11. Yarik
CHAPTER ELEVEN
YARIK
I became something of a masochist over the next year.
It wasn’t like I set out to find ways to make myself feel as if I was dying inside, but as it turned out, I was pretty good at holding the knife and drawing blood.
Take the second, third, and fourth times that I tried to kiss someone. There were a few girls in my year who liked my posh English accent—their words, not mine—I sounded nothing like the rich toffs who did business with my father—and the fact that I stood taller than all the other boys probably scored me a few points, too. The thing was, I was a bit of an anomaly. No one actually wanted to get to know me, but girls still passed me notes in class, writing things like:
Go to a party with me on Friday?
I like your eyes. Is that a weird thing to say? It’s just that they’re such a pretty blue .
Sit next to me tomorrow?
Sometimes, I dragged myself out to whatever party was happening because it beat staying home alone in my moldy room; I didn’t understand the obsession with blue eyes when I couldn’t ever seem to stop thinking about a pair of black ones that glittered with distrust—and I never, ever took up the offer to move seats.
I kept to myself for the most part.
At first, it was because I didn’t see the point in making friends when I’d eventually be sent back to England, but then one month turned into two, and three turned into four, and soon, it became glaringly obvious that Father had no intention in calling me back home. By that point, I’d garnered the reputation of being a loner.
No one wanted to be friends with a loner.
Or maybe it was that no one wanted to be friends with a loner like me.
Thanks to my father, everyone knew the Volkov name, and everyone feared it. I was a pariah, in part because I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between me and my classmates, and also because I couldn’t actually erase the blood that ran through my veins, despite how good I was at suffocating myself in the hurt.
“Excuse me,” one of the boys in my year said as he shoved past me. He didn’t lift his gaze to meet mine—not that I thought he would. The girls still flirted with me, but the boys kept their distance. They always had.
It bothered me.
Made me want to act out, to bare my teeth, or do something drastic like push them up against a wall. Except that my back was already up against a wall, literally, and by the time I got my mouth open to tell him to piss off, Isaak had already disappeared into the crowd.
Frustration welled up inside me.
Before I could stop myself, I was following him.
Just because I was a loner didn’t mean that I was invisible. I couldn’t even breathe at school without attracting unwanted attention. Even here, on nights like this, when adults were scarce and mayhem lingered on the horizon, I still couldn’t hide in the shadows. Maybe it was because of my size or maybe it was on account of my face—I was rubbish at managing my expressions—but everyone slunk aside to let me pass through. Their wariness only made me grit my teeth even harder.
I shouldn’t have bothered coming out tonight, simple as that. Courtesy of today’s go-round with my sperm donor, there was a perpetual black cloud hanging over my head. I felt trapped. Scraped raw emotionally while still flying high on the wings of fury, the way I always did after a call with daddy dearest.
I hadn’t been home in almost three years. He’d told me that I wouldn’t be welcome back for another three if I didn’t get my head out of my arse. Which was all kinds of ironic, if you asked me, because there wasn’t anything my father hated more than spineless twats, and yet he expected me to roll over like an obedient dog.
You’ll live here until I tell you otherwise ? —
You’ll do what I say when I say it ? —
You’ll marry ? —
I caught a glimpse of Isaak’s brown hair.
Maybe it was the thrill of the chase or maybe it was the chance to finally tell him to take his attitude and shove it up his arse, but either way, my palms were sweating as I followed him into the garden behind the house. It was one of the nicest properties I’d ever seen. Dark-stained wood finishes that matched the surrounding tree line. Besides the jacuzzi that sat under an ornate pergola, it was impossible to miss the three massive fireplaces with their black marble mantles that ran up alongside the house. Teenagers had overtaken the seating area, jostling each other as they laughed. Isaak briefly joined them before slipping off into the night, his silhouette immediately lost amongst the trees.
I stood there a second, my breath lodged like a second pulse in my throat.
Then I fumbled for my phone, hating myself even as I thumbed past my thread with Kirill to the one directly below it. It felt like I’d been yanked right out of my body as I stared down at the picture Vera had sent me an hour ago.
I wanted to throw the device across the garden.
Smash it against one of those black marble mantles.
Watch it burn in the fire and feel nothing when it went up in flames.
Vera
I guess he cleans up okay.
She didn’t need to include any other context because I knew it all from today’s call with Father. I knew that he was hosting a party at our country estate. I knew that he’d invited everyone short of the royal family—and he would’ve invited them, too, but he’d recently gotten into it with one of the princes. And I knew that he’d told Kirill to bring a date.
Objectively, she was beautiful.
Objectively, her black hair was long and shiny, pinned up with blue ribbons that matched her dress, and the way she stared up at Kirill with stars in her eyes belonged on a film poster at the cinema.
Objectively, I hated her.
I didn’t look at Kirill before shoving my phone back into the pocket of my jeans. I didn’t memorize every change the last two and a half years had left on his familiar face. And I definitely didn’t touch the tip of my finger to the corner of his unsmiling mouth and wonder if he already knew how she tasted.
