Chapter 21 - Nadya
Everything moves so fucking quickly; the days are a blur.
In the wake of our unceremonious return from New York City, reality is a film reel rolling at a volatile speed. It doesn’t seem to matter how much I grapple; no matter what, I can’t reach the dial that’ll fix it.
Conceptually, I understand what’s at work here.
My brothers have unanimously decided that this marriage, or “this fucking hoax” as it’s been sentenced, is going to be annulled.
The paperwork has been drawn up on the basis of fraud and duress with the help of the nifty recording Trifon’s bug got them.
Until I see sense, I am to remain under Trifon’s roof where he can keep an eye on me.
Also, somewhere within the Yuri family estate, Viktor Zakharov has been sequestered.
Anton Zakharov has been contacted by Trifon and informed of the situation.
He could counter Trifon’s decision by taking me captive as revenge for this, which is another reason I am to stay here like a good girl.
I understand the broad strokes, so to speak.
It’s the glaring holes in my knowledge that keep me up night after night. How much do my brothers know about what Viktor was doing in New York? How much have they told Anton? If they don’t kill him—and it is still a big if—will Anton take care of it?
There’s no one to ask these questions. At least, not until I sign the petition and affidavit. The loud and mean fight I'd had with my brothers the entire hour-long flight back to Boston still haunts me.
We've always fought, us Yuris. Or at least what I thought was fighting. Really, it was just harmless bickering. Child's play with no stakes and no need for forgiveness. We could—and have—run in the day after, and it would be as if the squabble never occurred at all.
This is nothing like that. No, this is endless-seeming days and meals full of uncomfortable silences in lieu of laughter and impulsive, heated words exchanged and hard liquor and flipped-up middle-fingers. This isn't who we are. This isn't how we are.
Or it wasn't.
I've been in trouble plenty of times. That's been the built-in cost attached to my mantra: I'd rather say sorry for doing something than ask for permission. I've been happy to pay it. But never before has this sprawling estate felt like a prison to me.
Just about everyone seems torn between being worried that I've lost my ever-loving mind and being livid about who I've lost it over. Unfortunately, neither mold leads to a single soul answering the question I walk around with in my eyes.
Where is he? Where is Viktor? My eyes ask Iosif, and his answer is, Still alive.
Like he expects that to be enough for me.
Like this, even, costs him so fucking much to let me have.
I don't know if that's better or worse than the way Leonid and Miron run in the opposite direction, or the way Trifon and Valentin appraise me with sorrow on their stoic faces.
I guess it's fractionally kinder than the way Darya keeps trying to get through to me, one patronizing Ted talk at a time.
At least no one fights the way I keep getting the household stuff to bring me all my meals in my bedroom, eventually.
Somehow, no matter what, every move I make or thought I think feels like losing. I’m fucking sick of it.
***
The knock that sounds on my door is inevitable.
I don’t find it unexpected, Iosif’s voice from the other side of it, asking, “Can I come in?”
It would be childish to feign sleep. It’s an urge I struggle against. Ultimately, I force out, “Sure, why the hell not?”
A tightness, like a fist, coils in my stomach. Just for something to do, I find myself plucking a bottle of merlot-colored nail polish from my bedside table and twisting it open.
Iosif enters, then shuts the door behind himself. He leans against it heavily, exhaling deeply, as if he climbed up the stairs too fast and needs to catch his breath now.
“Hey,” he says after a beat.
“Hmm,” I acknowledge him, swiping polish on an already painted toenail. It’s a decent excuse not to look at him, as far as excuses go. I don’t actually need to watch to be aware that he moves closer, nor when he lowers himself to sit at the bench at the end of my bed.
My nonchalance—real or imagined—can only last so long. It grows uncomfortable pretty quickly, with him watching me paint my toes, not saying anything, especially when I can palpably feel them coming.
