10. Sofia #3
Damir stills. Then he turns toward the dresser.
I immediately regret speaking. “What are you doing?” I ask.
He opens the top drawer, and my heart jumps.
Bluebeard. The word slams through my head before I can stop it.
The drawer is deep, old, dark wood lined with black velvet. For one terrible second, I imagine keys. Weapons. Photographs. A dead woman’s jewelry. Proof that my uncle was right and I have walked willingly into a house built around secrets and blood.
Damir reaches inside. I take one step back.
He notices. Of course he notices.
His eyes lift to mine. “I’m not going to hurt you, Sofia.”
The words should not comfort me, but they do anyway.
I hate that even more.
He removes something from the drawer.
Thread. Just thread. Dark, thick, almost black.
Then he takes off the ring from his own hand.
The family ring.
I’ve noticed it before because apparently noticing his hands has become a full-time occupation I didn’t apply for. It’s heavy and old, made of dark metal with the Volodin crest carved into the face. Not polished smooth like new jewelry. Worn. Carried. Survived.
He holds it for a moment, and something in his expression changes.
Barely, but I see it.
“This belonged to my father,” he says.
I stop moving.
He doesn’t look at me while he speaks. “Before him, my grandfather. It was pulled from the ruins after the fire.”
The room goes quiet except for the sound of the sea below.
My throat tightens for reasons I don’t appreciate.
Damir threads the cord through the ring once, then again, with surprising patience for a man who shot my fiancé less than an hour ago. His hands are large, the ring larger still, absurdly oversized for me even before the thread is involved.
“You can’t be serious,” I say.
“I am often serious.”
“That ring is enormous.”
“Yes.”
“It will look insane.”
“Yes.”
“It’s going to look like I stole jewelry from a statue.”
This time, he does smile.
Barely.
But definitely.
“Come here.”
“No.”
“Sofia.”
I sigh dramatically because if I don’t make a joke, I may feel something, and feeling things in Bluebeard’s cliff house seems unwise.
I step closer. He takes my left hand, and my pulse behaves stupidly. The contact is not intimate, not compared to his mouth on mine, his teeth at my neck, his hand at my waist. But somehow, this feels more dangerous. He’s not kissing me. Not trapping me. Not dragging me away from bullets.
He’s holding my hand with terrifying care.
He wraps the thread around my finger, adjusts the ring so it rests against the base, then ties the cord carefully enough that the massive signet sits securely despite being cartoonishly too large.
It looks ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.
The ring covers half my lower finger, dark and heavy against my skin, the thread looped around it in an improvised knot that should look temporary and absurd.
It does.
But it also looks like something else. Something old. Something claimed from ashes and tied to me because I said I had no ring.
My chest tightens.
For some reason, that annoys me more than fear would have.
I stare at it.
Damir’s thumb brushes once over the thread, checking that it holds. “There,” he says.
I swallow and look up at him. He’s closer than I realized. His eyes are on my face, not the ring. Pale. Steady. Impossible to read.
I should make another joke. I should ask whether his family ring comes with a curse or a complimentary death threat. Instead, I look back down at the ridiculous, enormous ring tied to my finger with black thread.
Something shifts in my heart.
Not love. God, no.
Not safety either.
I’m in a stranger’s bedroom, in a cliff house that reminds me of a fairy tale about murdered wives, wearing a bloodstained wedding dress and a ring that could knock someone unconscious if I swung my hand too fast.
But it’s the first thing today that has been given to me because I asked. It wasn’t negotiated or arranged. Not approved by Dmitri or my uncle or some old family council pretending violence becomes sacred when witnessed by a priest.
My throat feels tight.
That is inconvenient. Deeply inconvenient.
I flex my fingers, watching the oversized ring wobble slightly but stay.
“It looks ridiculous,” I say.
His gaze remains on me. “Yes.”
“You should be embarrassed.”
“I’m not.”
“Of course you aren’t.”
His thumb moves once more over my knuckle. A slow, absent touch.
My breath catches.
His eyes drop to my mouth. The room becomes too quiet.
Then Damir says, low and calm, “Now you have a ring.”
I look at him, the warning from my uncle still echoing somewhere in the back of my mind. He killed his wife.
Maybe I have walked into the monster’s house. Maybe this is the first locked door. Maybe the cliff, the portraits, the empty rooms, the ashes, the ring, all of it is just another beautiful cage.
But when I look down at the thread tied around my finger, at the heavy Volodin crest resting against my skin, I can’t stop the strange, unwanted warmth that curls in my chest.
It feels dangerous.
It feels stupid.
It feels like the first honest thing that has happened to me all day.