16. Kira
KIRA
I sat across from Nikolai's maid, thumbing through the magazine on the table between us, thankful he'd let me come out of the room to be a part of the household today.
Some strange man was watching over me today, however, not the usual ones.
And Gregg had healed up enough that I hadn't seen him in a few days.
Anya was busy stitching something, though it was a rough start on a scrap of white material, and I couldn’t tell what she was doing.
But it looked like artwork, not sewing.
Every so often she looked up at me and smiled softly, but I always looked away sharply.
I wasn't interested in small talk or hearing why she, too, thought I was being too hard on Nikolai.
Vlad had already given me an earful, which I expected from him because he seemed the most human of all the men who came in and out of this house.
But when Yakov told me to grow up and stop blaming Niko for my "daddy issues" I'd had enough.
"You need anything?" Anya asked, but I shrugged one shoulder and glanced at my cold tea. I hadn't really touched it.
I hated the flavor of ginger, though Anya insisted that it was good for an upset stomach when I refused lunch on account of feeling slightly sick.
I prayed I had just come down with something but the lingering thought that I could be pregnant had lodged in my brain and wouldn't give up.
"I'm fine," I said, turning another page of the magazine without looking at it and pushed the tea a few inches away.
Anya's eyes flicked up but she didn't comment.
She returned to her stitching while I stared blankly at pages I wasn't even seeing.
But since she had bridged the silent gap between us, I couldn’t ignore that she was there, trying to be friendly.
So I sighed and closed the magazine.
"What is that you're making?" I finally asked, nodding at the fabric on the table in front of her. It wasn't a conversation starter so much as something to think about besides the churning in my stomach.
She held it up so I could see. It was a bird, or the beginning of one, stitched in blue thread against the white cloth.
The outline was rough but there was something graceful about the way she'd shaped the wing.
"A bluebird," she said. "I make them for the church bazaar every spring. They sell for a few dollars each but the women there like them. And," she said with a grin, the money goes to help battered women."
"It's pretty."
"Thank you." She smoothed it back into the table and picked up the needle again. "My mother taught me. She could stitch anything. Flowers, animals, whole landscapes on a piece of linen the size of a napkin."
I watched her work for a minute and wondered why she found that particular hobby enjoyable.
It looked like a pain in the ass to me, but then she worked for the biggest pain in the ass I knew.
Maybe she just had extraordinary patience.
"How long have you worked for him?" I asked.
Her eyes flicked up in confusion for a second before she smiled. "Eleven years. Since before he bought this house."
"Eleven years?" I tried to imagine spending that much time in someone else's home, cooking their meals, washing their clothes, learning the rhythms of their life until you knew them better than they probably knew themselves.
"And you've just been here this whole time? Cooking and cleaning for a criminal?"
She didn't flinch at that and her steady expression didn’t change, like she was working out what I was getting at.
"Does he kidnap women often?" I asked and I realized as I was saying it how snarky it sounded. But he deserved the scrutiny.
"You're the first woman he's ever brought here," she said. "In eleven years I've never seen him bring anyone home. Not a girlfriend, not a date, not a guest who stayed past midnight. Not once."
I didn't know what to do with that so I picked up the ginger tea and forced down a cold sip to distract myself from the expression on her face.
"What kind of man is he?" I asked. "When he's not out kidnapping women and catfishing them?" I felt sadness well up inside me.
Here I was, wondering who Nikolai really was, but I couldn’t ask him myself.
I didn't believe a word out of his mouth anymore.
One minute he was a sweet man, the next he seemed like a monster.
Anya worked the needle through the bluebird's wing while she talked.
"He reads more than anyone I've ever met.
Most mornings he's in his study before I'm even up, already through half a book with his coffee going cold.
And he doesn't raise his voice at me, but he pays me more than I'd make anywhere else. "
"That doesn't make him a good person." I felt defensive. Maybe the reason I needed to know more about him was more personal than just what my enemy looked like. If I was pregnant with this man's baby I figured I should know what that baby's father was like.
"No, I suppose it doesn't." She paused and set the stitching down. "I know you don't believe it, but Nikolai is a good man, Kira."
I looked down at the magazine and opened it back up. I wanted to believe that Nikolai was a good man, but it was hard to wrap my mind around.
I understood loyalty, which was clearly why Anya thought so highly of him. I grew up surrounded by it. My father had people who'd been with our family for decades.
The cooks, the drivers, the security who rotated through our home.
They were loyal to my father not because they feared him but because he'd earned it over years of treating them well.
They'd earned his respect.
But loyalty to his staff and loyalty to his family were two different things, and my mother had figured that out a long time ago.
That was why she spent most of her time in Europe with my aunts, traveling between Paris and Milan and a villa in Tuscany that she'd purchased with money my father gave her to keep quiet.
God I missed her.
She was there now—somewhere in Europe, shopping and drinking wine and doing whatever it was she did to drown the pain of a broken heart caused by my father.
She had no idea I'd been taken.
Or maybe she did and she was handling it the way she handled everything, which was to look the other way so she didn't have to feel the hurt.
What I wouldn’t do to speak to her.
But I couldn't, even if I wanted to.
No one was coming to rescue me.
And hey, if I didn't think about it too hard, Niko wasn't all that bad. He already treated me better than my father treated my mother.
I just didn't know how a man twice my age, who kidnapped me, could ever truly love me.
It was so twisted and wrong.
I was doomed to be trapped here until he got tired of me or realized my father was never coming and sent me to an early grave.
A tear ran down my cheek and I wiped it away quickly, but Anya caught the action. She set her stitching aside and reached across the table and laid her hand over mine.
"You should lie down," she said gently. "You look tired, Kira. Rest would be good for you."
I wanted to argue but the nausea was getting worse and the tears were threatening to come back and I didn't want to fall apart sitting here across from her.
And I especially didn't want to vomit right here either.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
I slid off the chair and Vlad walked me upstairs without saying anything.
He opened the bedroom door and I went through and he pulled it shut behind me.
When I curled up in bed, the tears came.
This time away from my family had taught me a few things.
First of all, my father didn't care if I was dead or alive.
And second, that I missed my mother more than I ever told anyone.
But mostly, that I had a husk of a heart that had been hollowed out by watching my family disintegrate over the years, wondering why my mother ran away.
I had always blamed her for running.
Father was there.
He provided.
He was home every night.
But the shouting and the coldness… It had never been right. To a child's brain, having their parents together meant more than having them happy.
As an adult, I realized he never treated her right, but it took this situation to open my eyes all the way. Nikolai stole me off the street but he'd been nothing but loving and kind since.
He provided what I needed. He was genuine with me, even when it was uncouth. And he cared when I was hurting, even if he didn't know how to show it.
I couldn’t say that same thing about my own family.
Maybe I'd been too hard on him.
And if I had, what sort of father would he be? Because more and more I was sensing the reality that I must be pregnant.
My period was later and later, and the sickness came more frequently every day.
I just couldn't trust that Nikolai could love me the way I deserved, not when the only example I'd see of love was such a failure.
And how could he be a father if he couldn’t be a lover first?
I cried myself to sleep, hoping he didn't wake me when he came in this time.
I might well just break down and tell him.
And I wasn't sure what that would mean to a man who forced me to marry him against my will.