Chapter 5 - Yakov
I give her the grand tour. It takes approximately two minutes, which is intentional.
It’s a small house on a quiet street, with limited entry points, which basically means there’s nowhere for anyone to hide.
She walks through each room with her arms folded and her jaw set, and I watch her survey each one.
She is doing it without thinking about it, something that’s evidently been ingrained.
I wonder who taught her that. I wonder many things about Raya Volkov that I have no business thinking about, but I have been doing it for months anyway.
We get to the bedroom last. There is only one, and accordingly, only one bed.
I watch the moment she registers this, the slight rise in her chest, the color that moves up her neck before she gets control of it.
She turns around and attempts to give me her sternest look.
“You can sleep on the sofa,” she points toward the sitting room.
“I’ll be sleeping in here.”
“Oh no, you won’t.”
“Oh yes, I will. It’s safer. One room means one door to watch. I’m not leaving you alone at night in a house my father’s people will definitely be looking for.”
She stares at me. “We are not sharing a bed.”
“The bed is large enough that you won’t know I’m in it.”
“I will absolutely know you’re in it.” She says this with complete conviction, then I can see the moment she registers how it sounds, because she gets momentarily flustered. It’s cute. “Because you’ll be taking up half of it.”
“I’m not that big.”
“You’re… You’re like a mountain.” She points at me, trying to disguise her blush with bluster. “Just make sure you stay on your side.”
“I’ll do my best. Promise.”
“That’s not half as reassuring as you think it is.
” She turns and walks out of the bedroom, trying to be stroppy.
I stand there watching the sway of her hips as she struts away, and breathe in clean linen and the faint whisper of her lingering scent.
Raya Volkov is going to be sleeping inches away from me, and it is going to be a colossal exercise in self-discipline for the next several weeks.
I can’t believe she signed the fucking form.
Tonight, I will be sleeping in bed with my wife.
Raya Volkov is my wife. There was never a question: if it hadn’t been this way, it’d have been another.
She was always going to be mine. My father doesn’t realize the massive favor he did me, the best thing he’s ever done for me in his whole shitty life, in fact.
I lay out the ground rules over the next hour.
She will stay. She will make no attempts to leave.
I spell this out clearly, without embellishment; she listens, but I know full well she’s going to be trouble.
I can see in her face she’s memorizing the list so she can work through it systematically, destroying it point by point.
She attempts to leave for the first time later that afternoon.
I am in the bathroom when I hear the front door.
I get there in under four seconds, but she has still made it approximately three steps down the front path.
I say her name. She freezes, then turns around, attempting her most innocent smile. “I was only getting some air.”
“Inside, now.”
“I need air, Yakov. I am a person who requires oxygen.”
“There’s a garden at the back.”
She barges past me back inside and goes straight to the kitchen, where she fills a glass of water and drinks the entire thing, looking out of the window at the garden, obviously planning her next move.
She tries again a couple of hours later.
This time she gets as far as the gate before I’m behind her.
I don’t touch her, even though I’m desperate to; the pull of it is something I have accepted as a condition of being close to her.
Instead, I simply say: “Raya.” She stops with her hand on the gate and doesn’t turn around. “I was going to—”
“No.”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“You were going to give me a reason why stepping outside the perimeter of this property is a good idea. It isn’t. You need to trust me on this.” She spins around, directing her fury at me. “You are insufferable,” she tells me.
“I know.”
“You know, and you don’t care, even slightly?”
“I care, Raya, very much so. That’s why we’re here.
My job is making sure you don’t get hurt, so let me do it.
” She holds my gaze, then she lets go of the gate and walks back past me toward the house.
She’s close enough that I catch the scent of her hair as she passes, and I stand there and look at the gate and breathe through my nose for a moment before I follow her.
I make pasta for dinner. The cupboards are stocked for exactly this kind of contingency, weeks’ worth of store cupboard essentials to ensure I can at least put something together that is edible for the first few days while I get the lie of the land.
She sits at the kitchen table and watches me move around the kitchen.
“You can cook?” She attempts small talk, which I’m appreciative of. I’ve waited so long to be able to talk to her that I’ll take anything that’s not anger.
“I can do a lot of things.”
“Should I be worried about what else is on the list?”
“You may like what else is on the list.”
She snorts as I put the food on the table and sit down next to her.
She looks at the empty chairs on the other side of the table and then at me and clearly decides an argument over seating arrangements is not worth having right now; no doubt she’s saving her energy for whatever else she feels like busting my balls over..
I find this interesting. I find everything about her interesting, and now I’ve got a lifetime to learn everything there is about her.
