Chapter 15 #2
The carpet was soft under my feet—I'd worn socks, no shoes, somehow knowing instinctively that this space required that kind of respect.
Sophie showed me where things were with the proud efficiency of someone sharing their treasures.
Art supplies in one cabinet. Puzzles in another.
A basket of fidget toys that ranged from simple stress balls to complex mechanical things that clicked and spun.
"This was the first thing I bought," she said, picking up a stuffed elephant whose trunk had been worn soft from holding. "Right after Nikolai found out about my Little side. I was so scared he'd think I was broken, but he drove me to three different stores looking for the perfect stuffie."
The image of Nikolai—the Pakhan, the strategist, the man who could order deaths with a word—driving his wife around Brooklyn looking for stuffed animals made something ease in my chest.
"Kostya bought our kittens an entire PetSmart," I offered. "Like, literally everything. Beds, toys, treats. The employees were terrified."
Sophie laughed, bright and real. "They do that. These terrifying men who torture people for fun, and then they're like, 'My baby needs seventeen types of crayons, this is non-negotiable.'"
The casual way she said "torture people for fun" should have been jarring. But it wasn't. Because this was our reality—loving men who did monstrous things, finding softness in spaces between violence.
"How do you reconcile it?" I asked. "What they do versus who they are with us?"
Sophie considered this, still holding the elephant. "I don't," she said finally. "I just accept that both things are true. Nikolai has killed people. He's also the man who reads me bedtime stories when I can't sleep. Both things. Not one or the other."
Both things. I thought about Kostya's hands—how they'd been covered in someone else's blood when I met him, how gently they'd held me last night. Both things.
"Ready to color?" Sophie asked, and the subject change was gentle but clear. This wasn't the space for heavy philosophy. This was for something simpler.
I nodded, my throat tight with emotion I couldn't name. She smiled and tugged me toward the table with its scattered art supplies, and I let myself be led.
Let myself be small.
Let myself belong.
Sophie spread three coloring books across the small table like she was dealing tarot cards—each one a different window into possible peace.
Garden scenes, geometric patterns, fairy tales.
I reached for the geometric one without thinking, drawn to the clean lines and predictable patterns.
Structure. Control. Everything inside the lines.
"I used to do mandalas," I said, running my finger over a complex circular pattern. "During residency. Supposed to be meditative, but I turned it into a competition with myself. How perfectly could I shade? How precisely could I match colors?"
"Of course you did." Sophie's smile held no mockery, just recognition. She chose the fairy tale book, opening to a page with a castle surrounded by thorns. "I bet you alphabetized your crayons too."
I looked at the box of sixty-four Crayolas I'd been unconsciously arranging by color gradient. "Spectrum order is more logical than alphabetical."
She laughed, that bright sound that seemed to make the room warmer. We settled into our respective pages, and I tried not to think about how my hands had been covered in blood four days ago. Now they held "Cerulean Blue" like it was the most important thing in the world.
Silence wrapped around us, but not the uncomfortable kind that demanded filling.
This was the quiet of parallel play, of existing in the same space without needing to perform connection.
My breathing slowed to match the rhythm of coloring—in on the downstroke, out on the up.
The repetitive motion soothed something in my brain that had been screaming since the moment I'd fled the hospital six months ago.
Sophie worked on her castle in purples and pinks, ignoring conventional color schemes entirely. The thorns became rainbow gradients. The princess in the tower had blue hair. Rules existed to be broken, apparently, at least in her fairy tales.
“So,” she said, “how did you tell Kostya you were a Little?”
"He just knew," I said quietly. "Like he could see it in me before I even admitted it to myself. He gave me rules that first night. When to eat, when to sleep. I should have been terrified—this stranger controlling my life. But it felt like breathing after drowning."
Sophie reached across the table, touched my hand briefly. "Because it wasn't control. It was care."
"It was both," I corrected. "That's what makes it perfect."
We colored in comfortable silence for a few more minutes. I'd finished one section of my mandala, all cool blues and greens, ordered and calm. Sophie had turned her castle into a rainbow explosion that hurt to look at directly.
"He loves you," she said suddenly. "Kostya. I've never seen him like this."
