Chapter 28
ELLIE
I would have lost track of time if it weren’t for the wall clock. I check it every fifteen minutes. Three hours have passed.
Anya is still by my side. That’s the only thing keeping me sane, knowing that she’s okay, at least physically. She has eased from trembling to still.
Anya . She consumes my thoughts.
She’s six, and she witnessed?—
I don’t let myself finish the list of what she witnessed, but she saw enough. She cried. Sobbed, actually. But within an hour, she had her sketchbook out.
I watch her draw, and I wonder how many times she has needed that anchor.
The thought makes my stomach sink.
Afraid I’ll burst into tears, I shift my focus to Rolan.
I’ve been constructing a story about him since that first night, adding details as they arrived, adjusting the frame to accommodate each new piece of information.
The frame broke tonight.
The burning in his eyes that had no bottom. The way he said now and the room contracted around the word .
I’ve been afraid of men before. I know the texture of that fear, thanks to Landon and the men who came to my door.
What I felt looking at Rolan in that foyer was not the same.
It was worse.
What does he mean to me?
The question surfaces, and I let it sit without answering it. I’m not ready for that yet.
Will I ever be?
Mikhail arrives some minutes later.
“It’s clear,” he says. His face is composed. I’m sure Rolan told him what happened, but even so, he acts like it’s breakfast time. “You can come up now.”
I look at Anya. Her eyes meet mine. A tiny thread of understanding passes between us.
She closes her sketchbook.
I prepare to shield her eyes on the stairs. My hand is already near her face, ready to block or turn, the reflex that operated in the foyer now available on demand.
We come through the door to the main floor, and I stop.
Clean.
The foyer is — it’s not perfect. I can see the remnants of what happened if I look carefully: a section of wall near the east corridor that’s been freshly repainted, the slightly off shade of new paint against old.
A gap in the floor molding near the staircase.
The metallic smell, underneath the cleaning products, of fluids I don’t want to name.
But the bodies are gone. The blood is gone. The horror of what covered this floor three hours ago has been removed, systematically, by people who clearly know how to do this.
Anya walks through the foyer and keeps her eyes fixed straight ahead.
I look at the floor.
How many times? How many mornings have I come down these stairs and walked across this marble without knowing what had happened here before?
The thought follows me up the stairs to Anya’s room and sits in the corner while I get her settled.
My own bathroom. My own shower.
The water is hot enough to be almost uncomfortable, and I stand in it and let it run, hoping it’s possible to clean up all my thoughts.
When I step out, I’m drawn to my bed, which I haven’t slept in in two weeks. The pillow is too perfectly placed, the duvet undisturbed. I lie down in it.
It feels wrong.
I stare at the ceiling and push the feeling aside.
Is he okay? He seemed fine. He was walking, and despite all the blood on his clothes and hands, it didn’t look like it was his.
But there was so much blood.
The thought that follows arrives with a heavy darkness: What if none of it was his?
I lie still with this thought.
He was out there for, how long? An hour? More? And when he came back inside, he was covered. The men in the foyer were covered, and the bodies on the floor were?—
He’s done this before. And he’ll do it again. It’s why he has a safe room.
I’ve been living in a house where this kind of thing happens.
And he was in the middle of it, moving through it, and from the way Alexei and Mikhail talk about him, from the way the guards look at him when he crosses a room, from the silence that falls when he speaks, it’s clear.
He wasn’t out there managing it. He was doing it .
He might be a monster, I think, but he’s a monster who protected us.
Terror and a disturbing comfort alternate in my chest all night. I keep thinking until all the pieces I didn’t put together start to click into place one at a time.
I didn’t sleep, but at least I can say it was a productive night because I gathered the courage to act.
I don’t wait for my alarm to ring. Instead, I rip myself from bed and barrel straight to his office.
I don’t knock. I walk in, and I don’t stop walking until I’m in the middle of the room.
He’s at the desk, clean, composed. I can’t see injuries anywhere, so he must be fine, right?
He looks up.
My body acts against my will, almost relaxing with his eyes on me, almost making me give up.
I breathe in and push the feeling aside.
“Who are you?” My voice comes out steadier than I expect. “What happened here yesterday?”
He holds my gaze and says nothing.
“Rolan.” I keep my voice level. “Tell me what’s going on. Tell me who you are and what this house is, or I’ll leave this place.”
His expression shifts as he stands.
“You think you have a choice?”
The reply takes me by surprise.
“I do have a?—”
“You’ll stay.” He comes around the desk. “Because I want you to stay. That’s all.”
I stare at him.
The sentence lands in me with complicated force — infuriating, and under the fury, a sensation I hate myself for, some treacherous warmth that responds to the words I want you regardless of the sentence they’re embedded in.
But I won’t fucking stand for it .
“That’s—” I stop. The realization dawns: this isn’t a conversation he’s going to have with me right now, or possibly ever. Not in the terms I’m demanding it in. The wall is up.
I turn toward the door.
“Go back to our room,” he orders, as if I wasn’t clearly leaving already.
Our room. The phrase twists my face as I leave.
“No.” I don’t stop walking. “When you’re ready to tell me the truth — the whole truth — you know where to find me.”
“Elizabeth.”
I don’t stop.
“You won’t win this,” he sternly explains. “You’ll stay with me, and that is not something you get to negotiate.”
We’ll see, I think.
Then I walk out.