Chapter 10
Anastasia disappeared into her bedroom, slamming the door and running her hands through her hair. She took several deep breaths, trying to calm down and regain her composure.
Her thoughts ran wild as she tried to reconcile the man who had brought her breakfast with the man who still blamed her for Asya's murder.
I was a child. I didn't know.
Anastasia slid down the wall and buried her head in her hands, beginning to cry quietly as she cursed the tears that sprang to her eyes.
No, no, no. I can't let him hear me.
She was torn. She briefly believed he would be someone different, someone who might break her from this cage.
That was now a quickly discarded belief after the realization he was just like every other priest before him.
Maybe he used honey instead of vinegar, but he was still trying to manipulate her.
Except he wasn't even a priest, and he probably wanted her dead for what she’d done.
She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her head there, letting the tears fall. The crushing weight of her past, of a childhood devoid of love and full of judgment, went sweeping through her. Anastasia could feel herself coming apart at the seams.
She let out a stuttered breath and forced herself to put a lid back on her emotions, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand and standing up. She smoothed her skirts, looking at the clock and realizing that it was barely past daybreak.
There were a few hours to go until her lessons began. She prayed she wouldn't spend the whole time thinking about Mikhail's body pressed against hers and how his grip felt on her wrists. He had seemed even more massive as he held her against that wall.
Stop it! Christ, Anastasia. That man would love to see you hang. It would help if he weren’t so... domineering.
She let out a grunt of frustration and tossed herself on the bed, unable to decide if she was nervous or excited for this to truly begin.
???
Mikhail watched as Anastasia stormed off, the threat hanging in the air between them. What were they doing? He knew her loyalties were fragmented at best, and she wanted to change things. They couldn't seem to get past their personal hurts enough to have more than a few minutes of conversation.
We've spent the past fifteen years orbiting one another in our own ways; neither of us has seen the sun.
They were both victims of the same cruelty, two ghosts created by the same system. Their obsession blinded each of them to cover their scars; they couldn't see that their injuries were the same.
Mikhail grunted as he stood, letting his hair down and running a hand through it as if he could shake out the tension. His whole body was tight.
That damn woman.
With a glance towards her door, Mikhail stood up and headed into his room. He shut the door behind him and felt like he could breathe, if only for a second, with two walls between them. He lay down on the bed, unable to shake the strain from his muscles.
"Proklyataya baba," he cursed under his breath, sitting up and leaning against the headboard.
Since their argument, he had been in a painful state, feeling Anastasia twist underneath him.
It nearly drove him mad. It would have been so easy to close the gap between them, to grab her face and pull her into an angry kiss.
The heat from the argument only stoked that fire.
Despite his fury towards their past, he had spent the first few days of their time together aggressively fighting the urge to imagine what she would feel like underneath him; having her pinned against the wall had given him everything and nothing.
"For fuck's sake," he hissed, giving up.
Mikhail's hand went straight to the band of his canvas pants, losing all sense of hesitation and pushing them down until his cock sprang free. He wrapped a hand around himself, beginning to stroke as his head rolled back against the headboard.
He tried to force himself to think of someone else, anyone other than Anastasia. Her eyes, that blonde hair, those perfect, pouting lips... His breath picked up until it was ragged, sweat breaking out on his forehead as he fought back angry grunts. God forbid she heard him.
"Yebat," his control shattered, and he forced out a guttural sound that was almost inhuman. He stroked himself faster, trying his hardest to keep his mind on someone else.
He finally found a rhythm while imagining some faceless woman to occupy his dangerously possessive thoughts. The closer he brought himself to finishing, the more his mind flickered back to Anastasia, to her body pressed against his and that angry fire in her eyes.
He twisted his wrist just the way he liked, finally discarding the suffocating need to ignore his thoughts of her. He let images of her flood his mind, tension coiling at the base of his spine as he stroked faster, his lips drawing in a ragged breath to keep from making too much noise.
He clenched his teeth, imagining what it would feel like to touch her skin, to slide his hand between her legs, and bury himself deep inside of her.
