8. Alina
ALINA
The days after losing my mother blur together in a way that makes time feel unreliable.
I wake up in the same bed. The guards are still outside the door. The schedule hasn’t changed. Breakfast arrives when it’s supposed to. The house runs exactly the way it did before.
But I don’t.
Something in me shifted that day, and now I move through the rooms aware of my body in a way I wasn’t before.
Not in a vain way, but a risk-aware way.
I notice how close people stand, how conversations stop when I enter, how staff choose their words more carefully around me, and how quickly my own reactions rise and how much discipline it takes to keep them from showing.
I also notice the political change, because grief doesn’t insulate you from power.
The guards rotate more often. New faces appear where familiar ones used to be.
Messages arrive for Mikhail that don’t wait until morning.
The house isn’t just protecting me anymore.
It’s measuring me, as if my value has shifted and no one has said it out loud yet.
Mikhail avoids me, though he doesn’t do it dramatically or obviously.
He doesn’t forbid my movements or summon me to remind me who he is, and he doesn’t punish me with rules.
He simply removes himself, and the absence feels deliberate.
If we’re in the same room, he doesn’t stay long.
If he passes me in a corridor, his eyes don’t linger.
If he speaks to me, it’s brief and clipped, as if he’s handling something volatile and doesn’t trust himself not to mishandle it.
The coldness feels intentional, as if he’s asserting control by denying proximity, both to me and to himself.
I tell myself the sex didn’t matter, and I tell myself it was grief and proximity and a lack of alternatives, and I tell myself it was survival dressed up as want.
I repeat it often, especially when my body remembers his weight or the way he held me afterward, not possessive and not gentle, but deeply unsettled, like something inside him had shifted out of alignment.
Over the next few weeks, I start noticing subtle shifts in the staff’s behavior. More careful glances and quiet respect. Less pity. Whatever happened that night traveled faster than words, even if no one speaks of it.
I don’t ask questions I don’t need answered.
Instead, I watch.
I start taking my meals in different rooms, sometimes alone, sometimes near the kitchen, where conversation slips out when people forget I can hear them. I walk the garden daily and make sure the guards know my routine so that any deviation is obvious.
If I’m being watched more closely, I want to know how.
Lira becomes my anchor.
She’s the maid who brings tea in the afternoons, always the same blend, always the same careful knock. She’s in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, with dark hair pulled back and a posture that suggests she learned early not to take up space.
The first time I thank her by name, she looks startled. “You remembered,” she says.
“I pay attention,” I reply, surprised that people here don’t remember names in the first place.
She smiles at that, small and cautious.
Over the next few days, she starts lingering just a little longer when she comes in.
She asks if I need anything else. She offers small things she doesn’t have to.
Extra blankets. A book she thinks I might like.
Information she gives without realizing it’s information.
The house has rules, but it also has habits, and habits are easier to learn.
“You’ve been here a long time,” I say one afternoon as she pours tea.
“Three years,” she replies.
“And before that?”
She shrugs. “Another house. Similar work.”
That tells me enough.
“Do people talk?” I ask, keeping my tone casual.
She hesitates. “About what?”
“About me,” I say.
Her eyes flick to the door, then back to me. “People notice things,” she says carefully.
“So, they noticed…?” I press.
She nods once. “They noticed he hasn’t killed you yet.”
That confirms what I already knew.
After she leaves, I sit with the tea cooling in my hands and think about how fast my status changed without my doing anything at all. That’s the part that makes my skin itch. Importance in a place like this isn’t protection. It’s exposure.
I start asking Lira small questions about the house, but never about Mikhail directly. Instead, I ask her about how long people stay. Who comes and goes. Which rooms are used and which ones stay closed.
She answers what she can.
In return, I listen when she talks about her sister, about money she sends home, and how careful you have to be here to survive without becoming invisible. We understand each other on that level.
That evening, Lira walks with me toward the sitting room instead of peeling off toward the staff corridor like she usually does.
She’s carrying a small notebook and stops by the sideboard as if checking something off.
“They’re adjusting menus this week,” she says, not looking at me. “Routine review.”
I nod, already used to decisions being made around me rather than for me. She hesitates, then adds, “Is there anything you don’t eat?”
I think about how strange that question is here. “I eat what’s put in front of me.”
“That wasn’t what I asked,” she says, still casual, still careful.
I glance at her. She’s pretending to read the notebook, but her attention is on me. “Why?”
“Because sometimes it helps,” she says. “To know.”
“Know what?”
“What keeps someone steady.”
I almost laugh, then stop myself. “You won’t find that in the kitchen.”
She finally looks up. “Try me.”
I sit down slowly, folding my hands in my lap. “When I was a kid,” I say, choosing the words carefully, “my mother made potato vareniki when things were bad.”
