Chapter 5
SOFIA
The Tower isn't a dormitory.
I understand this the moment the guide — a silent, broad-shouldered upperclassman who moves like security and absolutely is — stops at the heavy oak door on the top floor and presses his thumb to the biometric panel.
There's no number on the door. No nameplate.
Just the panel, matte black against the ancient wood, and when the door swings open I understand immediately that this isn't a student's room.
This is a residence.
I step inside.
The door clicks shut behind me. The lock engages with a sound like a full stop at the end of a sentence that just told me something I already suspected.
The suite is enormous. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the campus — the spires, the stone gargoyles, the November forest pressing against the perimeter walls in the specific dark of a New Hampshire evening where the cloud cover sits low and the trees have already shed.
The furniture is leather and chrome, sharp angles, no softness anywhere.
No photographs. No personal objects. No evidence that anyone lives here in the human sense, the sense that involves accumulation and attachment and the specific debris of an ordinary life.
It smells like him.
I know this before I know how I know it — cedar and iron and something colder underneath, winter air and expensive scotch.
I've never been in a room with him before.
I shouldn't know his smell. I know it anyway, in the specific irrational way the body absorbs information the mind hasn't caught up with.
"You're late."
The voice comes from the far side of the room, near the fireplace.
He's sitting in a high-backed leather chair in the shadows — not lit by the fire, because there is no fire, which feels like a deliberate choice. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the gun in his hands.
He's disassembling it.
I watch for a moment. The movements are automatic, practiced — the specific fluency of someone who has performed this action so many times it has bypassed thought entirely and become part of the body's vocabulary.
He sets the barrel down on the side table with a soft metallic clink.
He's wearing the uniform but it doesn't look like a uniform on him.
It looks like tactical gear on someone who has decided to tolerate it.
He's younger than I expected.
This is the first surprise. I expected someone older — not ancient, but settled, because the Commission whispers around the Romanov name carry a weight that I'd unconsciously translated into years.
He doesn't have years. He's twenty-four, twenty-five at most, barely older than I am — the file said twenty-four and the file was right, but numbers on paper don't prepare you for the version that's standing in the room — which is the detail that reorients everything, because whatever is in this room, it isn't accumulated age.
The face is angular, aristocratic in a cold way, the jaw hard and precise.
The hair is dark. The eyes, when he finally looks up, are gray.
Not soft gray. Not the gray of fog or slate. The gray of tempered steel — flat, functional, evaluated once for hardness and found adequate.
Those eyes move over me.
I know what an assessment feels like. I've watched my brothers do it my entire life, in negotiations, at functions, in the family rooms where the business happened around me while I was supposed to be invisible.
This is an assessment. I am being catalogued.
I can feel the data points being registered: height, face, posture, what the posture communicates about my current internal state.
I meet his eyes and don't look away.
"Come here."
It isn't shouted. It barely qualifies as spoken — it's a phrase delivered at low volume with the absolute certainty that volume is unnecessary. The kind of voice that has learned it doesn't need to work hard to produce results, because the results arrive when required.
I don't move.
"I'm not a dog, Romanov," I say. "Don't speak to me like one."
He doesn't blink. He doesn't show irritation. He doesn't show anything. He simply stands.
He is tall. I knew he'd be tall from the photographs but knowing and experiencing are different systems: he fills the space between the chair and where I'm standing with a slow, entirely controlled approach, not fast, not threatening in the explicit sense, just certain.
The way a tide is certain. It doesn't need to rush.
He stops inches from me.
The heat off him is immediate and startling — the room is cold, the fire is unlit, and he radiates warmth at close range with the specific quality of someone whose body temperature runs slightly high, slightly furnace, slightly more alive than the room they're in.
I have to tilt my head back to hold his gaze. I do it.
"You're not a dog," he agrees. His voice is deep, a resonance that I feel in my sternum. "Dogs have loyalty. You have a price tag."
"Everyone has a price."