The thought of it broke him, his release rushing through him so violently he bit down on his fist as hard as he could to keep from shouting. Before he knew it, he was coming harder than ever to the thought of the woman he'd sworn he hated.
???
Anastasia waited until approximately five minutes past noon, purposefully late.
Mikhail was sitting down, his ankle resting on his knee, and a curious look on his face that she couldn't quite place.
"Sit," his voice left no room for argument.
Anastasia stared at him cautiously. He couldn't seem to look her in the eye when she took her seat. He was rifling through a stack of papers she had been forced to inscribe endless spells on, the paper rustling in his fingers.
Occasionally, he'd lift one to his face and smell it, analyzing either the ink or the paper. She couldn’t tell. It was an agonizing ten minutes before Anastasia broke the silence.
"Well? Are you going to say something? Or are you just going to keep me here all day for no reason?"
"You aren't really in a position to be making demands, your grace." His voice was heavy, and Anastasia raised an eyebrow, growing frustrated.
"What is your game here, Mikhail?" She said his name in the same tone that he used, shamelessly trying to get under his skin. Mikhail stopped and looked down from where he towered above her, even while sitting.
"We don't have to like each other for this to work," his voice took on a deadly quiet tone. "We need to at least respect each other. Can you agree to that?"
Anastasia didn’t know what to think as she stared at the man sitting across from her.
They had shared some moments that she had significantly cherished.
She’d been forced to trust him enough to bring him into the city the day before.
A decision she was regretting. Their argument at breakfast shattered any illusion she might have had that he might be different from most of the acolytes her mother had brought before.
He was, of course, very different-looking from her other tutors. She’d been forced to study under those charlatans but never wondered what it would be like to be under them.
They stood on shakier ground with even shakier hearts, both recoiling from the sudden impact of their pasts colliding with the present. He did, at least, seem eager to teach her about the use of her magic, whatever the situation. If anyone could teach her anything, it was surely Asya’s son.
Anastasia’s eyes fluttered, and she looked up at Mikhail, making his heart stop in his chest.
A man could die happy being on the other end of a look like that.
“I can agree to that,” she folded her hands in her lap, “For Asya.”
Mikhail’s gaze snapped up, staring at Anastasia and finding his breath becoming erratic again at the mention of his mother’s name. This woman was going to be the death of him if she continued to remind him of their past.
“Don’t —”
“Stop it,” Anastasia held up her hand. “We can’t pretend like she didn’t matter to both of us. We can’t. We do not have to like each other, I agree. We can respect each other. It doesn’t feel respectful to your mother’s memory to ignore what she meant to us.”
Anastasia cursed the tears in her eyes, wondering why being around this man had unlocked the gate she had kept around her emotions for years.
He was going to think she really was a spoiled duchess if she kept breaking into tears at every disturbance.
She subconsciously began tugging her sleeves down over her knuckles.
Mikhail noted the tick but said nothing. He noticed how she had deferred to referring to Asya as his mother instead of using her name. He noted the respect in her features and the ache in her voice, plain as day, scattered across her words.
The duality of his emotions was enough to make him consider going back to the monastery. Mikhail felt like kicking himself again every time he came face-to-face with how much pain she had shouldered alone for years.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years, during which he had been doing the same. Both were sequestered from the events of one night that left them with scars they were too afraid to show anyone.
“Alright,” he sighed, finding his resolve cracking every time that he was around Anastasia. “We can respect each other. For Asya.”
Anastasia nodded in response, and the silence dragged on. Nothing could fill such an intimate silence, drowned out by the remnants of their wounds. Mikhail cleared his throat, pausing to take his hair down and refasten the knot.
“So, from what I’ve gathered,” he leaned closer to her and showed her some of her old spell sheets, “Your tutors had no idea what they were dealing with.”
Anastasia couldn’t help it and burst out laughing at the remark. Mikhail recoiled, a little surprised by the sound.
Dear God, I love that sound. I wonder how much this woman has laughed in the last fifteen years. Not enough. Fuck. Stop it.