Chapter Eighteen
Mirabel
The breakfast dishes are still soaking when I finally decide to call Diane.
I’ve been pacing the kitchen for twenty minutes, phone clutched in my hand, trying to figure out what I’ll say.
Outside, two of Arkady’s guards patrol the perimeter. I watch them through the window, their shapes dark against the gray morning sky. One of them speaks into his radio. The other adjusts the gun at his hip.
Always watching. Always armed.
But somehow it seems worse today. More of them, for one thing; I counted four on my way down to the kitchen this morning, where there used to be two.
A new face stationed by the east wing corridor, a man I’ve never seen before, built like a refrigerator and roughly as communicative.
He’d looked at me when I passed—not with hostility, but with the blank, assessing gaze of someone acknowledging a variable.
Like I was a door he needed to know the position of.
Something has shifted. The atmosphere in the house has tightened.
More guards. More cameras; I noticed a new one above the garden entrance yesterday, its small black eye angled toward the path I use for my morning walks.
More men moving through corridors they didn’t use to occupy, speaking in low Russian, their radios crackling with transmissions I can’t decode.
Arkady hasn’t explained any of it. Of course he hasn’t. Arkady doesn’t explain. He adjusts the parameters of my cage and expects me to keep scrubbing his kitchen counters like nothing’s changed.
I turn my back to the window and dial.
Diane answers on the second ring. “Mira? What’s wrong?”
Straight to the point. That’s Di.
“I saw something.” I move to the kitchen table, pulling out a chair. Sitting feels safer than standing. My lower back has been aching all morning, the pregnancy making its presence known in new and inconvenient ways, as if the nausea and exhaustion weren’t enough.
There’s a silence from her side, then, “Okaaaay.” She drags the word out. “Something illegal? Did you witness a murder?”
The baby shifts inside me—subtle, barely there, but enough to make me press my free hand to my stomach.
Every morning, I stand sideways in the bathroom mirror, studying the curve that’s thickening below my navel, calculating how many weeks I have before fabric can’t disguise what my body is doing. The answer keeps shrinking.
“A murder? What? No!” I shake my head. “Nothing like that.”
“So what is it then?” It could be my imagination, but Di almost sounds disappointed.
“Arkady has a secret family.” The words spill out in a rush, tumbling over each other. “A woman and a baby. They’re living in this house. Right here. And he’s keeping them hidden from me.”
She sucks in a sharp breath. “What? Mirabel, slow down. What are you talking about?”
“I saw a text message on his phone.” I keep my voice low even though I’m alone in this wing.
Even though Arkady left this morning without explanation and hasn’t come back.
The walls in this place feel like they have ears—and given the new camera I spotted yesterday, they might actually have them.
“Some doctor messaging about a woman and an infant. Here. In this house.”
“You sure it wasn’t—?”
“Positive. I know what I saw.” My throat tightens. “The message said something about her condition improving. About a baby having a positive effect on her. Anxiety medication being reduced.”
“Okay, but that could mean—”
“It said her, Diane. His patient. Someone Arkady is responsible for. Someone living here, being treated by a doctor who reports directly to him.” I press my fingers against my temple, where a headache has been building since dawn.
“And before you say it could be anything, I’ve seen her.
A woman, in the east wing. Moving around a room I’m not supposed to know exists. ”
I hear Diane’s breath catch. A pause, longer than the others. When she speaks, the casual tone has dropped away entirely. “Okay. Tell me everything. From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”
So I do.
I tell her about the locked rooms. The sections of the house that are off-limits. The doors that are always closed, always locked, fitted with hardware that doesn’t match the rest of the house—heavier, the kind of locks you install when you’re keeping something in. Or someone.
I tell her about the medical staff. The nurse in light blue scrubs who appeared one morning and disappeared again before I could ask her name.
The supplies I’ve seen delivered—not the usual household things, but medical equipment, discreet boxes that never get delivered to me, even though I should know about them.
I tell her about the phone calls. Arkady speaking in rapid Russian behind closed doors, his voice dropping into registers I’ve learned to recognize—the cold one for business, the hard one for threats, and a third I can’t categorize.
Something careful. The voice of a man tending to something fragile.
And I tell her about the woman in the window. The silhouette I saw, slight and feminine, pacing behind glass. Moving through a room that’s supposed to be empty, in a wing I’m supposed to pretend doesn’t exist.
