4. Sofia
SOFIA
Sleep refuses to come.
It doesn’t even pretend to try.
I lie in the center of my enormous bed, staring up at the pale canopy above me while the house settles into its midnight silence around me.
The curtains are drawn. The lights are off.
The hallway outside my room is quiet except for the occasional low murmur of a guard speaking into his phone, his voice too soft for me to catch the words.
Not that it matters. The men in this house never say anything interesting where I can hear it.
My room is beautiful in the way expensive prisons are beautiful. Cream walls. French windows. Antique dressing table. A wardrobe full of dresses chosen by women who think beige is a personality trait. There are fresh white roses on the table near the fireplace, though I didn’t ask for them.
My uncle likes flowers. Not because he’s sentimental, but because flowers look good beside a woman being prepared for sacrifice.
I turn onto my side and punch the pillow into a new shape.
It does nothing. My body remains restless, too aware of the sheets against my skin, too warm beneath the silk nightdress I changed into hours ago and immediately regretted.
Everything touches too much. The straps against my shoulders.
The hem around my thighs. The cool weight of the blanket near my hip.
I close my eyes. Dmitri’s voice waits there.
“You’ll adjust.”
My eyes open again.
Absolutely not. I sit up, shove the blanket away, and press both hands over my face.
Tomorrow, there will be another fitting. Another meeting with the wedding planner. Another conversation about flowers, music, security, and which silverware looks most appropriate for an alliance built on my complete lack of options.
In thirteen days, I’m supposed to marry Dmitri Sokolov.
In thirteen days, I will stand beside him in a church while everyone watches me become his wife. His possession. His proof that he has climbed one step higher in a world full of men who measure power by what they can take and keep.
My stomach twists.
I hate him. I hate his perfect hair. I hate his voice.
I hate the way he says my name like it’s already written in his house records.
I hate that everyone around me treats my misery as if it’s a childish inconvenience, something I will grow out of once the ring is on my finger and the doors close behind me.
I hate that my uncle knows I hate it.
And I hate that he’s doing it anyway.
I fall back against the pillows and stare at the canopy again. Then, because the universe is apparently determined to humiliate me even in private, my mind supplies a different voice.
Quiet. Low. Controlled.
“I didn’t ask.”
My skin warms.
No. I press my eyes shut harder.
Not him. Not Damir Volodin.
Not the man my uncle looks at as though he has seen a ghost crawling out of the past with a knife between its teeth. Not the man Dmitri despises. Not the man every person in that restaurant seemed to fear without needing instruction.
Definitely not the man who removed his glove like the act had been invented specifically to ruin my life.
I roll onto my stomach and bury my face in the pillow.
This is ridiculous. I’m getting married in less than two weeks, and instead of obsessing over escape plans like a reasonable doomed woman, I’m thinking about a man old enough to have destroyed entire families before I finished learning multiplication tables.
A dangerous man. An enemy. A stranger.
A stranger whose eyes moved over me for all of two seconds and somehow made my body feel more awake than Dmitri has managed in six months of formal dinners, polite hand kisses, and compliments that sound like property assessments.
I turn my face to the side and groan softly into the pillow. “Stupid clitoris,” I whisper to the empty room.
The room offers no response. Coward.
For a few minutes, I try to be sensible.
I count backward from a hundred. I breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, which only makes me feel like a very anxious kettle.
I recite the capitals of countries I have visited and countries I have only pretended to enjoy studying while tutors attempted to make me marriageable.
Nothing works. My body remains restless. Wanting.
Annoyingly, inconveniently wanting.
I throw the blanket aside and sit up again. “Fine,” I mutter.
The bedside drawer opens with a soft glide. I reach past a book I have not finished, two lip balms, a packet of sleeping tablets I never take because I don’t trust anything my uncle’s doctor prescribes, and finally find what I’m looking for.
Small. Sleek. Pink. A birthday gift from Anya, who is technically my friend and technically a terrible influence, which is why I love her. I stare at the vibrator in my hand for a moment, suddenly feeling absurd.
Then Dmitri’s voice drifts through my head again. “Women often resist structure before they learn to appreciate it.”
My face hardens. “Oh, I’m appreciating structure tonight, Dmitri.”
