Chapter 19 #2
After dinner—something edible that Dmitry cooked while I cleaned up my baking disaster—we headed to the workshop.
It had been just his space initially, all dangerous tools and gun oil, the place where he cleaned weapons and occasionally built things I didn't ask about.
Now half of it was mine. I had my own set of restoration tools organized on pegboard he'd installed at the perfect height for me.
Tiny screwdrivers and pliers, bottles of brass polish and wood oil, boxes of salvaged parts sorted by mechanism type.
I’d been learning.
"So, what’s your diagnosis, doctor. You're think it's broken?" Dmitry asked, watching me examine the music box he'd brought home last week.
It was a disaster—water damage had warped the wood base, the male dancer was missing his entire left side, the female dancer's porcelain face had a crack running from forehead to chin.
The mechanism inside ground and stuck when you tried to wind it, probably full of rust and broken teeth.
Any reasonable person would have tossed it.
"Nothing's really broken," I said, already losing myself in the puzzle of it. "Just needs to be fixed."
He settled at his own bench, cleaning and oiling a Glock with the same focused attention I was giving to the music boxes. We worked in comfortable silence, the only sounds Bear's snoring and the quiet clink of tools.
The female dancer came free first, and I set her gently aside. Her dress was moth-eaten tulle, but the structure underneath was good. The male dancer was worse—someone had tried to glue him back together with what looked like chewing gum and desperation.
"This is actually three different dancers," I said, amused despite myself. "Someone made a Frankenstein dancer out of broken parts."
Dmitry had patiently shown me how to restore and repair the music boxes. He still did the most difficult jobs, but I was learning fast.
"Sounds familiar," Dmitry said, and I looked up to find him watching me with that soft expression that still made my stomach flip.
"Are you calling us Frankenstein monsters?"
"I'm saying we're both built from broken parts that shouldn't work together but do."
The honesty of it, casual and profound, made my throat tight. I focused on the mechanism to avoid crying over a music box like some kind of Victorian maiden.
The spring was shot, but I had a collection of springs salvaged from other boxes.
The pins on the cylinder were bent but not broken—careful pressure with needlenose pliers straightened them enough to catch the comb teeth.
The male dancer was trickier. I ended up fabricating his entire left side from parts of three different dancers, using jewelry wire to create joints that moved.
"That's cheating," Dmitry said, now standing behind me to watch.
"That's art," I corrected. "Taking what exists and making it into what it needs to be."
Two hours later, I had something that might work. The dancers stood ready, held by wires I'd reinforced with drops of superglue. The mechanism was clean, oiled, fitted with a spring that was almost the right size. The cylinder turned freely when I tested it with my finger.
"Moment of truth," I said, and turned the key.
The mechanism caught, held, then released with a grinding sound that made me wince.
But then—music. Stuttering and imperfect, skipping notes where pins were missing, but recognizable.
"La Vie en Rose," tinny and sweet, as the dancers began their jerky waltz.
The male dancer's improvised left side moved slightly out of sync with his right, and the female dancer's cracked face caught the workshop light in a way that made her look like she was crying crystal tears.
But they danced. These broken, rebuilt, impossible dancers circled each other in their stuttering waltz, and it was beautiful because it shouldn't have been possible at all.
His lips found my neck, just above the collar, that spot that made me shiver every time. "My clever girl," he murmured against my skin. "Making broken things beautiful."
"We're not broken anymore," I said, watching the dancers turn their imperfect circles. "Just . . . creatively repaired."
He laughed, the sound rumbling through his chest into mine. "Is that what we're calling it?"
"Would you prefer 'artisanal restoration'? 'Boutique rehabilitation'?"
"I prefer 'us,'" he said simply, and kissed me properly, the music box playing its broken song while Bear snored and the city hummed outside our windows.
When we finally made it to bed—much later, after the music box had wound down and Bear had demanded his bedtime walk—Dmitry pulled me against him in the dark.
"Your cookies are getting better," he lied beautifully.
"They're weapons-grade and you know it."
"I'll eat every batch until you get them right," he promised, and I knew he would. He'd eat charcoal and pretend it was delicious because I'd made it, because that's what love looked like in our strange little family.
"Next week I'm trying her cake recipe," I warned.
"I'll alert the fire department," he said, and caught my hand when I tried to pinch him, bringing it to his lips instead. "And I'll eat every burned piece, little one. Every single one."
The music box sat on our dresser now, the two damaged dancers frozen mid-waltz, waiting for tomorrow's wind to make them dance again. They'd never be perfect. The song would always skip, the male dancer would always move slightly wrong, the female's face would always be cracked.
But they danced anyway, these broken things we'd made whole enough. Just like us.
The playroom door looked like all the others from the outside, but inside was my world made real—everything soft and safe and small enough to hold.
Pink walls because I'd always wanted pink walls, even when I was too old to admit it.
Even when I was sleeping in storage units and pretending I didn't dream about princess bedrooms and mothers who stayed.
Tonight I was deep in that floaty space where nothing hurt and everything felt possible.
Dmitry's t-shirt hung to my knees, soft from a hundred washes, smelling like his detergent and that cologne that meant safety.
The fuzzy socks with bears on them were new—he'd brought them home yesterday without explanation, just left them on the bed like they'd always belonged there.
Mr. Snuggles watched from his place of honor on the top shelf while I worked on my mandala.
The coloring book was spread on the low table, the one Dmitry had built at the perfect height for sitting on the floor.
My tongue poked out—I couldn't help it when I concentrated—as I filled in each tiny section with sunset colors.
Orange bleeding into pink bleeding into purple, like the sky that time we watched dawn break from the roof.
The pencils were the good ones, with soft cores that blended perfectly.
