Chapter 19 - Nadya
It seems impossible that a modestly refurbished warehouse can feel like more of a haven than a glitzy, five-star hotel with a view of Central Park. But my palms slap furiously against these windows that do not, and cannot, open, and all I am is trapped.
“Just let me go,” I beseech, and it may as well fall on deaf ears.
Over the years, I’ve earned a considerable array of emotions from my family, friends, and even the odd stranger. Yet I’d maintain that I’ve never been looked at with such pity.
It manifests in different shades.
Iosif can’t look at me for longer than a second, and not at all if I, by some happenstance, accidentally catch his eye.
Sweet, wonderful Miron looks uncomfortable when he brings me food, trying to convince me to eat, no matter how many times I shriek about a lack of appetite.
The rest of my brothers aren’t here. I’d almost be relieved by that if I weren’t certain about what’s keeping them so damn busy.
They’re laying into Viktor.
“Is he okay?” I entreat, and no one will answer me.
It’s been thirty-eight hours.
Why the fuck won’t anyone answer me?
Neither my sister, Darya, nor Yulia can stop staring at me like I’ve grown another head.
It makes no fucking sense, if you ask me.
I know myself. They all know me. It isn’t exactly a knock-me-over-with-a-feather surprise that I caught feelings for a morally ambiguous bastard.
In fact, to me, it seems pretty par for the course.
Darya disagrees, apparently. Shocker.
“Nadya,” she sighs my name the way she tends to often, with all this unearned condescension.
I love my sister to death. But she doesn’t get it.
She couldn’t. That’s why she’s got this look on her face—almost distressed by her confusion.
I can’t fix it. That’s what no one is getting.
I don’t want to fix it if it means erasing Viktor. I can’t.
“Don’t.”
“Surely, you understand who the enemy is here. And it isn’t us. We’re your family, and you’re treating us like—”
I whirl away fully from the window and stalk across the room to where she sits at the foot of the bed, an ankle demurely tucked behind the other. “Like what? Like you’re holding me here against my fucking will? Like I’ve lost my mind?”
Darya’s brows knit together. “Haven’t you?”
My nostrils flare, and I swear I could breathe fire.
“Yulia?” Darya summons our sister-in-law with a lift of her fingers. “Please, this is your area of expertise. Surely this falls under the purview of traumatic injuries? Is Nadya’s erratic and feral behavior not indicative of a psychotic break of some sort? It looks like PTSD to me.”
Yulia pushes her strawberry blonde hair away from her face with a worried laugh. “Darya, sweetie, we don’t really throw around words like ‘psychotic break’,” she tries.
“It’s not like she’ll let us take her to a hospital and get her some sort of formal diagnosis,” Darya counters, eyeing me like I’m a lunatic about to start chewing my hair.
Let’s ignore that I don’t exactly feel far from something like that.
“Stop fucking talking about me like I’m not here!” I scream, feeling the tingle of my boiling blood rush to my face. It pricks my tears yet again. I’ve cried more in the last day than I have the rest of my fucking life.
“You might as well not be,” Darya says.
“Well, I’m fucking sorry, D. So, so fucking sorry that everyone’s not perfect. This—” I crudely gesture to myself, maniacal and unable to quell it. “—This is what it’s like when you’re a properly emoting person!”
Darya exhales harshly, like I’m costing her patience. “He kidnapped you. Are you genuinely not aware of it? I’m on your side, Nadya. I love you. I am worried about you. We all are.”
“It’s true,” Yulia chips in, her green eyes pleading with me.
For what? I don’t know what I can give them. The truth isn’t anything anyone wants from me.
“Isn’t love understanding? Shouldn’t it earn me, like—I don’t know, a shred of fucking faith?” I demand, hands wringing in the air.
“Faith in what?” Darya demands coldly. “In your defense of a vile man who abducted you and held you captive?”
“Faith in me!” I cry, my voice breaking.
I don’t care. I just don’t fucking care anymore.
“That’s all I’ve ever asked for, and it’s fine when it’s all, ‘Oh, look at Nadya, off being a daredevil again! Isn’t she so crazy?
Isn’t it so fucking funny?’ and then shut me down whenever anyone thinks it’s too out of hand.
What about my right to—my right over myself?
What about the fact that I have two eyes and a functioning fucking brain and I have the capacity to understand the things I see and feel and—”
My breaths pick up the pace with every word, until I’m hyperventilating. I only realize it when Yulia is instantly in front of me, her soft hands cupping my cheeks, shushing me, bringing me to her chest, and smoothing her hand through my hair.
