Chapter Eighteen #2
“You should visit soon,” Diane adds quietly.
Soon. The word makes me flinch. Soon means now. Soon means before it’s too late. Soon means getting past the guards and the tracking apps and the man who decided my movements are his to control, all so I can sit beside my dying father and pretend I’m not falling apart.
“I need to get out of here and see him.” I stand, moving back to the window. The guards are still there. Still watching. One of them has shifted position—closer to the east wing entrance now. “Without those guards breathing down my neck every second.”
“Be careful.” Diane’s worry bleeds through the phone. “Those kidnappers could still be after you. And if something happened—”
“I don’t care.” I sound brittle as I say it. “Arkady can’t keep me from seeing my own father. I won’t let him.”
The conviction in my voice sounds stronger than I feel. Because the truth—the truth I won’t say to Diane, won’t say to anyone, can barely admit to myself in the dark hours when sleep refuses to come—is that I’m not sure I can leave even if I want to.
Not because of the guards. Not because of the locks or the cameras or the tracking app that pulses on my phone like a digital leash.
Because of him.
Because every time I resolve to pack my bag and walk out the door, some part of me—the stupid, hopeless, self-destructive part that looked at Arkady Laurov and thought yes, this man, this dangerous, damaged, impossible man—that part grabs the doorframe and holds on.
Whispers that maybe I’m wrong about the woman in the window.
That maybe there’s an explanation I haven’t considered.
That maybe if I just wait a little longer, he’ll finally open one of those locked doors and let me see what’s behind it.
Hope. The most dangerous thing in this house, and I can’t seem to stop manufacturing it.
“Di, I have to go.” My voice steadies, or at least performs steadiness well enough to pass. “I’ll figure out a way to see Dad this week. Even if I have to fight Arkady for it.”
“You call me the second anything feels off. I mean it, Mira. Anything. A weird look from one of those guards, a door that won’t open, Arkady so much as raising his voice—”
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
I cut the call, set the phone on the table, and sit with my hands flat on the wood, staring at the grain.
I think back to the woman I used to be. It feels like a distant memory or a half-remembered dream.
The registrar who had a neat flat and a predictable schedule, who wasn’t involved with Russian crime families and bulletproof glass and a pregnancy she can’t tell anyone about.
That woman is gone. I don’t know who replaced her, but she’s sitting in an overpriced mansion, wearing clothes bought with money earned by sleeping with her employer, and she’s four months pregnant and completely, terrifyingly alone.
The baby moves again. A flutter, like a bird trapped behind glass.
I know, I think. I’m scared too.
I go wash the breakfast dishes. Not because they need washing—though they do; they’ve been soaking for an hour, and the water is cold and greasy—but because the motion helps.
The rhythm of it. Scrub, rinse, stack. Scrub, rinse, stack.
My hands know what to do even when my mind is somewhere else entirely, and right now my mind is in three places at once: with Dad in his hospital bed, with the woman in the east wing window, and with the man who put a lock on every door in this house except the one to my room…
because he doesn’t need to lock mine. I stay voluntarily.
That’s the cruelest part. I’m a voluntary prisoner.
Through the window above the sink, I watch the guards change position.
The new one—the refrigerator-shaped man from the east corridor—has moved outside.
He stands by the garden gate with his hands clasped in front of him, the posture of a man who’s been told to stand somewhere and will stand there until someone tells him to move or he dies, whichever comes first.
I count them. One by the gate. One at the east wing entrance. One patrolling the south lawn. And—I crane my neck to see—a fourth, stationed near the driveway, watching the approach road with binoculars.
Four guards visible. More, probably, in positions I can’t see from here.
This isn’t normal security. This isn’t the standard two-man rotation that’s been in place since I arrived.
This is a siege posture. Something has definitely changed—something Arkady knows about and I don’t, because I never know, because knowing would require him to treat me as something more than staff.
I dry my hands on a tea towel and lean against the counter, arms crossed, staring at the garden without seeing it. My mind runs through possibilities. Has one of his dodgy business deals finally drawn the wrong kind of attention? Are there more mobsters out there waiting to take him down?
The tea towel twists in my hands. I didn’t realize I was wringing it until the fabric bites into my palms.
I need to see Dad. I need answers about the woman in the east wing. I need to tell someone—anyone—about the baby growing inside me before my body announces it for me.
I need to stop being a passive observer in my own life.
But the guards are at the gate. The cameras are in the corridors. And Arkady’s phone tracks every step I take, every route I travel, every minute I spend outside the radius he’s drawn around me in invisible ink.
I set the tea towel down. Smooth it flat. A small act of order in a world that’s lost all shape.
Then I pull out my phone and open the messaging app. My thumbs hover over the keyboard.
I could text Arkady. Demand answers. Demand to see Dad. Demand to know why there are twice as many armed men on the grounds as there were last week, and what exactly he’s hiding in the east wing, and whether the woman behind that window is the reason he disappears for hours without explanation.
I could demand all of it.
But I already know what he’d say. It’s none of your concern. Or worse—nothing at all. Just that flat, shuttered look he wears when I’ve asked a question he has no intention of answering. The look that says you signed a confidentiality agreement, and you’re staff, and I decide what you need to know.
I close the app. Lock the phone. Set it face-down on the counter.
Not today. Today I swallow it. Today I clean the house and cook the meals and pretend I don’t notice the new cameras or the extra guards or the way the walls are closing in, centimeter by centimeter, so slowly you could almost convince yourself it isn’t happening.
But tomorrow.
Tomorrow I stop swallowing.