I had seventy-two colors to choose from, all sharpened to perfect points because Dmitry did that for me every week without being asked.
He sat across from me with his laptop, working on something for the shelter—security schedules or budget spreadsheets or one of the thousand details that went into keeping thirty kids safe.
But he wasn't really working. I could tell by the way his fingers had stopped moving over the keys, the way his head tilted slightly in my direction. He was watching me color, and the knowledge made me warm all over, safe and seen and precious.
"Almost done," I said without looking up, because talking helped keep me in this space where I didn't have to be twenty-two and traumatized and responsible for anything except staying in the lines.
"Take your time, little one," he said, and his voice had that special softness he only used in here. Daddy voice, though I wasn't ready to say the word yet tonight. Sometimes it came easy, sometimes it hid behind my teeth like admitting what we were would break the spell.
I switched to purple for the outer edges, the deepest purple in the box, almost black but catching the light with hints of blue.
Each stroke had to be perfect, even pressure, following the curves of the design.
The repetition made everything else fade—the shelter's endless needs, the Morozovs still circling like sharks even after the warehouse, the way my wrists still ached sometimes where the zip-ties had cut too deep.
None of that existed in here. In here, I was just a girl coloring while her person kept watch, and that was enough. That was everything.
"Finished," I announced, sitting back on my heels to examine my work. Every section filled, colors flowing into each other like water, not a single mistake or slip outside the lines.
I held it up for his inspection, that flutter of need in my chest that never quite went away—the desperate hope for approval that all the foster homes had trained into me, weaponized, turned into something that could cut if handled wrong.
But Dmitry never handled it wrong. He set his laptop aside immediately, taking the page with careful hands like it was something precious.
"Look at this," he said, and the pride in his voice was real, not the fake encouragement of social workers or the patronizing praise of foster parents who just wanted me to be quiet. "You stayed in all the lines, and these color choices—baby girl, this is beautiful."
"Really?" The word came out small, young, needing the confirmation even though I knew he wouldn't lie to me. Not in here. Not about this.
"Really. We should frame this one."
"That's silly," I said, but I was already imagining it on the wall next to my other pictures, proof that I could make beautiful things even with hands that had only ever stolen and survived.
An hour passed, maybe two. Time worked different in little space, stretching and compressing based on nothing but feeling.
I colored three more pages—a butterfly, a garden scene, a geometric pattern that made my eyes cross if I looked at it too long.
Dmitry had given up pretending to work, just watched me with that expression that made me feel like I was his favorite show, his best entertainment, his whole world narrowed down to this pink room and the girl coloring on his floor.
When the yawns started, I didn't fight them.
That was the rule in here—listen to your body, no pushing through tiredness or hunger or the need to be held.
I crawled around the table and into his lap without asking, knowing his arms would open for me, knowing I'd fit against his chest like I'd been carved from his ribs.
"Sleepy girl," he murmured, adjusting so I could curl fully into him, my head on his shoulder, thumb drifting toward my mouth because in here I didn't have to be embarrassed about needing that comfort.
He didn't stop me, just shifted so his hand could rest on my collar, that weight that meant I belonged somewhere, to someone, that I'd never be thrown away again.
His other hand stroked my hair in the rhythm he'd learned made me boneless, fingertips against my scalp, gentle tugs that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with care.
"Story?" I asked around my thumb, the word muffled but clear enough.
"What kind of story does my little one want tonight?"
"The brave girl," I said, because it was my favorite, the one he'd made up in the early days when I couldn't sleep, couldn't trust, couldn't believe this was real.
"Once upon a time," he began, his voice dropping into that storytelling rhythm, "there was a very brave girl who everyone thought was weak. She lived in a cruel kingdom where children were forgotten and hurt, where nobody saw her strength because it didn't look like the strength in storybooks."
I knew every word but needed to hear them anyway, needed the reminder that brave didn't always mean unafraid, that strength could look like surviving another day, that even princesses sometimes had to steal to eat.
"She was so brave that she survived winters without warmth, nights without safety, hunger without food. She taught herself to be invisible when visibility meant danger, to be silent when words would bring pain, to trust nobody because trust had only ever brought hurt."
His hand never stopped stroking my hair, and I pressed closer, my thumb in my mouth, surrounded by his warmth and scent and the steady beat of his heart.
"One day, the brave girl got caught by a beast. Everyone knew beasts ate brave girls, that they were monsters who belonged in the dark.
But this beast saw something in the brave girl that even she couldn't see.
He saw that her bravery had made her magic, that her survival had made her precious, that her strength disguised as weakness was the most powerful thing he'd ever encountered. "
"And then?" I prompted, though I knew.
"And then the beast did something nobody expected.
Instead of eating the brave girl, he gave her shelter.
Instead of hurting her, he protected her.
And slowly, day by day, the brave girl taught the beast how to be gentle, while the beast taught the brave girl that she'd been a princess all along, just wearing rags because the kingdom hadn't recognized royalty when it saw it. "
"Did they live happily ever after?" I asked, the words slurred around my thumb, sleep pulling at me like tide.
"They're living it right now," he said, kissing my forehead. "Every day, every night, every moment in between. The brave girl and her beast, building their own kingdom where broken things become beautiful and stolen hearts become given ones."
I might have said something else, might have whispered "Daddy" or "love you" or just made one of those content sounds that meant everything was right in my small, soft world. But sleep was already taking me, there in his arms, in our pink room, in this life we'd built from broken pieces.
Tomorrow I'd wake up and be twenty-two again, responsible for thirty kids who needed what I'd found, fighting systems and prejudices and the weight of trauma that never fully went away.
But tonight I was just his little one, safe and small and precious, coloring inside the lines while my beast stood guard against anything that might hurt me.
Tonight, the fairy tale was real.