Chapter 1
With quiet resolve, Ulayna walks down the sweeping staircase in the grand entryway of Alexi Novikov’s mansion.
Today is the day she learns to drive. Today is the day she does something she’s always wanted to do and takes an important step toward freedom and independence.
And Alexi is giving that to her, freely and without question.
She shakes her head at Alexi’s seeming idiocy.
She does not understand that man. He’s jovial, giving, and completely incensed by how she’s been treated in the past. He’s kind.
If she hadn’t seen his cold efficiency with a rifle firsthand, or witnessed him effortlessly ruling the Bratva in Chicago, she might have thought him a tryapka—a pussy. A man with no spine.
He seems to have two sides to his personality.
The cold, brutal, and ruthless pakhan of the Bratva, and the warm, thoughtful man that he only lets a few close people in his life see.
And somehow, over the past few months, she’s become one of those people.
It’s… different. And she’s not certain she can trust it yet.
Because, despite Alexi’s seemingly soft heart, everything else about the man seems to be hard as iron—his will, his spine… his abs, his pecs.
Ulayna yanks her thoughts back from that line of thinking.
It’s impossible not to notice how attractive Alexi is, but she forces herself not to linger on the idea.
She’s never really been attracted to anyone before.
At least not in a way that makes her body tingle and heat rush across her skin.
Her mind keeps telling her that she’s been hurt and has no business being attracted to a man like Alexi, but her body seems to have other ideas.
Like so many things in her life right now, it’s confusing, exciting, and overwhelming.
As she always does when she feels like her life is out of her control, Ulayna focuses on her breathing and works to ground herself in the present moment.
She remembers Viktor Frankl's teachings in his book A Man’s Search for Meaning and reminds herself that, even in the depths of great suffering, she has the power to remain optimistic.
Her life may no longer be full of suffering, but the ideology remains a North Star for her, guiding her when she feels as directionless as a leaf in the wind.
After a few more deep breaths, and when she feels more centered, she continues down the sweeping staircase.
Her sneakers squeak softly on the gleaming wooden stairs, the black-and-white Converse making her smile.
Today, she paired them with cutoffs and an oversized sweater in cheery yellow.
Not because the outfit looks particularly good, but because she can.
No one controls what she wears anymore. This outfit makes her happy, and that is the only factor she needs to consider now that she’s free.
After Alexi rescued her, he offered to buy her outfits fit for a queen.
But she’d refused because it had felt too much like charity, and her pride wouldn’t let her.
Instead, she’d insisted that they buy basic, comfortable items from the secondhand store for her new wardrobe.
At the time, she hadn't trusted that it wasn’t a trick and that he wouldn’t take it all away again.
She doesn’t feel that way anymore—with her, Alexi seems to be almost too giving.
Like if he offers her enough money, clothes, even cars, that it will somehow erase the horrors of her past.
Ulayna knows better. Nothing will ever erase her past.
But that doesn’t mean she didn’t enjoy dragging Alexi to the local secondhand store to go shopping.
The sight of him strolling down the aisles in his bespoke Armani suit was priceless.
He fit in about as well as a ballerina in a pigpen, his broad shoulders and the air of danger swirling around him like space couldn’t contain his power.
Surrounded by fluorescent lighting, sleepy-eyed clerks, and the forgotten cast-offs of the local middle-class families, he’d seemed like a god among men.
It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so… sexy.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she pauses and looks around. She glides her hand along the polished staircase banister, marveling at the smoothness of the wood but hating the depressing, masculine color. It should be a deep, warm, natural brown. Not stained to be an inky black walnut.
She’s been here at Alexi’s estate for several months but still hasn’t gotten used to the bleak, oppressive style of the palatial house.
The entire interior is decorated in a dark, eccentric baroque style.
Every wall either has damask wallpaper or hideous murals depicting gods, demons, and women being tortured.
Every fixture is gold-plated, numerous chandeliers drip from the ceiling, fluted columns flank each doorway, and the crown molding must be over a foot wide.
