Chapter 2 - Raya
I’ve gotten pretending I’m fine down to an art.
Fake it till you make it, and all that. I go about my days exactly as I did before.
Looking after the kids, shopping with Selene and my little sister Sofie, family dinners.
I laugh at all the right things and am completely present, not revisiting the moment the twins and I were taken obsessively at all.
I even let people hug me and don’t flinch in the slightest when someone comes up behind me too fast. Okay, that last one I’m still working on.
The security detail my family put on me after the kidnapping is roughly the size of a small army.
There are four men on rotation, two cars minimum whenever I go anywhere, a check-in system that would make a paranoid person feel, well, more paranoid, and makes me feel, on good days, something approaching safe.
On bad days, it reminds me that the threat is real enough to warrant four men and two cars, and I retreat to my bedroom, lie under the duvet, and stare at the ceiling.
Which isn’t me, has never been me, but I guess this will take time.
This morning was a normal good morning, or close enough.
I went to visit Selene while Simon was at work.
The twins were absolutely feral, as they always are, tearing through the apartment like two small but incredibly cute, natural disasters.
I chased them around for an hour, read them a story about a dragon, and felt, for the first time in weeks, like something close to myself.
The kids are fine; there’s no outward sign, at least, that would suggest anything out of the ordinary ever happened.
Kids are resilient in a way that adults aren’t, or maybe they haven’t learned yet to carry things the way we do.
After they’d been deposited in front of something animated and loud, Selene made more coffee and sat across from me and said, with her typical directness, “So, boyfriends. Is there anyone special? Has there been anyone special? I’ve never asked.”
“Are you joking?” I choke on my coffee. “You know this family, right? I can’t even pee without a tactical unit checking the room first.”
“Nobody in the past then? Not even a date?”
How desperate she looks for a nugget of gossip makes me laugh out loud. “When exactly would I fit that in, Selene? Between the security briefings and the family dinners and the—” I wave a hand. “All of this.”
“You could make time,” she says, raising an eyebrow at me over her cup, in a tone that means she has already decided I should make time and is totally on board with helping.
“I am perfectly happy,” I say, “with my books.”
“Book boyfriends don’t keep you warm at night.”
“Hmm, they kind of do. They also don’t come with security, so there’s that.”
She laughs at that, properly. The twins thunder past the doorway, and the sound of furniture crashing in another room carries through, which we both ignore because nothing sounds breakable. She looks at me over her coffee. “You deserve someone,” she says, quieter. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“It’s wishful thinking.” I mean it. I can’t currently imagine how that would work, practically speaking: a cozy dinner for two and, ‘You don’t mind if my security joins us, do you?’ I’m better off sticking to the books.
It was nice to talk, properly talk; the one good thing to come out of this is how much closer I am to Selene now; trauma bonding over her psychotic family will do that, I suppose.
She talks about Yakov, as she does sometimes.
I think she’s been struggling with his choice to stay with their father and what the consequences of his actions may have been.
I know she keeps in touch with him, but she also knows he’s never going to tell her the truth of it.
The whole thing has been a mess for both of us, and while I am trying to put my feelings in boxes, close the lid, and actively ignore them, she clearly needs to talk it through.
After a few hours, I kiss the twins goodbye, promising I’ll read them and their cousins more stories at family dinner, and ask my security detail to drop me at the bookstore on Clement Street.
There are plenty of other bookstores I could choose, but I don’t, simply because I know how much the guards hate the one on Clement Street, and I’m not above the occasional petty objection to their suffocating presence.
The street is incredibly narrow and has a blind corner, which means I have to get out and walk the short distance.
I tell them to stay back, lean against the car, and watch me if need be.
I need this: a few minutes of normality and freedom in which I can breathe.
They drop me at the curb. Petrov, who is my driver on afternoon rotation and whose expression suggests he is permanently braced for catastrophe, tells me five minutes, and I give him my brightest smile.
When I push open the door, the bell above it gives its small cheerful ring, and the smell of books and old paper does what it always does; it makes the world seem a marginally safer place.
I spend longer than five minutes. I always spend longer than five minutes, largely because who wouldn’t lose track of time, and a little bit just to push back.
I come out with three paperbacks, the sun actually on my face, and I am in the middle of deciding that today is actually far better than good when the prickling starts at the back of my neck.
It’s nothing, Raya. It’s always nothing.
I turn the corner, and the air leaves my body.
There’s a man leaning against a car that has been parked at a deliberate angle to block the flow of traffic, and my security detail is—holy god, they are on the ground.
I tell myself they cannot be dead; there’s no blood, no screaming, and he would not be standing here in broad daylight after committing four murders, but the thought is not as reassuring as I would like it to be.
However, ‘not dead’ doesn’t mean ‘fine,’ and none of them are moving.
“Who the fuck are you?” I say, sounding a lot braver than I feel, “and what did you do to my men?”
He doesn’t answer or bother to introduce himself. “Get in the car, Miss Volkov.”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” I say, holding up my hand, books and all, “because I am not interested.” I take a moment to study him, his build, his face and eyes, then it dawns on me. “Oh, my god. You’re a Mykros. I can see the resemblance now. The question is, which one are you?”
He dares to look almost amused. “I won’t ask again, Raya. Get in the car, or I’ll put you in it myself.”
I take a step back, doing the math on the distance to the corner; I know that I won’t make it.
He’s too close, and in my distraction, I hadn’t noticed he’s not alone.
Further down the street, two more cars are also sitting in a way that blocks any escape.
The books under my arm are not, unfortunately, useful as weapons, though I am considering it.
“Put your hands on me, Mykros, and you’re a dead man walking.”
He takes a step forward. I take another step back.
My brain is having a lot of feelings about the fact that this is happening again, that all the months of security details and check-in systems and being sensible have amounted to nothing, that I am standing on a sidewalk in the afternoon sun with my men on the floor around me, thinking that Matvei is going to go absolutely nuts. And then the strangest thing happens.
Someone steps out of nowhere and puts themselves between us.I know who it is before he turns around; it is very evident from his build, his hair, everything, that I am looking at the back of this man’s twin.
He glances back at me—a quick sweep, gray eyes checking me over like he’s confirming I’m upright and in one piece—then turns back to his brother.
They could be the same person standing in two places at once.
If Selene hadn’t told me she had twin brothers, I would have thought I was losing my mind.
Please, God, let this be the good one. Yakov.