Lira’s pen stills. “It wasn’t special,” I continue. “Just dough, potatoes, butter, onions. She made it when she didn’t want me asking questions.”
“What kind of potatoes?” Lira asks.
“Yellow,” I say. “Mashed rough. Not smooth.”
She nods once and writes something down. “Boiled or fried onions?”
“Both,” I answer. “She browned them after.”
“Salt?”
“Too much,” I say, and this time I do smile, just a little.
Lira closes the notebook. “All right.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I add quickly. “The kitchen here won’t—”
“I didn’t say it would,” she replies, already turning away. “Dinner’s at seven.”
She leaves before I can decide whether I regret saying any of it. At seven, the tray arrives, but it’s not one of the guards who brings it. It’s Lira. She sets it down without comment and lifts the lid.
I stare.
“They didn’t have sour cream,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I told them butter was enough.”
Words fail me at this act of kindness, but my eyes mist over. I pick up the fork because my hands know what to do even if my head doesn’t.
“Try it,” she says.
I do. For a few seconds, the room disappears. When I swallow, my eyes burn and I blink hard, annoyed at myself.
“It’s not exact,” Lira says. “But it’s close.”
“It’s close,” I manage.
She nods, satisfied. “Eat. It’ll go cold.”
I take another bite, then another. “You didn’t have to do this,” I say thickly.
She shrugs. “I wanted to.”
I look up. “Why?”
Lira meets my eyes. “Because no one here will protect you for free,” she says. “But people protect what they recognize.”
“And you recognize me?” I ask.
She considers that. “I recognize what it costs not to disappear.” She leaves me alone after that. I finish everything on the plate.
At night, I sleep badly, but not out of fear.
My body just doesn’t know how to settle anymore.
I wake up tense, aware of the bed, the door, the space where Mikhail isn’t.
It’s silly, because I was the one who asked for the lock…
and yet, I’d like to have him here, beside me.
At first, I kept blaming him for my mother’s death, but now that the vision is clearing, I see that only one man caused all of this. My father.
When I do see Mikhail, it’s never alone. He stands at a distance when staff are present. He speaks to Enzo or someone else, never to me. If our eyes meet, it’s brief and unreadable.
It makes me angry in a quiet way.
I didn’t imagine that night. I didn’t invent what happened afterward. He didn’t look like a man satisfied with conquest. He looked like someone who realized he’d crossed a line he’d drawn for a reason.
Knowing that gives me leverage I don’t fully understand yet.
I go back to my father’s history with fresh focus.
I stop thinking about him as a man who made mistakes and start thinking about him as someone who survived longer than he should have. That requires planning. Redundancy. Connections.
I write lists again, but differently this time. I think about who benefited from his silence. Who gained time. Who showed up only when things got worse. I ask Lira if there’s a way to access old deliveries or visitor logs. She hesitates. “That’s not something guests usually request.”
“I’m not a guest,” I reply.
She studies me for a moment, then nods. “I’ll see what I can do.”
It takes three days.
When she comes back, she doesn’t bring papers. She brings names of men who didn’t get along with the Morins. I write them down. One name appears more than once. I don’t recognize it, but that doesn’t mean anything.
Mikhail finally speaks to me four days later. It’s in the hall outside the study. He’s on his way out, jacket on, expression set, phone already in his hand. “Alina,” he says.
I stop.
“Yes?”
“You’ll be having dinner with my mother tonight.”
It’s not a question.
I nod. “All right.”
He hesitates, then adds, “Be careful what you say.”
I meet his eyes. “I always am.”
For a moment, something like regret shines in those beautiful eyes of his.
Then it’s gone. Dinner is formal and restrained.
His mother watches me with interest that doesn’t feel kind or cruel.
Just evaluative. I answer questions without giving anything away.
I don’t mention my parents. I don’t mention the night that changed everything.
When I return to my room, I feel heavier than I did before.
The house is pressing in again.
I shower and sit on the bed afterward, towel wrapped tightly around me, trying to shake the sense that something is building without my permission.
I fall asleep late.
When I wake, it’s with a sharp wave of nausea that comes out of nowhere. I sit up fast, heart racing, hand flying to my mouth. The room tilts. I breathe through it, waiting for it to pass.
It doesn’t. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and barely make it to the bathroom before I retch. There’s nothing in my stomach, just acid and the unpleasant realization that my body is reacting to something I don’t understand yet.
When it passes, I sit on the floor with my back against the tub, breathing hard. This makes no sense.
I haven’t been sick or eaten anything unusual. I don’t feel weak, just unsettled and off-balance in a way that’s new. I press my hand flat against my stomach and sit there. The thought comes uninvited and sharp enough to make my breath hitch.
No. He used protection.
I push it away immediately. There are too many variables, too much stress and upheaval.
Still, when I stand and look at myself in the mirror, I don’t recognize the woman staring back.