The wail that leaves me is lurid and ugly.
“It’s okay,” Yulia coos, and it isn’t, it isn’t remotely fucking okay. “It’s going to be okay.”
How?
“I can’t stop seeing it,” I hiccup, my tears soaking through Yulia’s powder blue sweater. “Every time I close my eyes, I—I see blood. I see his blood…”
“I know, sweetie. I understand.” Her hand never relents.
“Where is he? Why won’t anyone tell me where he is? I just—Maybe if I knew he was okay. I can’t just stay here! I can’t, I have to—”
She reaches into the pocket of her jeans with the hand not petting me and draws something from it.
I don’t even see what it is. A pill? I think, a brief instant before she’s already pressing it into my mouth.
My head is spinning too hard, my face tingling like fire ants are biting me, and I don’t fight her.
I swallow it dry and push away the glass of water Darya appears with.
I knock it right out of her hand. I only sob harder.
“Sit with me,” Yulia cajoles, steering me away from the wreckage. “If you want to talk, I want to listen. Please, Nadya. The worst thing you can do is keep it all inside.”
Is it? I don’t think it’s the worst thing. I don’t even think it’s fucking close to the worst thing. I’m kind of an expert, aren’t I?
I end up sitting at the foot of the bed, where my sister had been just minutes ago.
All it takes is sitting down, and it's as if the autopilot I've been running on for the last day has its switch flicked off.
Every major system in my body threatens to switch to emergency protocols, as centers are wont to do in times of crisis.
Yulia's voice seems to stretch out a hand to me through a fog.
It’s all I can do to try to understand the words she says to me.
“Believe me, sweetie, I truly do understand what it is to be attracted to someone who’s all wrong for you on paper.
” Yulia gently swipes a single tear from the stream of many with the pad of her thumb.
“Your brother wasn’t my idea of an ideal man.
I wasn’t even waiting for one, let alone a vicious, obsessive, possessive, bossy bratva king.
My every instinct told me to run from him, no matter how beautiful he was. And I fell in love with him anyway.”
Darya switches between staring at both of us like we’re insane.
There’s solace in this shared insanity.
Yulia smiles encouragingly. “Now, I’m not saying Viktor Zakharov is like your brother.
I don’t think he’s a good person at all, Nadya.
I’m sorry. But I want you to know that I’m not judging you, either.
The only two people who can know what really happened between you and Viktor are you and Viktor. ”
If there still is a Viktor, I can’t stop thinking.
And every time I think it, my chest develops another fissure. It feels for all the world like the pulverized remains of my inside are going to leak out of those cracks. Again, I shut my eyes, and all I see is the rivulets of Viktor’s blood on the ground.
It’s a useful enough distraction, but I’m not exactly grateful for the peeved sniff Darya expels.
In a more dramatic-than-expected depiction of her losing control, she literally throws herself into the air.
“I just don't understand. How? How do you get abducted off the street by a maniac you know has a penchant for terrorizing our family, and just—what, find that to be part of his charm? How does that even happen?”
I open my mouth. Then close it.
Can I even put it into words? Haven't I asked myself the same question over and over again, sick to my stomach over my own betrayal?
“I guess it happens when the bullshit you see in movies and hear about in those sticky-sweet love songs about a moment and a spark that just turns into more.
.. happens to you. When that crap walks up to you in the alley behind a club, and just goes for it?
Apparently, if you're mean at least, you climb on that dick.” It sounds to my own ears like a cheap explanation.
It doesn't taste like the truth in my mouth, to borrow cliches in order to encapsulate the inexplicable magnetism between him and me.
So, am I surprised that my sister doesn't look convinced? No. I'm not.
I don't know what I am except exhausted.
I’m worn down.
And still, I can't give up. I can't, when Viktor’s life may depend on it. I have to fight for him, because I know—fuck, I just know—he’s fighting for me. I just know it.
Besides, it isn’t just his life I’m fighting for.
It’s bigger than that, or at least it has to be.
He’s put so much on the line to build something of his own.
If he—I can’t even bear to think it. If he goes, it isn’t as if what he’s put into motion will disappear.
His brother will probably absorb it, and—what?
Get a leg up on my brothers, too? The only future without Viktor is lose-lose.
I bury my face in my hands and croak out a prayer to whichever higher power has an open line right now.
Please, please, please. That’s all I can think.