Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
T he stranger’s name was Petr Volkov.
I learned it the same day as that first meeting, not long after he spotted me limping along the side of the road and pulled his posh car over. I thought maybe he’d come to finish me off. Wouldn’t have been hard, really, what with how bad I felt, but he’d only put down the passenger window and said, “Get in.”
That was it. Get in.
Worst part was, I’d done it.
All it took was one long look at the unfamiliar road stretched out before me and I’d climbed into the passenger seat without a backward glance. Maybe because I had nowhere else to go. Because my head throbbed and every part of my body ached, and I wore a hospital gown like a shawl to keep the chill out of my bones. Either way, as I’d stood there while a gust of wind whipped off the scraggly tree limbs overhead, I’d decided that it was better to stick with the devil I knew than the one I didn’t.
Or maybe that was a whole crock of shit.
Pretty sure Petr Volkov knew it, too .
I spent that day, and every one that followed, being interrogated:
“What do you remember from before the river?” Nothing .
“Nothing? How do you remember nothing ?” How do you know the sky is blue? I don’t remember anything. If I did, I’d tell you .
“I don’t think you would.” A small shrug. That’s your problem then, not mine.
“It’s your problem, too, boy, if I think you know more than you’re letting on.” The only thing I know is that I haven’t seen Yarik. Where is he?
As the weeks wore on, invoking Yarik’s name became my get-out-of-jail-free card. Mention Volkov’s son and it was game over immediately. One minute, I’d be stuck at a table while Petr cleaned a gun, a blade, some random kitchen knife that he plucked from a drawer, and in the next, I was set loose on the estate, allowed to wander wherever I wanted even though I knew that there were eyes on me at all times.
It was a fabricated sort of freedom.
I’d given up any chance at the real kind the moment that I panicked on the side of an empty road and chose to stay with the devil instead.
Early on, I met Igor Volkov and his daughter, Vera. Yarik’s little sister Nina became my personal shadow, following me everywhere, peppering me with questions that I didn’t know the answer to, speaking in Russian whenever my silence annoyed her—which was often. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the Volkovs weren’t exactly living on the straight and narrow. There were bodyguards assigned to every member of the family, not to mention the fact that Petr kept odd hours, often rushing off in the dead of night or holding meetings in his study just as late.
They put me up in a room that overlooked the front drive. Besides having a place to hide from Nina, it meant that I could watch the comings and goings of the house.
It meant that I could watch for Yarik .
His disappearance didn’t make any sense. Petr Volkov was a mean bastard all right, but I didn’t think he’d off his own son. Maim or injure, maybe, but kill? Too messy. Volkov struck me as the sort of person who liked things neat and orderly even when he was the one orchestrating chaos.
Whenever I wasn’t required to sit for another one of his inquisitions, I roamed the mansion’s endless hallways in search of his son, peeking behind closed doors and never getting much of anywhere.
And then one day, I opened a door and found him unpacking a suitcase.
I must have made a noise of surprise because his head jerked up and his eyes went comically wide. A second later, his freckled cheeks flushed a brilliant red, and he practically slammed the luggage shut before darting in front of the bed to block the contents with his body.
Unsure of my welcome, I lingered on the threshold. “What are you hiding?”
It wasn’t hello.
It wasn’t even, You’re probably wondering why I’m still in your house .
It was rude and audacious, and I felt my own cheeks burn.
I opened my mouth to apologize, but Yarik had already squared off his hips for a fight. “What makes you think I’m hiding anything? ”
“You couldn’t close the suitcase fast enough.”
“Maybe it’s a secret.”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t get to keep secrets in a house like this.” A week ago, I’d found what looked like an armory behind one of the mansion’s many closed doors. I had a feeling the only one who successfully kept secrets around here was Petr Volkov and maybe his brother, Igor. Not for the first time, it made me wonder if I was about to become another Volkov secret.
I still didn’t understand why Petr had changed his mind about me.
Then again, maybe he hadn’t. Maybe I was going to go to bed one night and just never wake up, and then I’d never have the chance to tell the man to go fuck himself.
Feeling a little bold, I stepped into the bedroom, watching avidly as Yarik slung himself up onto the tall, four-poster bed so he could sit cross-legged on top of the suitcase like a bird sat on its nest or a dragon guarding a horde of treasure. He dropped his hands onto his thighs and studied me with that defiant blue gaze.
“I have loads of secrets,” he announced.
“Like what?”
He didn’t answer right away, but strangely, a reply felt unnecessary. The way he’d disappeared after that first day, how he spoke openly with me now as if he was totally unsurprised to find me in his room, told me that he’d known all along that I was living on the property.