“So, what happens now?” she asks, twisting pasta around her fork.
“We stay here for a while. I can work from here. You settle in.”
“Settle in?” she repeats, like she can’t believe the words that have come out of my mouth. “Yakov, I have none of my things. I have the clothes I was wearing when you very definitely kidnapped me and three paperback novels.”
“I’ll take you to get what you need tomorrow.”
She looks up. “Outside? Really?”
“The drugstore and a clothing shop. We’ll be quick.”
As she eats, I can see her turning this over, trying to figure out whether it’s a real offer or some kind of test. It’s neither.
She needs things, and I will spend a lifetime giving them to her, even if she doesn’t realize it yet.
I want her to be comfortable, to feel at home, because she is at home as long as she’s with me.
“Fine,” she says. “But I’m choosing my own things.”
“I assumed.”
“And if you try to tell me what to pick, I will make your life considerably more difficult.”
“I don’t doubt you for a second.” I don’t. I’ve seen how feisty she can get. She looks at me like she’s not sure if I’m being sincere or if I’m teasing her. I am being sincere. I will always be sincere with her, which is not a quality I ever imagined myself cultivating.
I take her to the small main street the next morning.
I keep close, closer than she’d like; I can tell from the occasional sideways look she gives me as I position myself between her and the street, but she doesn’t say anything.
She quickly picks up what she needs from the drugstore, without comment, which tells me she’s aware of my concerns and has decided not to fight.
The clothing shop takes longer, which is no surprise.
I know from my calls with Selene how much the girls enjoy shopping.
She moves through the rails with purpose, selecting what she wants.
I stand slightly behind her and to the right, watching the shop, the door, and her in equal measure, which is harder than it sounds because looking at Raya from any angle requires a deliberate act of will to stop.
She holds up two options at one point without turning around. “Which one?”
I look at them, and now it’s my turn to wonder if she’s trying to trick me into choosing the wrong one.
One is gray, one is dark green. “Green,” I say.
She puts the gray one back without saying a word.
I say nothing either, but inside I’m feeling pretty damn smug with myself.
The dark green against her complexion will look stunning, and it isn’t far from my thoughts for the rest of the morning.
Back at the house, she takes her things to the bedroom while I sit at the kitchen table, open the laptop, and start working through the channels I need to cover.
Yaroslav will have gone back to my father by now, who will be on the warpath.
I need to find out his next moves, track the Volkov situation, update three contacts, and cross-reference new information one of them has about Alek.
I make the calls in Russian, keeping my voice low so as not to draw Raya’s attention.
At some point, she comes back through to the sitting room and curls up on the sofa with one of her paperbacks.
She isn’t reading; she hasn’t turned a page in twenty minutes because her eyes keep going to the window.
She is thinking. I wonder what she is thinking about.
I have wanted to know what goes on in her head for months, and now that she is an arm’s length away from me, I still can’t tell.
After ending a call and making some notes on my phone, I reach for my coffee; it’s gone cold. When I get up to make another, she looks over. “What are you doing?”
“Stuff,” I tell her.
“That’s vague.”
“Yes.”
She watches me move around. “Were you always like this? Even as a kid?”
I look at her. “Like what?”
“Chatty.”
I know she’s teasing me, but I make the pretense of seriously considering her question, because this is nice, normal, almost. “Probably.”
“Must have been a fun household.” As soon as the words leave her mouth, I can see her regret in saying them. I assume Selene has shared some stories regarding life in the Mykros household.
“Not really.”
There’s a pause before she speaks. “No,” she says. “I don’t suppose it was.”
I hand her a fresh coffee, and she takes it, neither of us saying anything else about it.
I go back to the laptop, and she goes back to her book; this time I think she actually reads it.
I watch her for the rest of the evening without meaning to.
Sofa to bathroom. Bathroom to kitchen for water.
Kitchen back to sofa. My brain has decided that knowing where she is at all times is a baseline requirement, like knowing the exits and the perimeter.
She says goodnight at ten thirty and goes to the bedroom.
I give her twenty minutes, which is ample for her to do whatever she needs to do, then I follow.
She’s already on the far side of the bed with her back to the center.
I get in, reach over, and turn off my lamp.
Hers goes off a minute later, the darkness settling around us.
“Yakov?”
“Yes.”
“If you touch me while I’m sleeping, I will break your hand.”
I smile at the ceiling. “Understood, rodnaya.”
“Good.”
She’s asleep within ten minutes. I lie there facing her back for some time, listening to her breathe and taking in the smell of her hair and whatever cream it is she has rubbed all over herself, but I don’t touch her. I’m not a complete fucking animal. I want my wife to want me.