I lie back, push my nightdress up around my hips, and slide my hand between my thighs.
At first, it helps. The low vibration hums against me, and my body responds quickly because apparently all my noble suffering still comes with functioning nerve endings.
My breathing changes. My thighs part. My free hand grips the sheet beside my hip as pleasure begins to gather, slow and promising.
I think of nothing. That’s the plan. No Dmitri. No wedding. No uncle. No church. No cream invitation cards embossed in gold.
Just sensation. Just my own body, my own hand, the one private thing in this house that has not yet been negotiated by men in expensive suits.
The feeling builds.
Almost.
Almost.
Then it slips away.
I curse under my breath and adjust the angle. Again, it rises. Again, it gets close enough to make my stomach tighten and my toes curl against the mattress.
Again, nothing.
My body hovers cruelly at the edge, refusing to fall.
“For God’s sake,” I whisper.
I try harder. I change positions. I close my eyes.
I think of faceless things, harmless things, bodies without names and mouths without consequence.
I think of the kind of men I used to flirt with at parties before my uncle decided even harmless fun was a liability.
I think of kisses against walls, hands in my hair, the weight of someone over me.
Nothing works. Because my mind, traitorous little monster that it is, keeps circling back to one image. Black leather sliding off long fingers.
I stop fighting it. My eyes close. This time, I let myself remember him.
Damir Volodin standing in the restaurant doorway, broad shoulders wrapped in black, silver at his temples, his gaze moving over the room as if every person inside it is already accounted for.
The stillness around him. The cold control of his voice.
The way Dmitri seems smaller just by standing near him.
The way Damir looked at me.
Not like I belonged to him. Not like I was already bought. Like he had noticed something dangerous and was deciding whether to step closer.
My breath catches. The pleasure that had been teasing me for ten useless minutes suddenly deepens.
Of course.
Of course my body chooses the enemy.
I press the vibrator more firmly against myself, thighs tightening around my hand, and imagine his bare fingers instead of mine.
I imagine him standing at the side of my bed in that severe black suit, watching me with those winter-gray eyes, saying nothing because he does not need to.
I imagine his gloved hand closing around my ankle and dragging me down the mattress with terrifying patience.
A sound escapes me.
In my head, he removes the glove the same way he did in the restaurant, slowly, finger by finger, and I imagine that hand on my thigh, pushing my nightdress higher, spreading me open while he looks down at me with that calm, ruthless attention.
My body finally gives. The orgasm rolls through me hard enough to steal the breath from my lungs. My back arches. My hand clenches in the sheet. For a few seconds, the whole world narrows to heat and pulse and my own quiet, broken moan into the dark room.
When it passes, I lie still, panting at the canopy like it has personally witnessed my moral collapse. Silence returns. I turn the vibrator off and let it fall beside me on the bed.
“Well,” I whisper. That happened.
I should feel guilty. I don’t.
I feel irritated, mostly, because now Damir Volodin has managed to ruin both lunch and masturbation, and he was not even physically present for the second one.
That seems unfairly talented.
I clean up in the bathroom, avoid looking too long at my reflection, and climb back into bed with damp hands and a very serious intention to never think of him again.
It lasts approximately eight seconds, and then I picture his mouth.
“Stop it,” I tell myself.
My body, freshly satisfied and apparently shameless, offers no apology.
Eventually, sometime close to dawn, sleep finds me.
It’s not restful.
In my dream, I’m walking down the aisle in a white dress while Dmitri waits at the altar, smiling that polished, possessive smile. My uncle sits in the front pew, watching like a man pleased with a completed transaction.
The priest opens his mouth. The church doors groan behind me. And when I turn, Damir Volodin stands in the entrance, black gloves in one hand, my invitation in the other.
I wake up with my heart pounding. The room is pale with morning light. For a moment, I lie still, staring at the ceiling.
Then I start laughing.
Not loudly. Not happily, exactly. Just enough to know I’m in trouble.
By breakfast, I look perfectly normal, which is one of my more useful talents. My hair is brushed, my dress is pale yellow, my earrings are tasteful, and no one looking at me would suspect that I spent part of the night climaxing to thoughts of my fiancé’s worst enemy.
Personal growth comes in many forms.