Individually, any of these features might be fine, but when they’re all packed together and layered on top of each other, it creates a moody, oppressive, and chaotic atmosphere that looks more appropriate for the backdrop to a reenactment of Dante’s Inferno.
Ulayna can’t help but picture it differently.
Painting the crown molding and wainscoting in a warm ivory color and covering the hideous murals in a rich teal would modernize and elevate the space.
Exchange the light fixtures, replace the carpet, and add some oversized mirrors, and it could be stunning.
Ulayna sighs. It’s not like she has any interior design experience.
Over the past four years, she’s spent plenty of time in professionally decorated mansions of all types—ultra-modern penthouses, Tudor-style estate homes, old-money manors, luxury chateaus, and even a Japanese-inspired pagoda—but that doesn’t make her an interior design expert.
She doesn’t know where this desire to give Alexi’s mansion a makeover is coming from. Her previous Masters would never have allowed—
She cuts that thought off with a shake of her head.
She has to keep reminding herself that Alexi isn’t her master.
He’s… well, she’s not really sure what he is.
Her benefactor? Her guardian? No, that doesn’t sound right.
Guardian sounds too close to parent. And while Alexi may be older than her, the way her body reacts to him is anything but childlike.
She’s not sure how to label her relationship with Alexi. It’s too new and too unique.
But whatever he is to her, he’s gifted her complete autonomy over her body—something she’s never had before. For the first time in her life, she’s free to choose when to eat, how long to sleep, and what to do with her day.
The day Alexi rescued her, he didn’t just physically unchain her. He freed her soul and her mind, too. Since he cut the chain off her ankle and saved her from the depravity of his father, Boris, she’s been practically bursting at the seams with joy and a deep desire to live life to the fullest.
When Alexi granted her her freedom, her first independent decision had been to stay.
During their first conversation, sitting at the bottom of these very stairs and swapping a shitty bottle of vodka back and forth, Alexi had offered her anything she wanted.
He’d offered to give her money so she could run, buy her a condo, send her back to Russia, anything.
Another woman was rescued at the same time as Ulayna and had taken a duffel bag full of cash and run. Ulayna didn’t blame the woman for that decision. It had been tempting. It really had. But she decided to stay because Alexi had also promised her something much more valuable—vengeance.
Ulayna had grown up in a shitty government-run boarding house for orphans in the heart of Moscow.
At the time, she thought her life couldn’t get any worse.
But at the tender age of fifteen, she’d been stolen away and forced into the Program—a sick, twisted school that trained young women to be docile, mindless sex puppets.
Following two years of brainwashing, torture, and perverse training, she’d been sold to her first Master.
None of her Masters ever kept her for long.
She was always the shiny new toy to be played with for a short time.
They would always trade her in or resell her when they slowly learned that her will had not been completely smothered by the Program.
Maybe it would have been easier to let go of her self-identity and become a mindless waif like the other girls.
But completely by accident, she’d stumbled across A Man’s Search for Meaning.
When she’d learned that Viktor Frankl had endured the nazi concentration camps with resolute optimism, the idea had stuck.
Despite the hardships of her life and the utter depravity she was subjected to daily, she embraced the idea that even if she couldn’t control anything else, she could control how she reacted to her surroundings.
This enabled her to act like the perfect living sex doll her Masters wanted her to be, without actually becoming one.
She endured. She survived. And she learned to protect that core piece of her humanity like a mother bear protecting her cub—fiercely and unwaveringly.
Her childlike features had made her a valuable asset to the Masters, and they always paid handsomely for her.
But every once in a while, she’d slip, and they’d see a sliver of the steadfast resolve that lived inside her.
A determination that someday, every man in the Program, every one of her Masters, would find their way to hell at her hands.
So when Alexi had offered to help her track down the people who had enslaved her and find her vengeance, she’d stayed. She’d stayed in this god-awful mansion and started making a list of everything she would need to learn to take down the Program.