I looked up, meeting her eyes for the first time in twenty minutes. "Like what?"
"Soft," she said simply. "He’s been smiling. Not the terrifying smile he does before breaking someone's kneecaps. A real smile. Nearly gave Nikolai a heart attack."
"He smiles with me," I said, defensive of my dangerous man.
"Exactly." Sophie leaned forward, abandoning her coloring.
"That's what I mean. You make him human in a way I don't think he's been in years.
Maybe ever. Nikolai says even before everything with their mother, Kostya was always the hardest one.
The enforcer. The monster, though he'd never say that to his face. "
"He's not a monster," I said automatically.
"No," Sophie agreed. "He's not. But he thought he was. Until you."
I thought about Kostya this morning, promising to come to a pastel nursery because I needed him. The Beast of the Bratva, playing with stuffed animals because his Little needed her Daddy present.
"I don't know how to be what he needs," I admitted. "I'm so broken, Sophie. Six months of running, of hiding, of being terrified every second. What if I'm too damaged? What if my trauma trauma-bonds him into something unhealthy?"
Sophie laughed, but not unkindly. "Maya, honey, we're all trauma-bonded.
Every relationship in this life is built on damage and the choice to love anyway.
You think I'm mentally healthy? I'm married to a man who orders murders over breakfast and I call him Daddy while coloring princess pictures.
We're all fucked up. The trick is finding someone whose damage fits yours. "
"Like puzzle pieces," I said, understanding flooding through me. "Broken edges that match."
"Exactly." She picked up her crayon again, adding purple streaks to the sky around her castle. "Besides, you stitched him up in a basement while he was bleeding out. Your entire relationship started with trauma. Might as well lean into it."
Despite everything, I laughed. It felt good, laughing about things that should be horrifying. Finding humor in the darkness we all lived in.
"He's coming at three-thirty," I said. "I wanted him here, but not the whole time. Needed to prove I could do this without him first."
"Good instinct," Sophie said. "It's important to have spaces that are yours, even when you're owned by someone.
" She said 'owned' so casually, like it was normal.
And here, in this sunshine-yellow room with our coloring books, it was.
"But having him here at the end? That's perfect.
You can show him what you made. Little you showing Daddy your art. "
My chest went warm at the image. "Is that silly?"
"Everything about this is silly," Sophie said, gesturing to our entire setup. "That's what makes it perfect. When everything else is life or death, sometimes you need silly. Sometimes you need to show your murder-daddy your coloring and have him tell you it's pretty."
Murder-daddy. I laughed again, harder this time, until tears gathered in my eyes. Sophie joined me, both of us giggling over our childhood coloring books, finding joy in the absurdity of our lives.
This was friendship, I realized. This was real, built on mutual understanding of needs others would find strange. Sophie and I were the same kind of broken, and that made us perfect for each other.
"Thank you," I said when the laughter faded. "For this. For sharing your space. For understanding."
"Thank you for coming," she replied. "I've been so lonely with this part of myself. Nikolai is wonderful, but he's my Daddy, not my friend. I needed this. Someone who gets why I need to color inside the lines sometimes."
"Or outside them," I said, looking at her rainbow castle.
"Or outside them," she agreed. "But by choice, not by accident."
Choice. Everything came back to that. The choice to be vulnerable. The choice to be Little. The choice to trust men who did terrible things but loved us with surprising tenderness.
At three-thirty exactly, the knock came—three measured raps that made my heart skip like a scratched record. I'd been watching the clock for the last fifteen minutes, purple crayon frozen in my hand, pretending to focus on my mandala while my body tracked each passing second.
"Come in," Sophie called, but I was already moving, already reaching for the door.
Kostya stood in the hallway looking like violence personified—black henley stretched across his chest, tactical pants, boots that had probably kicked in doors that morning. But his expression was soft. Careful. Like he was entering a church instead of a nursery.
He'd removed his shoulder holster. The gun was gone, but the shape of where it lived was still pressed into his shirt. His hands were empty, hanging loose at his sides, and I realized he was nervous. The Beast of Brighton Beach was nervous about entering a room full of stuffed animals.
"Hi, Daddy," I said, and watched his gray eyes go dark.