By the time I finish, the silence on Diane’s end has acquired a specific quality. Like she’s putting the puzzle pieces together and doesn’t like the picture.
“But it could mean anything, Mira,” Diane tries to be the voice of reason, though I can hear the effort it’s costing her. “Maybe a family member? Or staff?”
“Staff that Arkady hides from me? Staff that needs a dedicated doctor and anxiety medication?” I lean back in my chair, staring at the ceiling.
A cobweb I missed during yesterday’s clean hangs from the light fitting, trembling in the draught from the ventilation.
Dammit. How did I miss that? “No. This is something else. Someone he doesn’t want me to know about. ”
“A mistress?”
I try not to gasp, even though I’ve been thinking it myself. Hearing it from Diane—blunt, practical Diane who doesn’t soften things because she respects me enough to say them straight—makes it real in a way my own spiraling thoughts haven’t managed.
“Maybe,” I say. My voice sounds thin. Distant. Like it’s coming from someone else. “Or worse. A partner. Someone he actually—” I can’t finish the sentence. The implications crowd my throat, each one uglier than the last.
“Someone he actually what?” Diane pushes, gently.
“Cares about.” My throat works. “Someone he chose. Not someone who just… happened to be convenient. Someone like me.”
“Mirabel McLeod, don’t you dare.” Diane’s voice sharpens with a ferocity that catches me off guard. “You are not convenient. You are a woman who—”
“Who cleans his house and warms his bed and doesn’t ask questions.
” The bitterness surprises even me. It rises from somewhere deep, somewhere I’ve been pushing it down for months.
“That’s what I am, Di. That’s what he’s made me.
And now I find out there’s someone else—someone important enough to hide, to protect, to bring doctors in for—and I’m just the help who doesn’t need to know. ”
“Are you in love with him?”
The question takes the fight out of me. Not because it’s unexpected—I’ve seen it coming since the conversation started. But because the answer terrifies me.
“I don’t know,” I lie.
“Bullshit, Mira. You know.”
I close my eyes. Press my hand harder against my stomach, as if the baby can anchor me to something solid while the rest of my world spins.
“Yes,” I say. “God help me, yes.”
Diane exhales—not with surprise, but with the resignation of someone who suspected the diagnosis and has just had it confirmed. “Right. Okay. So we’re dealing with that too.” A pause. I can almost hear her recalibrating. “That prick. Pack your bags and leave today. You can come stay with me again.”
“Thanks, Di.” I trace patterns on the table’s surface—circles and spirals, anything to keep my hands occupied and my mind from running further down corridors I can’t afford to explore. “But if I leave this place, I’ll stay with Dad. He needs me now.”
The words sound wrong even as I say them.
Because Dad needs money more than he needs my company, and leaving Arkady means leaving the salary that’s keeping Dad alive.
The impossible choice I’ve been trying not to think about for weeks, the one that wakes me at four in the morning and sits on my chest, pressing the air out of my lungs until I have to count my breathing to keep from drowning.
Stay, and I’m a prisoner in a gilded cage with a man who keeps secrets and other women behind locked doors. Leave, and Dad’s treatment stops. The chemo. The specialist consultations. The drugs that are the only thing standing between him and the grave.
Some choice.
“Speaking of your dad…” Diane’s tone shifts. Goes careful. “I visited him yesterday.”
Everything inside me goes still.
“How is he?” I already know the answer. Can hear it in the way she hesitates.
I’ve had bad news delivered to me so many times over the past year that I’ve developed a physical response to it—my stomach drops, my shoulders tighten, my body bracing for impact before my mind has finished processing the warning signs. “How is he really, Di?”
“He’s okay.” Too bright. Too fast. “You know Peter. Tough as nails.”
“Don’t lie to me. Everyone in my life lies to me. Please don’t you start.”
The sharpness of my own voice startles me. It comes from the same place as the bitterness—that deep well of frustration and fear that’s been filling up fast since this all began.
A beat. Then her voice softens. “He’s hanging in there, Mira. But he’s lost more weight. And he’s tired—the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. You know what I mean.”
I know what she means. I’ve seen it. The way the cancer hollows him out from the inside, leaving the shell of the man I love—the warm eyes, the quick smile, the hands that fixed everything when I was small—but removing the substance behind it, month by month, treatment by treatment.