Chapter Thirty Six
Alexei
By the end of the following week, it is impossible to deny it any longer. Katya is trying to die. Not by her own hand—she is trying to make me kill her. She has as little care for her life as she thinks I do, and there is only one thing that gives me the tiniest spark of hope.
Her emptiness is now filled with anger. Where once she was flat and lifeless, she burns and seethes with fury.
There is no room in her for anything else; not even self-preservation.
The light which called me to her is no longer that sweetness I adored.
It’s a volcanic explosion, and every bit as violent.
I can’t decide if this is only a test, or if she truly is looking for a way out.
My first indication that something is wrong is a splintering crash from the gallery, followed by an ear-piercing shriek.
At first I think she must have dropped a glass, but I race toward the sound anyway, hoping she has not acquired a new injury.
Katya stands, bare-footed, across from a newly vacant pedestal. The ruins of a priceless imperial Ming vase scatter across the floor. She twirls a fireplace poker stolen from another room in her hands, like a batter setting up for the next swing.
This is not the first of her rampage. It is only the most audible. Three masterpiece paintings are in tatters already. Millions of dollars in art, gone in an instant. Probably she does not even know the true value of what she has destroyed.
Her chin juts out. Her face burns with color, but her eyes—they are assessing. Challenging.
I know what she sees in me now. Her captor. Her killer.
“Are you trying to make me angry, koshechka?” I am angry.
There is no denying that. Anyone would be angry over the senseless ruination of such valuable works of art.
But Katya is worth more to me than all of them.
I step over the shards scattered by my feet and count the cost up in my mind.
The Picasso—six million, when I acquired it.
The Monet, twenty million. The Caravaggio, a staggering thirty-five million.
The vase that lies now in shards…truly priceless. Without equal in the world.
With a sharp motion, she draws back the fireplace poker, and strikes out again. A renaissance-era bust explodes into little more than dust and fragments. Irreparable.
“Don’t move.” The words come out sharper than I would have liked, but then I am angry.
A shaky sigh slips from between her lips; her shoulders slump, and her eyes close. This is resignation. The moment she believes she will know the full force of my anger, and what it is to be directed at her. She does not flinch from it, not even as the soles of my shoes crunch over the shards.
I bend, gently brushing the bits of porcelain and marble from the tops of her feet. She loses her grip on the poker as I swing her up into my arms, and it clatters to the ground.
“If you wish to be destructive, koshechka, you should wear shoes. You could have cut your feet.”
Her throat is much improved; she unleashes a feral scream makes my ears ring. Her feet kick out as her arms flail. Her nails are like claws, and she manages to take a swipe at my face before I sling her over my shoulder instead.
Her knee catches me in the chest. I deliver a firm swat to her ass.
Not enough to hurt, but enough to capture her attention.
“Stop that. I do not want to drop you.” She can’t claw me through the thick leather of my jacket, and so instead she pounds her fists upon my back.
Vicious strikes, with all of her strength.
She is not nearly strong enough to wound me.
“You think I don’t know what you are doing?
” My voice grates with annoyance, and she stills, instantly on guard.
“I was careless with you before, but I have learned better. There is nothing that happens in my house that is secret from me.” She bounces over my shoulder as I proceed up the stairs.
“I know you tried to steal a kitchen knife. I know you still seek a means of escape—which you will not find. I know you propositioned Anatoli.” That was the worst of it all.
I tell myself she did not mean this, that she is only desperate.
That my second was her chosen victim was a deliberate act.
I know she expected it to get back to me.
And it did—but I did not give her the reaction she sought.
“You think I will kill you for a tantrum? Koshechka, you know nothing at all.”
Angry wheezes break from her lungs, and it is only when I toss her down upon the bed that she gets her breath back once more.
I pin her arms above her head with one hand before she can lash out with them, straddle her wriggling body so she cannot kick out at me.
I let her buck and struggle, working out the tempestuous fury that consumes her until her throat is raw from screaming, until she breathes in short, sharp gusts.
At last her head falls back and her eyes close.
A tear streaks toward her temple. I wipe it away, cradle her chin in my hand.
