Hazel
Barely a week in, and I'm already learning how to be happy.
It looks like this. Mornings in a bed the size of a small country, waking warm and used and held, his hand always somewhere on me even in sleep, like he's keeping count.
Breakfast at his right hand while Misha narrates his eggs and Lena pretends to disapprove of all of us.
Days that belong to the children — letters and numbers and snowball wars in the white garden, the three of us pink-cheeked and shrieking while a man who runs a country watches from a window with a look on his face I'm not sure he knows he's making.
Then nights that belong to him, every one, thorough and devastating, Gosudar' falling out of me like it lives there now.
And not only at night.
On the day he's due in the capital, he takes me in a linen closet at noon.
I'm crossing the gallery with an armful of the children's storybooks when a hand closes around my wrist, a door I didn't know was a door swings open, and then I'm inside it — in the dark and the smell of starch and cedar, pressed to a wall of folded sheets with the whole warm weight of him against my front.
"Sir!" I get out, and he kisses the rest of it off me.
"Couldn't leave without having you first," he says against my mouth, like that's a perfectly reasonable thing for the ruler of a country to say in a cupboard at lunchtime.
"Due across the city within the hour — opening the winter session at the Duma, locked in that chamber till dark and home straight after.
I'm damned if I'll sit through six hours of speeches wanting you.
Watched you cross the gallery and decided the country could wait ten minutes. "
His hand is already under my skirt, and the sound I make is far too loud, so he covers my mouth with the other one, eyes glinting in the dark. “Quiet. There’s a footman twenty feet down the hall. You’ll have to be very good and very quiet for me, won’t you, kotyonok.”
I nod against his palm. Mortified. Melting.
“Shh.” His fingers slide higher, find me already soaked through my underwear, and he makes a low, approving sound against my temple. “There’s my good girl. Already dripping for me in the middle of the day. Stay quiet now.”
He has me up against the shelves in under a minute, my legs around him and the books scattered across the floor where I dropped them, his hand still sealed over my mouth to catch every sound I can’t help.
He shoves my underwear aside with two rough fingers, tests how wet I am, then frees himself and notches the thick head of his cock against me.
“Shh, shh—” he murmurs when I whimper into his palm. “Be good. Take it.”
He pushes in in one long, claiming stroke, burying himself to the root while my back hits the shelves and my cry is trapped against his hand.
It’s fast and filthy and ruinous, the wet sound of him driving into me too loud in the small space, his free hand gripping my thigh hard enough to bruise as he uses me against the wood.
His voice stays low and unhurried at my ear the whole time, even as his hips snap harder.
“Look at you. Soaked at noon, for me. This is what you’re for.
” He grinds deep, holding still for a second so I can feel how full I am, then starts fucking me in short, powerful thrusts that rock the shelves.
“Going to keep you full all day, every day, until it takes. My good girl. Quiet now—don’t you dare make a sound. ”
I try. God, I try. But every time he bottoms out I shake and whimper into his palm, and he just presses harder, muffling me, using my body like it belongs to him—because it does.
His breath is hot against my cheek. “That’s it.
Let me. Just take it. Such a good girl for me, staying so quiet while I fuck this pretty cunt in a closet. ”
It takes me silent and shaking, his palm pressed to my lips and his name locked behind it, my walls clamping down hard around him as the orgasm crashes through me in helpless waves.
He follows a few strokes later, holding deep, forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we’ve run a mile while he floods me in thick, hot pulses, still murmuring against my mouth, “Shh… good girl… take it all… stay quiet…”
Then he sets me on my feet. Fixes my skirt with appalling competence, smoothing the fabric down over the mess already starting to slip between my thighs.
Crouches and gathers the spilled storybooks off the floor and stacks them neatly back into my arms, perfectly composed, as if he hadn’t just ruined me against the shelves with a footman only twenty feet away.
"You've missed one," he says gravely and fishes the bear book out from under the bottom shelf, sets it on top of the pile.
He opens the door and walks back to go run a country as though nothing on earth has happened, while I have to lean on the shelves for a solid minute before I remember how to be a person.
***
An hour later I watch his car slide out through the gates and the white blizzard of camera flashes beyond them, and the whole palace goes quiet in the particular way it does when the one warm thing in it has gone.
Back tonight, he said. I catch myself counting the hours like a girl with something to lose.
I am one now. That's the trouble.
I keep waiting to wake up. I keep not waking up.
That's the part that's started to frighten me — not the fear that it'll end, but how much I've let myself build on the assumption that it won't. Misha cries for me, me, when he scrapes his knee, reaches past two nurses and a footman to get to my arms, and something tears open in me every single time, sweet and terrible, because you can't un-know being someone's safe place.
You can't give it back once a child hands it to you.
But the palace has other rooms than ours, and in those rooms I am not anyone's safe place. I am a problem.
I feel it in the way the senior staff go smooth and blank when I pass, the particular politeness people use for a thing they expect to be gone by spring.
I feel it the morning I come down to find photographers stacked three deep at the gates, long lenses pushed through the iron, and a footman drawing the curtains with a tight little best you stay back from the windows, miss.
I feel it in the word that's started following me down corridors, just under hearing, in two languages: the American. The nanny. You know the one.
I am a scandal in silk that costs more than every house that ever turned me out, and the silk doesn't fool a soul. Everyone in this palace knows exactly what I am but the four people at our breakfast table.
It's Lena who undoes me, in the end.
She finds me in the window seat that same grey afternoon. The house hushed with its Tsar gone to the capital, Misha down for his nap. She sits at the far end of it, careful, leaving the exact correct amount of space, and she's quiet for a long time with her knees pulled up.
Then she says, to the window, not to me: "Green."
"Hm?"
"My favorite color." She picks at the hem of her sock. "It's green. The dark kind. Like the trees at the dacha in summer." A breath. "You said I could tell you. If I decided. No test."
I have to look very hard at the snow for a moment so I don't scare her by crying.
Less than a week ago this child told me not to bother learning her favorite color, because the others learned it and left.
And now she has handed it to me across a window seat like a key, like a hostage, like the most dangerous thing she owns — here, I'll risk it, I'll let it matter — and I understand exactly what it cost, because I was a girl who guarded her favorite color too, once, in houses that didn't keep me.
"Green," I say, when I can. "I'll remember. The dark kind. Like the trees in summer."
She nods, fierce and small, and after a minute she scoots down the window seat and leans into my side, just slightly, just enough, and we watch it snow.
That's when I know I'm in real trouble. Not because of him. Because of this. Because I would now burn down the world before I'd let these two children lose one more person, and a girl with nothing to her name has no business loving anything she can't afford to keep.
The Dowager finds me there an hour later.
She doesn't sit. She looks at Lena asleep against my shoulder and then she smiles the venomous smile that means nothing good is coming.
"You and I should talk," she says. "Privately." She lifts one finger, and a nurse appears from nowhere and gathers Lena off my shoulder before I can find the words to object.
"There are things about this household you don't yet understand, and I think it's high time someone explained them to you." The smile sharpens to a point. "Come to my sitting room. Now."