Chapter 7
Eva
The door was already opening when I started screaming.
Not the real door—the one in my head, the one that opened every night when Mr. Henderson decided to check on his foster daughter.
My body knew the sound of those particular hinges, had memorized the exact weight of his footsteps on carpet, the way the hallway light would slice across my bed like a wound.
"Don't touch me!" The words tore from my throat, raw and desperate.
I was tangled in something—sheets, but my brain said restraints.
The steel-grey duvet wrapped around me like a straightjacket, and the city light leaking around blackout shades became the bathroom nightlight Mrs. Henderson insisted stay on so her husband could "check on the troubled girl. "
Hands reached for me through the darkness. Large hands, male hands, hands that had no business being near a fourteen-year-old girl in the middle of the night.
I came up swinging.
“I said don’t touch me!”
My fist connected with something solid—a jaw, maybe—and I heard a grunt of surprise. Good. Let him hurt. Let him know what it felt like to be touched when you didn't want it, to have your body become a thing that didn't belong to you anymore.
"Eva." A voice, but not Mr. Henderson's. Deeper, accented, familiar in a way that made my brain stutter between past and present. "Eva, you're safe."
But I wasn't safe. I was never safe. Safety was a lie adults told to make you drop your guard, to make you stop fighting, to make you easier to hurt. I swung again, wild, my knuckles scraping against something that might have been stubble or might have been memory.
Then the hands withdrew. The presence near my bed shifted, lowered, and suddenly there was space to breathe. Through the panic, through the roar of blood in my ears, I heard movement—controlled, deliberate, unthreatening.
"You're safe, little one." Dmitry's voice, I realized. Dmitry, not Mr. Henderson. Present, not past. "No one touches you here."
He'd lowered himself to the floor beside the bed. I could make out his shape in the dim light—hands visible, palms up, making himself smaller than me for once. He sat with his back against the nightstand, close enough that I could hear him breathing but far enough that I didn't feel trapped.
My body was still in fight mode, every muscle coiled, ready to run or attack or both.
My hands shook as I pushed the duvet away, needing to not feel confined, needing to see the exits.
The bedroom door was cracked open—he'd left it that way, I realized.
Left me an escape route even though we both knew the apartment door was still locked.
"Just a dream," I managed, though my voice came out cracked and wrong. My breaths were short, clipped, and it felt like I was out of breath. My heart was pounding, faster and faster, so fast it felt like it would beat out of my chest and burst.
"I can teach you something," he offered, still on the floor, still making himself non-threatening in a way that must have been killing his pride. "A breathing technique. It helps quiet the noise."
"I don't need—"
"In for four," he started anyway, his voice low and steady. "Hold for four. Out for four. We do it together."
He demonstrated, and despite myself, I found my breathing trying to match his. In for four—one, two, three, four. Hold—one, two, three, four. Out—one, two, three, four.
"Again," he said, and we did it again. And again. Each cycle pulling me further from that bedroom in the Henderson house, anchoring me to this moment, this room, this man who was sitting on my floor in the middle of the night teaching me to breathe.
The tremors started to ebb, replaced by exhaustion so complete it felt like drowning. My body sagged against the headboard, spent from fighting an enemy who wasn't there.
"We can quiet the monster in us," Dmitry said after what might have been ten minutes or an hour of breathing together.
"You don't have a monster in you," I said, the words automatic.
He stood then, movement fluid despite having been on the floor for so long. In the dim light, he peeled off his t-shirt, and I tensed, ready to fight again if necessary. But he just stood there, letting the city light from the window illuminate his torso.
Scars. So many scars.
A knife line under his ribs, pale and raised. A puckered burn on his shoulder that looked like someone had held something hot against him for a long time. Near his hip, the distinctive coin-shape of a bullet wound. Each mark a story of violence survived.
"Everyone has monsters," he said simply.
Before I could stop myself, I reached out, fingers finding that rib scar. The skin was smooth and strange under my fingertips, evidence of damage that had healed but never really gone away. His hand came up, gentle but firm, capturing mine and returning it to the duvet.
"Not tonight," he said. "Sleep."
He disappeared into the bathroom, returning with a glass of water that he set on the nightstand within easy reach. Then he went to his drawer, pulled out one of his t-shirts—soft, oversize, the black one I'd stolen twice already—and set it on the foot of the bed.