“I said never, koshechka. No matter the provocation. Test the limits all you please, but remember this.” I find the shell of her ear with my lips. “Ya tebya lyublyu. I love you. Okay? I love you.”
These are words I have never said to her before—to anyone before.
I have known lust before her. I have known desire and envy. I have known passion. But now I know fear. I know hopelessness. I know despair. I know the shatter of Katya’s heart, and the futility of trying to mend it with my clumsy hands. I know a love so violent that it makes prisoners of us both.
And as her anger turns at last to grief, I know, too, that this is the cruelest thing I could ever have said to her.
∞∞∞
“Tell me what you want, koshechka.”
“Nothing.” She speaks in whispers and only if I speak first. Anguish is a shroud that weighs heavily upon her. She eats—not enough. She drinks—too much. Not her sweet white wines or the mojitos she once enjoyed, but liquor straight from the bottle.
She does not speak to the therapist I engaged for her. She exists. She endures, but this is all.
I tell her of my love for her every day, every night, but she does not respond.
My words might as well be wind, and they flow over her and away.
We share a room, a bed. I think she dreads that one day I will touch her intimately.
I think I dread that, too. I know already that she will not respond. She will only endure.
She does not protest my touch. She follows my orders. Her defiance has come to an end, and now she merely teeters through the paces of life like a puppet on strings. There is so little of her left now. Her light—her life—ended in the cold darkness of the pit.
There are no more escape attempts. She spends her days staring sightlessly out of the window of the library, with a book she does not read on her lap.
She does not interact with the staff. Though she has access to the outside once again, she does not lounge in the sun.
She does not swim. She does not ask to go out, to buy books.
She does not use the new computer I purchased for her. She does not use her phone.
She treats herself like a prisoner. Perhaps because I made her into one.
“Come to me,” I say, and she does. Of course she does.
She lets me draw her across my lap, lets me sink my hand into her hair, tuck her head against my chest. But it is so empty without her warmth, without her hands to hold me back.
That is something I cannot take from her.
She has to choose it—and she will not do this.
Every day I ask her that same question, and every day she gives me the same answer, because I have already denied her the one thing she has asked of me. So today, at last, I ask of her something else.
“Tell me, then, koshechka,” I say into the soft hair near her temple. “Tell me where you would go. What you would do.”
Her breath catches in her throat. “Somewhere sunny,” she says at last, and there is a substantial quality to her voice that has been missing these last weeks. “Close to the beach. Maybe close enough to walk.”
I could give her that. I have real estate all over the world.
“I would have a pet. A cat,” she says, and I think of the tiny apartment she lived in before I found her and of her motel in Minneapolis. Places ill-suited to the presence of a pet.
“You can have a cat if you want one, koshechka. Or a dog.” My fingers trace the curve of her cheek. “I will find you a tiger if you like.” I have no particular liking for pets, but Katya can have whatever she pleases.
She gives a slow shake of her head. I cannot bribe her with animals. I cannot earn back her love with gifts she does not want from me.
“Would you teach, to support yourself and this cat of yours?” I ask.
“Yes,” she breathes, and it sounds like she is dreaming of it.
“Elementary school. Like mom.” She enjoyed her barista job in Minneapolis, liked her coworkers, her boss.
If she had tried, then, to get a job with her credentials, she would have been too easily located by her family.
But they are no longer a concern, and yes—Katya could use that degree she earned.
She could have this dream she has worked for at last.
Her voice grows softer, but that warmth is pervasive. “I’d go to the beach on weekends. See movies. Visit museums. Make friends.”
All things she has long been denied. Of course she would want friends. There are not friends in my world. There are staff. There are men beneath my command. And there are enemies. She wants someone to laugh with, to talk with. Things she no longer does with me.
I stroke her hair. “It sounds peaceful,” I say. And I know it now, that that is what she wants above all else. Peace. Something she has not had since before her mother died. Not from her family. Not from me.
“Yes,” she says. “Peaceful.” But the warmth has left her voice. I hear that fragile dream break and crumble to ashes.
It is the moment I know that for her dream to live, mine will have to die.