18. Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
HARLOWE
Three days passed in this stasis. Arrow left early and came back late, sometimes sending food up with a houseman whose face I never saw above his collar.
Scalding showers hammered my skin until it turned raw.
Sleep came under mountains of blankets, heart jackhammering awake from dreams where my father was the one laying claim to me, and Arrow only watched from the doorway, lighting a cigarette and waiting for the bruises to form before he touched me.
Every page of the guest room books blurred together. Boredom chewed through me until my jaw ached, then silence closed like a lid over my skull.
Sometimes, I counted my breaths to pass the time.
Sometimes, I just let the hours bleed.
The fourth night, Arrow didn’t come home. I roamed the house, checked the time in every room, and pressed my nose to the cold glass, hoping to see headlights up the driveway, or at least the sliver of a silhouette through the moonlight.
I sterilized the kitchen, polished the plates, and organized the condiments in the fridge by shade and acidity until my nails split.
When an engine finally cut through the quiet at 10:54 p.m., I waited at the landing, clutching my arms so hard my biceps threatened to tear.
The person who entered was not Arrow.
It was a girl, barely older than me, in a yellow babydoll dress and a canvas duffel bag slung over one shoulder.
She moved through the house as if she owned it—maybe she did.
Her blonde hair was hacked off at the collar, not with skill, but with the box-cutter sincerity of someone who needed their reflections dead.
I debated fleeing, but her eyes found me at once.
“You’re Harlowe.” She pronounced it with the flat a, not the w, like she was correcting my name out from under me.
Silence seemed safer.
No use confirming or denying in a place where everyone already had your number.
She laughed, an easy smile ghosting under her breath, and slid off the duffel, setting it on the stone tile with a theatrical thunk.
“He said you wouldn’t have the balls to try the windows—four-inch polycarbonate. You could drop a bomb on this place, and it’d just get shinier.”
She shed her coat—army surplus, blood on one sleeve—and I counted three knives on her. One at the thigh, one in the boot, and a third, bulging in the seam at her hip.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Arrow doesn’t like it when his toys get sharpened by anyone but him.” She stepped in, too close, pinning me with a look of practiced violence. “But I’m polite; I introduce myself.” She stuck out a hand. “Natalya Romanov.”
I’d never met a she-Romanov. The species had been clearly underestimated by me.
“I know who you are.” I shook, but let her feel the sweat pooling between our palms. “You’re his cousin—Dmitri Romanov’s daughter.”
“Once removed,” she snapped, then winked. “The only thing that ever gets removed in this family is the competition, and you’re looking more and more like a competitor.”
She yanked at my wrist, hard enough to pop the fingers out of joint, then dropped my hand like she was handing off a live grenade. A hint of satisfaction sparkled at the edge of her mouth.
“You know what I’m here to do, yeah?”
“No, but I’m sure it doesn’t involve a slumber party,” I said, trying to will my voice into something sharper than the fear prickling under my skin.
Natalya craned her head, sizing me up the way Arrow did—a point-by-point audit of failings and strengths, seeing something I couldn’t.
“He told me not to kill you, but he didn’t say I had to be nice. Tonight, you’re my responsibility. He’s . . . occupied.”
She pronounced it like “op-uh-kied,” drawing out the foreignness until it sandpapered my nerves.
“You’re to stay in the house, and if you try your luck, I get to break your legs. Just the legs, nothing permanent.”
General boredom colored the threat, as if it was her job to enforce rules no one ever respected.
“Do you get paid extra if I make you earn it?” The quiver in my jaw ruined the effect.
Natalya grinned, teeth stained yellow from tobacco, close enough that I smelled the vodka thick on her breath.
“No, darling. I just like the work.”
She straightened, gave me a deliberate leer, then upended her duffel and dumped its contents on the entryway rug. Duct tape, zip ties, a bottle of prescription painkillers, and, to my dawning mortification, a double-pronged steel collar fitted with a medical lock.
It looked less like kink than orthopedics for criminals. Natalya let the objects speak for themselves, watching me for a second so long and deliberately that it became a threat.
“Arrow said you’d be more entertaining this way.” She flipped the steel collar so it shone in the moonlight. “But if you want to save everyone the trouble, just bite your tongue off now. I’ll even help.”
She flashed that yellow smile again, and stalked off toward the kitchen, leaving the arsenal like breadcrumbs in case I wanted to test the limits of her mercy.
Clearly, she had no idea who I was.
I gathered my spine and followed her. By the time I reached the kitchen, she’d already unscrewed one of Arrow’s hidden vodkas, poured two shot glasses, and was toying with the knife at her thigh like it was an anxious tic.
She pushed a glass toward me. “Drink or don’t, I don’t care. But if you pass out, I’m not babysitting.”
I drank. Because what else do you do when your jailer invites you to the table?
“You think you’re special?” she asked, toeing a barstool out for herself and lounging like a girl who’d never waited for anything in her life. “You’re not. You’re just the newest installment. Two families, hundreds of years, same playbook every fucking time.”
My glass met the counter with a loud thunk. There was courage in the burn, or at least enough for me to meet her stare without looking away.
“And yet, here you are, playing nursemaid for the next girl in line, like a good little dog.”
