12. Katerina
KATERINA
Aleksandr doesn’t ease me into any of it.
He tells me everything without softening a single detail into something more palatable.
None of the words make sense at first—gambling debts, a bargain struck in a room I was never in regarding my life, wiping responsibility over me with a few signatures on dotted lines.
Aleksandr listens to me unravel as each truth peels back more of my sanity than the one before it.
There was no mission.
No plan to take the Volkov Bratva down from the inside.
No greater good like I had been told there was to save.
I wasn’t deployed to dismantle a shadow operation. I wasn’t chosen because I was uniquely qualified or strong enough or trusted to carry the weight of something that mattered that would one day affect hundreds of thousands of people.
What I was… was fucking sold.
The words echo inside my skull relentlessly.
I tell him he’s lying.
I scream it, actually. I shove at him, furious and desperate for him to tell me none of it is real.
I claw for something solid to grab onto as my knees give out and I plunge to the ground.
He catches me before I do, scooping my trembling body up into his arms before taking me inside and bringing me to his office.
Documents I don’t want to look at are placed in front of me then.
The first page is a ledger entry dated four years ago.
My father’s signature, the same looping flourish he’s used on every single birthday card I still have since childhood, stares up at me beside a column of numbers that make my stomach drop.
It follows another entry and then another.
Payments missed, interest compounded, a trail of red ink that leads straight to the month he sat me down and told me I had been chosen for something monumentally important.
Aleksandr turns each page without speaking.
A notarized agreement dated the same week I was told I would be “deployed” to infiltrate the Volkov estate is next.
The terms are clinical, a marital contract enforceable under private arbitration with no right of refusal or annulment clause unless mutually agreed by both parties.
It’s a copy of the same contract I willingly signed weeks ago, believing it would be a temporary document binding me to this place.
I stare at it until the letters blur.
Each new piece of information crushed me more than the last. Every story I told myself while living here, every memory I’ve ever had beforehand, recontextualizes into a horrible picture that makes me sick to my stomach.
Every promise I clung to twists into a betrayal that hurts more than if I’d been stabbed and left to bleed out in some cold, dark alleyway.
He didn’t just trade me to a man we both believed to be a monster. He weaponized my need to feel worthy of him against me, dressing up his selfish desperation as duty I needed to uphold, feeding me lie after lie until I swallowed them whole without choking.
The grief is nearly suffocating.
It steals the air from my lungs, folds me inward until I can barely hold myself upright anymore.
Shame follows fast on its heels, burning and humiliating, for believing my father without question and trusting him so completely that I’ve forsaken myself completely, never once imagining he might choose himself over me.
The days that follow blur together.
I barely eat. I barely speak. Both feel pointless when everything I thought I knew has been stripped down to the bone and given me an entirely new and horrifically real perspective on my life.
I spend hours staring out the windows and lying awake at night replaying memories I once cherished and watch them rot in real time.
The proud looks, every gentle hand on my shoulder used to guide me down a path of his choosing, every speech about duty and sacrifice, warps into something cruel when viewed through this new lens of truth.
I search through my memories for moments where love ended and utility began or if love was ever actually present at all.
All through it, Aleksandr gives me space.
That surprises me.
He doesn’t press or demand for me to talk to him, but his attention is a constant, steady weight that hovers nearby. He watches without intruding, seeing the wreckage left in the aftermath of opening my eyes to reality, and allows me to move through it on my own terms.
I don’t know what I expected from him, but it wasn’t that. It’s another truth I can’t accept yet.
I expect to crumble the way people always do when the foundation of their entire lives collapses underneath them, but I don’t. The grief suffocates me until I refuse to let it consume me. Instead, I force myself to temper it, letting it give way to a fresh new emotion I haven’t felt in a long time.
Resolve.
I stop thinking about being saved from the consequences of what my father did to me.
I want the world to see him for who he really is.
Not the decorated hero or the honorable man behind the podium, but the coward who sold his daughter and wrapped it up in patriotism so he could sleep soundly at night.
I want justice.
For the first time since arriving at this estate, I understand something with utmost certainty. I’m done being the one who pays for his sins.