Suddenly, I didn’t feel all that brave.
I felt thrown off-balance, like the night I’d almost drowned. Ears ringing, throat tight, aches and bruises throbbing like invisible wounds beneath my skin.
“Your father picked me up on the side of the road when I tried to leave,” I heard myself say .
“I know.”
“He interrogates me every day. From the moment I wake up until whenever I annoy him enough that he lets me go. And then he does it again twenty-four hours later.”
Yarik’s gaze didn’t waver. “I know.”
“He thinks I’m a . . . a spy or something, doesn’t he?”
No answer.
“Cadwell. Kurobara. Who are they?”
Still nothing.
I nearly exploded with frustration. “How does your father know them? Why does he think they know me ? Please,” I said in a rush, “you have to tell me something .”
Biting his bottom lip, Yarik darted his gaze away. Just when I thought he’d avoid yet another one of my questions, he spoke in a too-careful voice that had me straightening my shoulders because this—whatever this was—had to be important.
“Their names are Ian Cadwell and Kage Kurobara. My father . . .”
“Your father, what ?” I pressed.
“He hurt them.” As if seeing a memory play out in his mind’s eye, Yarik blinked slowly. Between his thighs, he linked his hands together. “He hurt them very bad. They were his best friends, and now they’re . . .”
“Dead?” My throat felt too tight.
“No,” he said with a sharp shake of his head, “not dead. But he worries, I think, that they want to hurt him as badly as he hurt them.”
“So, he thinks they sent me? Is that it?”
“I think he hopes that they did so he has a reason to hurt them even more.”
I turned that over in my head, trying to parse out his meaning and read between the lines. It made sense. No matter what I told Petr Volkov, he seemed determined to prove that I had ulterior motives. Maybe they’d all worked together? Clearly, Volkov had betrayed them somehow. But if all that were true, then what could I say to prove my own innocence? I hadn’t recognized their photos when Volkov had shown them to me, and I didn’t think regaining my memories would change that.
“I ask about you, too,” I said, changing the topic. “Have asked about you, I mean. No one’s said where you were, but I knew that you couldn’t be here, not when I’ve torn this place apart. There aren’t any locks on the doors.”
“There are locks. Just not on any of the doors you’d come across.”
I digested that bit of information, and then said, “What did you do?”
Blond lashes swept down, cutting off access to all that glittering defiance. Against all common sense, I took another step closer to the boy perched atop the suitcase, cataloging every one of his reactions and memorizing them, the way I had already memorized how Volkov flexed just his right hand whenever he was about to lose his cool.
“You did something.” Another step closer. “You’re the reason I’m still here.”
“Has he let you see a doctor again? Your memory should have come back, don’t you think?”
“Yarik—”
He blinked up at me, a startled, wide-eyed look that stopped me in my tracks. “Yaroslav.”
“What?”
“My name. It’s Yaroslav.”
“But I thought . . .”
“Yarik is only for—” Lips clamping tight like he’d thought better of it, he bent his knees into his chest, his lanky body suddenly appearing small and unassuming. “It’s a nickname. Sort of. Like an endearment.”
“In Russian?”
He nodded. “An endearment for Yaroslav, if that makes any sense. For family or close friends. It means something in Russian.”
But we weren’t in Russia, I knew that much. So, I said, “It means something to you .”
This time, his cheeks didn’t betray a blush, but I could tell the conversation had made him uncomfortable. Somehow, he seemed to curl into himself even tighter. “It does.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.” I tried to smile for him. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But—”
“Yaroslav, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Maybe one day,” he said in that soft, careful voice, “but not yet.”
The irony was that he’d cut me off from using a special name that held meaning while I didn’t have even a single one to offer him.
Over the last few weeks, I’d tried my best to pick apart my memories; the problem was, I hadn’t lied when I said there weren’t any from before Yarik— Yaroslav —found me by the river. My reflection said that I wasn’t a teenager yet, like Vera, but that I wasn’t as young as Yaroslav, either, who Nina had informed me was ten years old. Once I’d showered off the Thames, I’d searched my reflection in the mirror, hoping that there’d be something I could latch onto—and there had been in the shape of a thin, vertical scar on my lower abdomen. But whether it was from a past surgery or falling off a bicycle or something else entirely, I didn’t remember.
I couldn’t remember anything .
Though the past haunted me, I didn’t feel comfortable bringing any of my concerns to Petr Volkov, not when I thought they might give him more ammunition against me. It was one thing to say that I’d lost my memories—or had them taken from me, more like—and another thing entirely to open up about how confused and frustrated I felt. So, I just bit my tongue, endured our talks , and roamed the mansion, looking for the boy who’d saved me.