"No." His hand comes up and grazes the barcode on my lapel — doesn't touch my skin, just the fabric, just the tag, but the proximity is so precise it's effectively a touch. "People have prices. Objects have costs."
His hand moves to my throat.
I breathe.
He doesn't grip. He doesn't press. He simply rests his hand there, in the specific way of someone who has decided to take an inventory rather than demonstrate force — his thumb against my pulse, which is going at a pace I would very much like it not to be going.
He can feel it. He knows he can feel it. His expression doesn't change.
"Your brother is a businessman," he says. "He sold a depreciating asset to cover a bad investment." His thumb presses fractionally — not a threat, a measurement. "You are the receipt, Sofia. And receipts don't speak."
"I am not a—"
"Shh."
The sound is soft. Almost gentle. It operates on me the same way the come here did — not because I want to comply, but because the voice saying it has the quality of something that expects to be heard.
"You are here to be seen," he says. His eyes move over my face with the unhurried precision of someone who is used to having time for thorough observation.
"To be worn. To be kept. You will attend classes because I require an educated partner, not a bore.
You will attend events because I require a presence.
" He pauses on presence, as if weighing the word. "And when we are here—"
He leans down.
His mouth is at my ear, and his height means he has to bend slightly to reach it, and the closeness, the deliberateness of it, the warmth — sends a full-body reaction through me that I have no way to stop and absolutely refuse to show.
"When we are here, you will be silent. You will exist only when I acknowledge you."
He holds there for a moment that is longer than necessary to deliver those words.
Then he pulls back.
His face is a mask of bored indifference. He walks away from me the way he walked toward me — without urgency, without looking back — and sits back down in the chair and picks up the gun.
I stand there.
I stand there — furious, frightened, and something else underneath both that I am not going to examine right now or possibly ever — and turn for the door. One breath of air that doesn't smell like cedar and iron and this situation.
I grab the handle.
It doesn't turn.
I pull harder. I try the handle the other way, I try it harder, I try it the way you try things when the answer is no and you already know it but your hands need to be told. The door doesn't move.
"Aleksei." His name in my mouth tastes like something I've been handed without asking for. "Unlock the door."
He reassembles the gun with a series of soft mechanical sounds. He doesn't look up.
"Aleksei—"
"It's biometric," he says to the room, not to me. Conversational. Informational. "My prints only."
I stare at the matte black panel.
My prints only.
Not: there's a code. Not: here's the emergency exit.
Not: the door opens from the outside at certain hours.
My prints only. Which means: you are in this room because I have placed you in this room, and you will leave this room when I decide you will leave, and the door being locked is not a circumstance but a structure.
I look at the biometric panel.
I look at him.
He's watching me now. The gun rests on his knee and his steel-gray eyes are on me and there's no triumph in them — no satisfaction, no cruelty. Just the weight of absolute ownership, which is worse than cruelty because cruelty has an affect you can hold onto. This is simply the way things are.
"Welcome home, Orphan," he says.
The word lands precisely where he intended it.
I don't let it show.
"What are the terms for contact with my family?" Not permission. Information. There's a difference.
He looks at me.
"Application through the portal. House Heir approval required."
A portal. A system. Systems are legible — you can learn them, find where they bend.
"Thank you," I say. Not gratitude.
He goes back to the gun.
From the locked door, I look at him. The principle I've been building since September: make him work for it. Make whatever you are inside this arrangement something he has to reckon with rather than manage. Don't make it easy to forget you're a person.
I am in a locked room in a locked tower on a campus I arrived at today. I have no phone. I have no money. I have a uniform with my status printed on the tag and the words of an oath I said this morning in a voice that barely shook still sitting in my chest where I put them.
I have this: the knowledge that I am still me. Still thinking. Still watching. Still building the file on him the way he presumably built one on me.
My chin doesn't drop.
"When's dinner?" I say.
Something moves across his face. So fast it might have been invented. But I don't think it was.
"Seven," he says.
"Don't be late," I say.