me sometimes, or forget I was down there at all.
I learned to stay quiet, invisible, to steal food when no one was looking. "
She took another sip, larger this time.
"The third one was the worst. That's where she said I was broken from the factory. She had this theory that foster kids were damaged goods, needed to be fixed through discipline. Her discipline involved locked closets and missed meals and standing in corners for hours until your legs gave out."
"How long were you there?"
"Fourteen months. Until I hit her back. Then I got labeled as violent, problematic. The homes after that were for 'troubled' kids, which meant kids who'd learned to fight back."
Each word was another piece of the puzzle that was Eva—why she knew how to take a beating, why she hoarded food, why she tested every boundary compulsively like she needed to know exactly where the walls were.
"The last one almost adopted me," she continued, voice softer now.
"The Hendersons. They were older, couldn't have kids.
I was seventeen, about to age out anyway, but they wanted to make it official.
Then Mrs. Henderson got pregnant—miracle baby at forty-three—and suddenly they didn't have room for a damaged teenager. "
I felt like there was something she wasn’t telling me. The pain in her eyes when she said the name, Henderson.
"So you aged out."
"Turned eighteen in a group home. They gave me two hundred dollars and a garbage bag of my stuff and wished me luck. I lasted three weeks in the halfway house they placed me in before I ran. Been on the streets since."
Four years. Four years of sleeping rough, stealing to eat, fighting to survive. No wonder she'd felt safer in my locked apartment than she had in years.
"Your turn," she said, those mismatched eyes finding mine in the darkness. "Fair's fair."
I poured myself another vodka, needing it for this. "Came here when I was fifteen. My father had made enemies in Moscow, the kind that don't forgive. We left everything—came with nothing but the clothes we wore and my grandmother's music boxes in a diplomatic pouch my father had stolen."
"That's why you fix them. They're all you have left of her."
"Had. She died three years after we arrived. Cancer. American hospitals couldn't save her any better than Russian ones could have."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. She died thinking we'd made it, that America was everything she'd dreamed. Better that than knowing what we became."
"What did you become?"
I gestured at the apartment, at myself, at the general reality of what the Volkov name meant in this city. "Monsters. Necessary monsters, but monsters nonetheless."
"You're not a monster," she said quietly. "Monsters don't fix music boxes. They don't save sick puppies. They don't refuse to hit girls who beg for it because violence is all they understand."
"Maybe I'm just a different kind of monster."
"Maybe." She shifted closer, not much, just enough that I could smell my shampoo in her hair. "But you're my monster. The one keeping the real monsters away."
The possessive pronoun sent something through me I didn't want to examine. My monster. Like she'd claimed me as much as I'd claimed her.
"We're both strays," she said, vodka making her philosophical. "Nobody's first choice, nobody's family. Just surviving because we don't know how to do anything else."
"You're Bear's first choice."
She looked down at the puppy, sleeping peacefully in her lap, trusting her completely. "Yeah. I guess I am."
"And he's yours."
"He's mine," she agreed, then looked at me with those impossible eyes. "What are you?"
The question hung between us, heavy with implications neither of us were ready to face.
What was I to her? Captor, protector, the man who fed her and housed her and refused to be the violence she expected?
What was she to me? Prisoner, responsibility, the girl who'd disrupted everything and somehow made it better?
She was drunk. Not sloppy, but loose-limbed and honest in a way that made her dangerous. The vodka had dissolved whatever barriers she usually kept between us, and now she moved on the couch like liquid, each shift bringing her incrementally closer.
"You know what's fucked up?" she said, not waiting for me to answer. "I feel safer here than I have in years. With you. The man who kidnapped me."