The boy who kept secrets.
I eyed the suitcase beneath him, still curious. “Can you tell me where you went, at least?”
“Away.”
I frowned. “Away? That doesn’t explain?—”
“Father’s going to sit you down tonight. My sister and I won’t be there, but I’m not sure about Uncle Igor. Maybe. Depending on Father’s mood.”
He said it all so fast, as if he had to get the words out before someone strolled in here and tore him away, that I could only keep my mouth shut, determined to give him the floor to say whatever else was clearly on his mind.
Yaroslav hugged his knees. His gaze never left my face. “He’s going to say that you have a choice—you don’t. He’s going to say that if you agree, he’ll do whatever he can to help you find your family—he won’t. If you stay, you’ll be just another soldier to him. Nameless?—”
“I don’t have a name.”
“Everyone has a name,” he said with conviction, “you just don’t remember yours.”
The notion that I might not have always been so alone, without a home or a family, threatened to sweep my feet right out from under me, and I glanced around, heart pounding fast, in search of somewhere to sit. In the end, I went down to the floor. It was only when I lifted my chin and allowed myself to stare into a pair of dark blue eyes that my shallow breathing came even close to evening out.
“Your father . . .” I dug my fingers into the soft rug. “He does bad things, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s what he wants? From me, I mean. If I become his?—”
“Soldier. A Boyevik.”
“—I’ll do bad things, too?” On the back of that question, another hit me hard, and I heard myself swallow. “Do you do bad things?”
He didn’t even flinch. “I do what I’m told.”
Because even if he was only ten years old, he was still a prince.
Because if Petr Volkov was the one who owned this land, and these trees, and the fucking air we all breathed, then that meant, one day, his son would be the one to inherit it all.
I thought of the weapons I’d found.
I thought of the way Volkov cleaned his gun and his blade and that random kitchen knife, all to intimidate me into spilling secrets that I didn’t know because I couldn’t remember my own stupid name. He wanted to keep me around. Wanted to find, I was sure, a way that I could prove useful to him and whatever bad things he did that could afford him an estate like this one. And if I could help him hurt Cadwell and Kurobara even more, then that was probably just a sweet bonus.
“Why did he come after me? What did you say to him?”
It was Yaroslav’s turn to swallow. I heard his throat click and then watched how he adjusted his hold on his knees like it was suddenly too hard to keep still. Finally, he blurted, “He wouldn’t have let you live.”
My heart squeezed in my chest. “Yaroslav…”
“He would have given you a headstart, just enough to let you think that you’d gotten away, but he would have sent someone to follow. Maybe he’d give you a month or a year, if you were lucky. Enough time for you to find some other place to call home. And then he’d have shot you dead.”
Anxiously, I licked my lips. “I don’t know anything.”
“He wouldn’t care.”
“I don’t even remember my name!” I sounded hysterical, my voice cracking embarrassingly. With trembling fingers, I clutched at my hair, pulling on the strands. “I’m not a threat. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t even know who I am!”
Those blue eyes turned distraught. “M-maybe I should have let you die.”
For the first time, I almost wished he had.
Emotion flooded my veins, and I leaped up, fleeing to the open door like it’d be just as easy to outrun my fate. A fate that no longer belonged to me. Although maybe it never had. Maybe I’d never had a home or a real family, and maybe I was always destined to live a life that belonged to someone else—to never have a name or a past, or anything to call just mine.
It didn’t register that I was crying until I heard Yaroslav call after me.
I was already halfway down the hallway when I turned to find him hovering on the threshold of his room, one hand curled into a fist against the doorframe, the expression on his face one that I swore would haunt me until the day I died.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I was going to run.
I’d plotted my escape early on, mapping out various exit points throughout the estate until I had each route memorized. And yet, despite every fiber of my being telling me to get away from this place—from Petr Volkov, specifically—I’d found myself sticking around day after day, for weeks , because it felt important that I see Yaroslav one more time before I left for good.
Well, he’d finally come home. And I had just enough common sense rattling around in my skull to realize that if I didn’t leave tonight, I might never get another chance to become something other than a killer for a man that I didn’t even like.
Turned out that Volkov had given me my own set of guards, just in case I got any wild ideas.
I got no farther than the stables before they caught me and dragged me back to the mansion. They threw me in a cold, dark room, one with a lock on the door. Then they left me alone. I stayed that ways for days—until the fight went out of me, until I lost my voice from screaming, until I folded myself in half, worn down by exhaustion and defeat, and pressed my lips to the strip of space at the base of the door, whispering to whoever was on the other side that I would do anything Petr Volkov asked of me.
When the door finally opened, I learned that I was sorry, too.