Chapter Katriona
Katriona
I wake at nine to the sound of nothing.
I notice this before the ceiling above me or the strange weight of the duvet or the pale grey light coming through curtains that aren’t mine.
The silence. In my studio flat, morning comes with the floor above creaking and the bins being collected and the couple next door arguing in fast, affectionate Italian. Here, nothing but peace.
The second thing I notice is the pain.
Or rather, the absence of it. It’s never entirely gone, but right now pulled back to a dull, distant ache, manageable in a way it hasn’t been in days.
The naproxen, taken with actual food for once.
The bath. The heat pad, which I apparently fell asleep holding because it’s still tucked against my side, warm and faintly ridiculous.
I lie still for a moment and take stock of myself, which is a habit I developed years ago, the daily audit. Pain levels, nausea, fatigue. How much of the performance is going to be required today. What I can afford to feel and what needs to be managed into something more presentable.
Today’s audit is better than yesterday’s. Better than most days in recent memory.
I sit up slowly, testing the movement before committing to it.
The room assembles itself around me. Dark furniture, clean lines.
On the nightstand, a fresh glass of water, a single white tablet, and a note in handwriting I don’t recognize yet, blocky and efficient: Second dose.
Take with breakfast. Kasimir is downstairs.
No signature. He doesn’t need one. I already know his handwriting without ever having seen it: precise, undecorated, the penmanship of a man who considers flourishes a waste of motion.
I pick up the tablet and hold it between my fingers, and I think about the fact that he checked my prescription on the drive over.
That he knew the dose. That the note is not an instruction so much as a reminder, the difference between a person who tells you what to do and a person who has done the work of understanding what you need and made it available.
Those are entirely different things, and I have been receiving so much of the former for so long that the latter is almost unrecognizable.
Almost. But not quite.
I find the robe where I left it over the chair and pull it on.
In the bathroom mirror, I look like someone who has slept a full eight hours for the first time in months, which is exactly what I’ve done, and the evidence of it feels uncomfortable for some reason.
My color is better. The shadows under my eyes are still there, they are carved in by now, not going anywhere without sustained improvement, but they are lighter than yesterday.
I let myself think about Monday.
I haven’t let myself think about it properly yet.
Last night I was too tired and too careful, keeping hope at arm’s length, because hope is the thing that hurts most when it doesn’t come through.
I’ve had a lot of practice at being hurt by things I was stupid enough to want.
But alone in this bathroom, with the morning light coming pale and clean through the frosted glass, I let the thought arrive.
A specialist. A consultation where no one will tell me I’m being dramatic. Where no one will suggest yoga. Where the conversation will begin from the premise that my pain is real and the only question is what to do about it.
I press my palm flat against the cold edge of the sink and breathe.
I want to run in the mornings. I used to run, before the pain made running a negotiation with my own body that I consistently lost. I want to eat a meal without doing the mental calculus of whether it will stay down.
I want to sleep through the night without the 3am cramping that’s been my alarm clock for too long.
I want to stand in the middle of a room and not be running pain management in the back of my head the whole time, the way a phone keeps a dozen apps going even when the screen looks dark.
I want a life that belongs to me. Not just survival wearing women’s clothing.
Monday might be the beginning of that. I allow myself, very cautiously, to want it.
Downstairs, Kasimir is exactly as Akyl described him.
Compact, grey-haired, moving around the kitchen with the quiet authority of someone who has owned this space for longer than I’ve been alive.
He greets me without fuss, gestures at the island stool and tells me in accented, measured English what the breakfast options are.
“Porridge, please,” I say. “Just a small amount.”
Kasimir nods as though this is entirely reasonable and says nothing about the fact that I arrived at one in the morning in a dinner dress and am now sitting at his kitchen island in a borrowed robe at nine on a Sunday morning. I appreciate this more than I can say.
Akyl isn’t here. There is evidence of him: a coffee cup in the sink, still faintly warm when I touch the ceramic.
A newspaper folded to the business section, set aside with the precision of someone who reads the whole thing before they leave rather than picking through it over the course of the morning.
His jacket isn’t on the hook by the door.
He has been up for hours and he is somewhere else, being someone that I am only beginning to understand the dimensions of.
I wrap both hands around the mug of tea Kasimir sets before me and let myself think about him properly, because I haven’t yet.
Last night was survival mode, the same mode I’ve been running on for three years: assess, manage, endure.
There wasn’t space for thinking about Akyl Mostovoi as a man rather than as a solution to a problem.
I did the math before the dinner, the cold, practical sum of what I was willing to put up with to stay alive.
I’d braced for a lot. I’d spent three weeks getting myself ready to tolerate a man who was older, or unpleasant, or who’d look at my medical history like a liability and treat me to match.
I was ready to be handled instead of seen.
Useful and grateful and invisible, because that’s the trade a woman makes when she’s got nothing else to bring to the table.
What I was not prepared for was Akyl.
He is dangerous. That isn’t a metaphor. The Mostovoi family’s position in the world is built on things that don’t get discussed in polite company. I’m not naive about this. I went to that dinner with my eyes open to exactly what these men are, and I chose to walk in anyway.
But dangerous and monstrous are not synonyms, and the man who sat in that chair last night while I ate rice in his borrowed robe was neither cruel nor contemptuous.
He asked questions. He listened to the answers with the full weight of his attention.
He didn’t flinch at my medical history or look at me with the particular expression I have come to hate most, the sympathetic grimace of someone who has decided you are fragile and are now recalibrating how much use you might be.
He looked at my history the way an engineer looks at a structural problem. With the focused, quiet intensity of a man already designing the solution.
And, since I’m being honest with myself, he is ridiculously good-looking.
Not handsome in the polished, symmetrical way rich men often are, all that money applied early and kept up.
His face is hard and severe, built for sharpness rather than warmth, and it’d be intimidating if it weren’t for the way he goes when he’s not putting on the power.
The stillness of him. The way his attention feels when it lands on something he actually wants to look at.
He settled it on me, last night, for a significant portion of the evening. And I am not entirely sure what to do with that.
Kasimir sets the porridge in front of me in a white bowl, small and plain and exactly right, and beside it a small dish of honey and a few slices of banana and a second cup of tea, this one ginger.
“Thank you,” I say, the words not feeling like enough for the thought that’s gone into what I need. I’ve never experienced it, and my throat thickens with emotion that Akyl or Kasimir, or both of them, have thought about what I need most and then given it to me without question…
Kasimir simply nods. “Akyl will be back soon.”
I eat slowly. It stays down. The tablet dissolves into my bloodstream and begins its quiet work, and I sit in this enormous, silent kitchen and I take stock of where I am.
I slept eight hours with a heat pad and woke to a note and a tablet and a bowl of porridge calibrated to my digestion. Now I’m sitting in the quiet kitchen sipping ginger tea and know that tomorrow might be the day I finally get real help.