Objectively speaking, I was a fucking liar.
Beneath my feet, the world felt lopsided. The trees grew crooked, and the moon rose from the earth. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I couldn’t make the hurt stop . I stumbled away from the house toward the jagged tree line. The cold air stung my exposed skin, so I hugged my arms to my chest while the soles of my trainers crunched on dead leaves.
I wasn’t looking for Isaak, but I wasn’t not looking for him either.
I was almost fifteen years old, and I’d never been kissed. The girls who flirted with me made a pit open in my stomach. I let them touch me—a hand on my chest, a shoulder pressed against mine—because it seemed like something I should do, and I’d been raised to obey or face the consequences. The boys, like Isaak, wanted nothing to do with me, for reasons I didn’t understand. I dressed like them. I spoke Russian like them. I loved playing football, same as they did, and I could out-bench all of them if I wanted. But none of them offered friendship, and they continued to avoid me like I had poison running through my veins.
The quiet hum of voices up ahead slowed my footsteps.
I’d spent enough time hunting both two and four-legged prey to know how to quiet my approach so I didn’t make a sound. I slipped through the shadows as I’d done a million times before, moving from the trunk of one tree to the next until I had a clear view.
A girl had joined Isaak.
Her hair was blond like mine, but long, reaching all the way down to the small of her back. Isaak had the strands wrapped around his fist, but there wasn’t any violence in the gesture. He was . . . flirting. His green eyes shone like brilliant emeralds under a patch of moonlight, and his teeth were a flash of white as he threw back his head with a low, happy laugh.
The girl rose onto her toes as she pressed her hands to the center of his chest. She laughed, too, this tinkling, delicate sound that didn’t grate on my nerves so much as it made my heart race even faster. Not because I was entranced. Not even because I wanted her. But because I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to take her place.
To feel the tree bark scrape my skin.
To have a boy I liked play with my hair.
To know in my heart that someone wanted me as much as I wanted them.
I didn’t know what that was like, and I craved it. Was desperate for it.
A ragged sigh left my lips. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but winter crept closer every day, and the woods weren’t alive with the sounds of summertime. There was me, and there was Isaak and the girl, and I didn’t even have the chance to hide before Isaak’s gaze found me within the shadows and went hard.
Run, run, run .
I was frozen in place, terrified to make a sound.
Realizing that something was wrong, the girl turned her head to follow the direction of Isaak’s stare. The moment she spotted me, her eyes went round, bulging in surprise, and Isaak let go of her hair to angle her face into his chest, as if I was . . . as if I was something wrong .
A creep.
Some monster hiding in the woods.
I opened my mouth and stumbled backward at the same time, wanting to defend myself while also desperate to run far, far away. Escape won out, in the end. Self-preservation always did.
With a broken gasp, I spun around and sprinted as fast as my legs could carry me. The cold settled like icy fingers around my lungs, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, until the edges of my vision blurred and misery howled in my ears.
When I reached the bus stop, I drew too much attention getting on, so I quickly found an empty seat and turned toward the smudged window, trying my best to ignore the mottled reflection staring back. I didn’t recognize myself. Not the windswept blond hair or the flushed cheeks, and definitely not the haunted gaze.
There were tear tracks on my cheeks.
I didn’t recognize those either.
My room was empty, the same way it’d been since the day Kirill went back to London.
I stripped off my jeans and crawled into bed without brushing my teeth. I didn’t have the energy tonight. If I was being really honest with myself, it was worse than that; I didn’t want to run the risk of looking at myself in the mirror, of meeting the gaze of the broken boy who dwelled in the lost crevices of my soul, who begged for scraps after years spent locked away in the darkness.
I’d tried destroying him.
Drew blood and let him weep onto the floor, hoping with every cut that he would disappear for good. But he lived within me always, a needy, hopeful thing that threatened every corner of my life with his inability to just stay gone .
Chills wracked my frame as I drew the thin blanket over my head. Facts were facts. I was stuck in Moscow. Maybe forever but at least for now. Unless you stop fighting and do what he wants.
I wouldn’t.
I fucking refused .
Curling into a tight ball, I kept my back to the empty room and prayed for sleep. It came in wretched spurts, my dreams plagued by nightmares that kept me from falling deeper, until finally, I gave up, throwing the covers aside and tugging my jeans back on. It was cold when I stepped outside but no colder than my heart as I made my way to the spot I loved beneath the stars.
I lay down in the dead grass.
Tipped my head back on the pillow of my bent arm.
It was only then, when I was shivering but bathed in pale moonlight, that I reached for my phone. Out here, I could pretend that I wasn’t so very alone. Out here, I could stare up at the night sky and convince myself, if only for a little while, that I wasn’t drowning. I pulled up Kirill’s last text and read it out loud to the stars:
“Happy birthday, Yarik.”