Chapter Nineteen #2
While Anatoli doles out a suitable punishment, I search for Katya on the cameras.
But there is nothing. She has found some blind spot in them to secret herself away, which is no real problem.
I have only to go back through the footage to find her, roll back the timestamps until I can find her last location.
So I cast the footage back and scroll through the cameras, and—there. I see her walking down the hall toward my office. It is usually locked against her, but today it is open because it is being cleaned. She peeks her head inside and ducks in.
Hurriedly, I switch cameras again to the interior of my office.
And there she is again, harassing the maid who has come to clean, peppering her with questions, probably, or pleading for help.
This camera has no audio—my conversations within my office are private, not to be overheard by anyone—so I cannot hear what she is saying.
Eventually, the woman does what all the staff do when Katya is so doggedly persistent.
She leaves. Throwing her hands in the air in exasperation and with a beleaguered shake of her head, the woman leaves.
And Katya is alone in my office. This, I think, was her plan all along.
She knows, now, the staff will not help her. They will only walk away.
She tries my computer first, but she scowls as she cannot get past the login screen. Then she sets about rooting through my drawers. There is nothing much for her to find there. Correspondence in Russian that she cannot read, maybe some account statements. Most of the drawers are locked.
For a moment she wrenches on a locked drawer, pulling with all her strength as if that will allow her to open it. And then, when she is convinced it is not stuck, she pulls something from the pocket of her jeans. A pair of nail clippers?
She manipulates them in her fingers, pulls the hooked file from where it is concealed in the middle. As I watch, she jams it into the drawer’s lock, wiggles it intently. And then the drawer is open.
I sit bolt upright. “Fuck.” The word climbs up my throat before I can claw it back. And I can only watch as Katya—some hours ago, now—rifles through the once-locked drawer.
And finds Nicola’s phone.
Anatoli scowls at me as I rise from my chair, leaving the meeting without a word.
I don’t know yet where she has gone, but I fast-forward the footage as I stalk out of the room, prepared to find her.
I watch her punch in Nicola’s lock code—his birthday—and curse myself for having told this to her days ago.
Foolishly, I thought the locked door of my office and the locked drawer of my desk would prevent her from using it.
She make several calls. Probably to the police. Again and again she dials, and stares incredulously at the phone as the call is cut short. I pay them to ignore me. I would have told her if she had asked, but probably she would not believe this.
Another call, probably to her papa. It ends within a few minutes, and Katya stares down at the phone in her hand, brows drawn. I think I see the moment she realizes she knows no other phone numbers to call. The police will not help her. Her papa will not help her. Her brother is dead.
There is no one else she knows well enough to have memorized a phone number.
She sits down in the chair behind my desk, her shoulders slumped in defeat. Her fingers scroll through the contents of Nicola’s phone. And she begins to read.
Fuck. I am walking the house aimlessly, furiously fast-forwarding through the footage that shows Katya’s swift descent into despair.
She reads—and reads—and reads. Every horrible thing her brother thought of her; his conversations with their papa.
And then at last the phone falls to the desk, and Katya buries her head in her hands.
Her loose hair obscures her face as her shoulders shake.
Gradually she lets herself slide off of the chair altogether, as if even her spine deserts her in these heart-wrenching moments. She never left my office. She only slid out of view of the camera. Like a wounded animal, she hides from everyone, secreting herself away behind my desk.
I can hear her sniffles as I approach my office. Raw, aching. The sounds of despair. She struggles to quiet herself at the sound of my footsteps in the hall. She does not want to be discovered.
I collect Nicola’s phone from the top of my desk and tuck it away back in the drawer. The lock is ruined; she practically carved it out with her file.
I push my chair away from the desk and sink to my knees. Her blond hair is mussed, as if she has been pulling at it. In the cavity beneath my desk, her back is braced against one wall. Her knees are bent; her arms folded over them. Her head is buried in her arms, face obscured.
“Katya,” I say. Softly, in deference to her wounds.
Another sniffle. “Go away,” she says, and her voice is again raw. Hoarse, but without heat. Maybe she cannot manage it in this moment; maybe now she knows I am not the liar she called me.
“Is my office, koshechka. You don’t send me from it.” I thump my chest with my fist. “Come here now.”
Still she does not listen. Her shoulders tighten; her fingers curl into the thick material of her sweater. The one that says University of Illinois across the chest. She says, through an abbreviated sob, “Just leave me alone.”
More than an hour, now, she has been alone with her grief.
No—almost six years she has been alone. Who comforted her when her mother died?
Who dried her tears? She is only now realizing how alone she has been.
She is only now realizing that her hopes of being embraced by the rest of her family are beyond futile.
And she cries now for the death of that dream.
Fuck this. I reach beneath the desk, grab a fistful of her sweater, and drag her out.
Her sobs break on a wail of shock. She flails; her grief transmuted briefly into fury.
But she is a small woman; it is not difficult to quell her struggles.
It is less difficult still to pull her over my knees and press her face against my shoulder.
She breathes in hard, wheezing pants. Her tears wet my collar. Her shoulders tremble.
I wrap one hand over the nape of her neck.
“You don’t cry for them, koshechka,” I order.
“You don’t do this foolish thing. They don’t give a fuck about you.
So fuck them, yes?” Despite herself, her limbs soften.
Her pitiful struggles ease. “And next time, when I tell you that something is not for your eyes, you listen.” I impress this order upon her with a little shake, and she sucks in a harsh breath that sounds like it burns her lungs.
Her voice is small, resentful. Still thick with these foolish tears she cries. “Why do you even care?”
“I do give a fuck about you.” Maybe I am the only one who does. Now, I think, she knows this. “For your own good, I tell you I do not want you to see these things they say.” Now her soft heart is breaking. And she turns her face into my shoulder because she has no one else to hold her.
Her shoulders pinch. She breathes, “Papa called my mom a whore.”
I know this already. I know everything he said; everything he told his worthless son to save face.
That Katya’s mama tempted him. That she fucked him for his money, got pregnant on purpose to get child support from a rich man.
He paints himself to be the virtuous man deceived by a conniving woman; helpless in the face of her wiles.
Tells his son he begged Katya’s mama to get an abortion, offered her thousands of dollars to get rid of the problem.
And when it was too late for that, he buried her beneath an avalanche of legal documents, threatening to take from her the child he never wanted unless she kept secret his paternity so his wife would not find out how weak he had been.
Giulio sees Katya only as a liability for most of her childhood.
A secret that becomes more difficult to keep as she grows, so he sends her away to boarding school, where she loses years of time with her mother who has so little of it left.
It is only when he realizes that she has grown up pretty—like her mother—that she becomes an asset instead.
Not a legacy, like his worthless son. But a possession to be sold or traded for more power, more prestige.
She is a tool to be used. She has never been anything more to him.
Katya sobs, “He said—he said—”
Fuck. My hand palms the back of her head, and the brokenhearted sounds she makes are smothered against my throat. “Okay, koshechka,” I tell her. “Only this once, you cry. But then you are done, and you do not think of this again.”
I feel her nod, feel her shoulders tremble. And for a few minutes she cries. She curls up, drawing her knees to her chest like she must make herself small. As if by doing this, she can compress the weight of her grief, form it into a tiny ball that will somehow hurt her less.
And then, when she has at last cried all the tears she has, she sucks in huge breath and swabs at her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. She is quiet, now. Still, like she has expended all of her energy and there isn’t enough left even to push herself away from me. She whispers, “Sorry.”
A rough sound leaves my throat. “You do not apologize for this,” I say. “You do not apologize for someone else’s mistake, someone else’s foolishness.”
And this time, she obeys without protest when I send her off to bed.