5. Alina
ALINA
The sentence doesn’t land, at least not for the first ten minutes. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The phone in my hand feels unreal. My fingers go numb. “No,” I whisper.
Mikhail’s eyes don’t move. “It happened an hour ago.”
I shake my head hard, because if I say yes, it becomes real. “She doesn’t go anywhere alone.”
“She did today,” he replies.
“Why?” I say, and my voice breaks. “Why would she go?”
Mikhail doesn’t answer that. He looks past me toward the door. “Enzo.”
Enzo appears fast, like he was already coming.
Mikhail’s voice turns cold. “Get the details. Hospital, status, witnesses. Now.”
Enzo nods once and leaves.
I’m still shaking my head. “No. No, no, no.”
My knees buckle, and I catch myself on the desk. The edge digs into my palms, and I welcome the pain because it’s something I can name.
Mikhail stays where he is and watches me, and there’s something tight and held in the way he does it, like he’s already moved in his head and stopped himself at the last second.
I look up at him, and the anger hits, sudden and wild. “You said she was safe.”
Mikhail’s eyes flash. “I said she was under watch.”
“That means safe,” I snap.
“It means monitored,” he says, voice tight now. “It means I knew where she was. It does not mean I can stop a bullet in a city street.”
My chest burns. “You could have moved her.”
“She didn’t want to leave,” he replies. “She didn’t want to be brought here. She fought it.”
I stare at him, and the grief rises so hard it makes me dizzy. “Then she died because she didn’t want to be trapped.”
Mikhail’s gaze hardens. “She died because someone sent a message.”
The words hit through my panic. I grab onto them because they give shape to chaos. “To whom?”
Mikhail’s mouth tightens. “To me.”
My hands start shaking again. “This is because of you.”
“It’s because of what your father did,” he snaps back, and now his anger is fully in the room. “It’s because someone thinks they can take what’s mine and hurt me through you.”
I flinch at the word mine, and I hate myself for it because it still does something to my body even now.
I can’t breathe properly. I press a hand to my chest and try to force air in.
Mikhail steps closer. “Sit,” he orders.
“I don’t want to sit,” I choke out.
He grabs my elbow firmly and guides me to the edge of the bed and pushes me down, then he crouches in front of me so I can’t look away from him. His eyes lock onto mine. “Breathe,” he says, voice rough.
I try. I fail.
Tears spill anyway. I press my hands over my face, and a sound comes out of me that I don’t recognize. It’s too broken to be a sob. It’s too raw to be a scream.
Mikhail’s hands close around my wrists and pull them down. “Look at me,” he says.
I shake my head, but he holds my wrists steady until I do.
His eyes are hard, but there’s something else there too, something that wasn’t there earlier. Not softness, exactly. Presence. The fact that he’s still here, still in front of me, still holding me in place when everything else just vanished.
“My father is dead,” I whisper, and my voice sounds small. “And now she’s dead too.”
Mikhail’s hand closes at his side. “Not yet.”
I blink at him. “What?”
Enzo comes back in fast, face pale in a way that makes my stomach drop deeper.
He speaks to Mikhail first. “Hospital confirmed. She didn’t make it.”
I make a sound that is half laugh and half choke. My body folds forward, and Mikhail catches me before I hit the floor. His arms go around me, and for a second I fight it, because I don’t want to need him. From my state of haze, I hear him say some words to Enzo, who leaves immediately.
Then I stop fighting because I don’t have anything left to hold onto. I clutch his shirt with both hands and press my face to his chest. His body is solid. Warm. Real. My tears soak into expensive fabric, and I don’t care.
Mikhail doesn’t say sorry or that it’ll be okay. He holds me tighter, and his voice drops close to my ear. “I will find who did it.”
I shake my head against him. “It won’t bring her back.”
“No,” he says. “It will end it.”
I pull back enough to look at him, eyes blurry. “You can’t fix this.”
His gaze burns into mine. “I don’t need to fix it,” he says. “I need to punish it.”
The rage in him is so clear, it steadies me for a second. Not because I like it, but because it gives my grief a place to go. I wipe my face with the back of my hand, then I hate that I did it because it feels childish. My body starts shaking again, deeper, from the inside out.
Mikhail’s hand slides to the back of my neck, firm and grounding. “Stay here,” he tells me. “Don’t leave this room.”
“Where would I go?” I whisper.
His eyes flick to the door. “Nowhere you can be reached.”
The words should scare me.
Instead, they make my throat tighten again.
I don’t have anyone.
I don’t have a mother to call. I don’t have a father to hate. I have a husband who bought me, and a second man out there who might try to take me, and the people who knew my mother’s grocery route well enough to kill her.
Mikhail stands, but he doesn’t step away. He looks down at me, and his gaze is sharp enough to hurt.
“You’re not alone,” he says.
I let out a broken laugh. “That’s a lie.”
His eyes narrow. “No,” he says. “It’s ownership. There’s a difference.”
I should slap him, or scream. Instead, I stare up at him and feel my body betray me again, because ownership from him still feels safer than being floating and untethered. In reality, I want my mother. But my mother is gone. Mikhail starts to turn, and panic spikes so hard, it feels physical.
“Don’t leave,” I say, and it comes out harsher than I expect.
He pauses. I push up from the bed and step into him, close enough that my chest hits his. My hands land on his shirt, fingers gripping fabric the way I gripped it when I cried.
His eyes drop to my hands, then lift.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” he says, voice low.
“I know,” I whisper. My throat hurts. Everything hurts. “I’m not ordering. I’m asking.”
I lift my face. I don’t give myself time to think, because thinking will stop me and I don’t want to stop.
“I can’t do this alone,” I whisper.
Mikhail’s gaze pins me. “You’re doing it,” he says. “You’re standing.”
“I’m standing,” I agree, breath shaking. “I’m also falling apart.”
His eyes flick to my mouth again, and the heat in his stare turns my grief into something jagged.
I hate him for it.
I hate myself for responding. My fingers tighten in his shirt. “Tell me what to do,” I whisper, and it’s the most humiliating thing I’ve ever said, because it’s surrender, and I know it.
Mikhail’s eyes darken. “Careful,” he says. “You don’t say that to me unless you mean it.”
I swallow. “I mean it.”
His hand rises, cups the back of my head, and pulls me in.
The kiss is not soft or patient. It takes my mouth, steals my breath, and drags a sound out of me that I try to swallow back.
My hands slide up his chest, gripping harder, and he holds me there, locked against him, as if he’s decided that if I’m going to break, I’m going to break in his arms.