Natalya’s smile could have cut glass. “I like to see a Virelli mouth try to talk its way out of a steel collar—makes the morning less boring.”
Her attention flicked to the row of kitchen knives beside my hand, the message implicit. Try it, and she’d be on me before the first artery opened.
“I’m not going to run,” I lied. “I just want to know what happens in the morning.”
She sighed, disgusted by the lack of originality.
“Arrow gets home, you eat breakfast, maybe you get to hear him brag about business deals while you try not to bleed on the rug.” Natalya sniffed, studying me as she rolled the steel collar between her palms. “You know what’s fucked?
He doesn’t like hurting women. Not even the ones that beg for it.
” She shot me a sidelong look, filing away any flicker in my expression.
“He’ll punish you, sure. But he’ll never love you, if that’s what you’re after. ”
My laugh crawled up my throat, damp and mean. “That’s the last thing I’d want. I need him like a cat needs a leash.”
Natalya poured another shot, this one fuller than the last, and tipped it over her tongue.
“That’s cute. Virellis always think their bloodline is special, but you’re not the first to bleed for a cause that doesn’t give a shit about you.
If you want my advice? Find a way to make your misery interesting.
” She snorted, putting the bottle to her mouth, ignoring the glass, before she continued.
“They don’t want to admit it, but the old guard is dead.
The Romanovs are a dying breed—only a few of us are left.
And the ones that are can’t get over the past. Arrow is the future of this family.
I know it, your father knew it, and that’s why he practically begged Arrow to take you off his hands.
And Arrow, being the kind of man he is, decided he would show mercy to the Virelli whore, and chain her up in a glass palace instead of the river. ”
She bent the collar open, exposing the raw, shorn edges, then thunked it onto the counter next to the vodka.
“So, what happens after the wedding?”
Natalya shrugged, lining up spare objects in feathery rows. “If you’re lucky? You become a statue, a warning for future generations. If you’re unlucky, Arrow gets bored and leaves you in a cage somewhere nice until you rot.”
She sipped again, watching me.
“Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.” She cocked her head, almost pitying. “He’s a Romanov. He always wins.”
There was no answer to that. Not one worth the risk, anyway. So I drank more vodka, and let the burn anesthetize the part of me that still wanted to believe in rescue. Natalya watched, smiling to herself.
After a while, she went to the living room, threw her boots onto Arrow’s couch, and turned on the TV to a late-night cooking show, volume up so loud it bled through the glass walls.
I drifted to the guest room, winced at the collision of moonlight on the empty sheets, and sat on the edge of the bed and waited. For an hour, I paced the small square of floor, listening for movement downstairs. Pulling on a sweatshirt, I tiptoed downstairs.
A blue glow from the TV flickered across Natalya’s sleeping face, her mouth half-open as if in the middle of laughing at the punchline of her invincibility. I cautiously approached her and kicked her leg to see if she’d wake up. She didn’t.
While Natalya was busy trying to engage in a dick-measuring contest, I made my move.
My father had taught me something, and that was: you do just enough to make your enemy comfortable, before you strike.
Vodka shared like two friends swapping stories, then the handful of crushed pills—taken from the prescription bottle in the foyer.
A gamble, sure, but her ego did the rest.
Moving through the dark with the hush of a mouse, I went into the kitchen and opened the silverware drawer.
There were no knives—Natalya must have swept them first—but I found a mallet, and a bottle of wood glue.
I pocketed the tubing, then doubled back, my footsteps feathering softly along the cold marble.
If Arrow’s security system were as phobic as his cousin, there’d be a camera on every door and an alarm on every window, but humans always leave seams. And I would prove that, even in a Romanov citadel, there were atoms of permissiveness.
There had to be.
I floated to the window above the staircase—the one with the best view of the river and the enemy’s approach. The glass was immaculate, too thick to break, but along the baseboard, there was a tiny nest of wiring, barely visible unless you pressed your cheek to the wood.
Uncoiling the tubing, I fitted it over the wire, and bit down, hoping the latex would keep my teeth from leaving evidence. I sawed through it, inch by inch, panicking each time I heard the television in the living room go to a commercial about Clorox wipes.
My jaw ached, and my hands trembled with hunger and desperation, but after what felt like a year, the wire snapped with a soft, metallic tang. I nearly sobbed from the relief.
I straightened, hands clenched in the hair at my temples, not believing that the fix worked—until the night air seeped in through the now-unlatched panel at the base of the glass.
Six inches was enough. I could squeeze. I pushed through the open gap of the window—shoulder first, scraping my ribs—before landing on the wet stone below.
It was a five-foot drop, just enough to tear the skin on my palms and send a jolt of pain up my kneecaps. I rolled, bit my tongue on a cry, and lay flat. I listened for guards and alarms, but when there were none, I ran.
The back lawn was a fractal of pebbles, cold grass, and the trees, slashing in the wind, made for a better disguise than I’d ever had in my own house; I crouched behind them, watching for the shimmer of anything human or alive, but there was nothing.
Mafia kings believed in their fortresses.
When I reached the stone wall at the property line, I scaled the stone fencing, leaving blood behind, and then I ran, in the way my brother used to run, knowing the world had already decided how the story ended, so I might as well enjoy the downhill sprint.