"If you want to change," he said, not looking at me. "Sometimes fresh clothes help."
I thought he'd leave then, return to his room or the couch or wherever he went when he wasn't managing his captive houseguest. Instead, he pulled the armchair from the corner to the window, settling into it barefoot and shirtless, clearly planning to stay.
"You don't have to—"
"I know," he interrupted. "Sleep, Eva."
He started counting again, quiet in the darkness. "In for four . . . hold for four . . . out for four." A rhythm, a heartbeat, something steady to hold onto while my mind tried to drag me back to places I didn't want to go.
I changed into his shirt while he kept his eyes on the window, the fabric soft and smelling like his detergent, like safety I didn't know how to trust yet. Then I curled into the bed, Bear's snoring from his pen the only other sound besides Dmitry's counting.
It was only then, on the edge of sleep, that I remembered we’d kissed, just hours before. It sent warmth through my body, my cheeks flushed with shame and desire.
I breathed—it was all I could do to find my way back to calm. I fell asleep to the sound of Dmitry counting—numbers in the dark, steady as promises, reliable as sunrise.
And when I dreamed again, it was of kisses, soft lips, and hard fingers.
The eggs on my plate looked perfect—fluffy, golden, exactly how I liked them—but they might as well have been cardboard for all I could taste them.
I pushed them around with my fork, creating patterns in the yolk while Dmitry watched me from across the kitchen island with those careful eyes he got when he was cataloging my damage.
He set down his coffee with a deliberate click against the marble. "I'm sorry."
The words hit me like cold water. I looked up, certain I'd misheard. "What?"
"I'm sorry," he repeated, and there was something in his voice I'd never heard before. Regret, maybe. Or recognition. "I've been keeping you locked away, controlled, thinking it would keep you safe. But isolation makes trauma worse. Triggers it. That’s why the nightmares came."
I stared at him, fork frozen halfway to my mouth. Dmitry Volkov, the Beast of the bratva, was apologizing.
"I wanted to keep you safe," he continued, those grey eyes steady on mine. "But I made you a prisoner instead. Caged you like I've been caging parts of myself."
"You didn't make me have nightmares," I said, defensive out of habit more than conviction. "That's been happening since—"
"Since you were a kid?"
I nodded.
"You were talking," he said gently. "Last night, in the dream. You said things."
My hands started shaking. The fork clattered against the plate, loud in the quiet apartment. "What did I say?"
"Enough. Henderson?"
That one word carried weight, understanding, a promise that he knew without making me explain. But suddenly I wanted to explain. Wanted someone else to carry this story so I didn't have to hold it alone anymore.
"The ones who almost adopted me. They were the ones who broke me.
Mr. Henderson was a deacon at their church," I started, the words coming slow like pulling glass from skin.
"Everyone thought they were perfect. They fostered kids for years, had pictures on their walls of all the children they'd 'saved.
' I was going to be their first adoption. Lucky number eighteen."
Dmitry didn't move, didn't interrupt, just listened with that stillness he had when something mattered.
"Like I said last night, Mrs. Henderson was trying to get pregnant.
Had been for years. IVF, medications, prayer circles at church.
Mr. Henderson said God wanted them to have a child of their own, but maybe I could be practice.
" The word tasted like bile. "He'd come to my room at night to 'check on me.
' Make sure I was being a good girl. Make sure I was grateful for their charity. "
My voice had gone flat, clinical, like I was reading from a police report. It was the only way to get through it.
"I tried to tell Mrs. Henderson once. She called me a liar. Said I was a damaged girl trying to destroy their good Christian home. Said if I ever told anyone else, they'd send me somewhere worse. And there was always somewhere worse."
"How long?" Dmitry's voice was controlled, but I could hear something dangerous underneath it.
"Six months. Until Mrs. Henderson got pregnant. The miracle baby. Then suddenly they didn't have room for a damaged teenage girl anymore. Sent me back to the group home with a garbage bag of clothes and a warning to keep my mouth shut."
The silence that followed felt like standing at the edge of a cliff. I waited for him to say something dismissive, to file this away as useful information about my psychological profile, to use it as leverage somehow.