Dread isn’t an emotion I tussle with much. That makes it overly-fucked how it’s become my primary feeling these days. It is a balloon in my chest, if a balloon could be fashioned from a rock’s texture instead of latex.
Iosif’s words don’t puncture it in the slightest when he grunts, “Can’t we just fucking talk?”
I frown as I consider the question.
We are fucking talking, I could argue. But I know it isn’t true. For the past two weeks, we’ve been worlds apart, despite how often he and Janella have been staying over at the family estate since the return from New York.
“About what?” I quip sardonically.
I’m so fucking sick of talking about it—of trying to explain to my family that Viktor isn’t who they think he is, that things don’t have to be the way they are, and all to no avail.
“You and me. About what happened when we found you. And,” Iosif blanches, appearing nauseous, “what happened before.”
Well, I didn’t see that one coming. At most, I thought I'd get another bullshit lecture on how this, the stubborn refusal to unbind myself from Viktor, can't end well.
His unbidden apology feels like slapping sunburn.
My hand runs up and down my arm, nails scratching at a phantom bother to keep my body busy, distracted from the very real pain inside. The truth is that, no, I don’t want to talk about it. Not at all, not even for a moment. That’s precisely how I know we need to.
“Okay. Let’s talk.”
My voice comes out sounding so small, I'm mortified. But I can't do anything about it, the same way I have felt I can't do anything since I realized the man I had felt a connection with, unlike any other I have ever known, was with my beloved family’s bitterest enemy.
I've been reduced to this helpless, pathetic damsel in distress.
No one seems to understand that I'm as disturbed, if not more so, by this involuntary change inside myself than anyone else. It wounds me more, and worse.
My upset sits heavily on my chest as I brace myself to hear my brother out.
He says, “I shouldn’t have said what I did. On the phone that day. I realized something was up the second the call dropped. I’ve felt like a brick of horseshit since.”
Oh.
“Yeah. You broke my heart.” It pains me to admit it, and I know that pain shows plainly on my face as I look up and offer him the sad half of a smile.
Part of me questions whether it's worth even saying out loud.
But never before have Iosif and I considered our responses to one another in the checks and balances of worthiness and unworthiness.
Despite how corroded our bond feels right now, I have to believe, for my sanity if nothing else, that it won't always be this way.
Not between us. Maybe, if we don't let it be.
“I heard you, you know. Before all of it—the morning after I first slept with him. I heard what you said to Janella about me. About worrying about me and how I don't have a tether.” I hadn't planned for these words, but now that my lips shape them, they feel important to say.
“Yeah?”
“I spun out when I heard it. But in retrospect, I'm fucking furious.
How could you think that? You are the tether.
All of you. All of this. I may not live my life from a place of caution and overthinking, and, OK, maybe that gets me in a shitload of trouble sometimes.
None of that has ever been something I'm unaware of or prepared to handle.
What has broken me is how any of you could think even for a second that I'm either that selfish or seriously fucking naive, that there couldn't possibly be something that I can see that this God damn lunatic I can't help but feel something for.
Something that you can't because he doesn't just go around bearing his underbelly any more than any of you do. He is as arrogant as any of you. As obsessive. As possessive. As unhinged and as willing to sacrifice himself to love me.”
I don't think I've said this many words in one go in my entire fucking life. I mean every single one. And it feels good to finally, finally say my truth out loud.
“I never thought I'd fall for someone in this world that you guys shield us, girls, from. Which, actually, is kind of fucking sexist as hell... But one bottle at a time, I guess.”
The only thing that can dissipate the burgeoning weight on my chest is the short, exhausted snort of laughter my favorite brother treats me to now. It is the nicest sound I've heard in the last two agonizing weeks.
When he leans forward, stretching an arm out, I let him take my hand. Iosif squeezes it. I squeeze his back.
“Fair enough,” he says. “Guess it kinda never occurred to me that that's even something that you'd want.”
My shoulders lift in a shrug. “I'm not saying I do.
I'm saying you should have thought about it.
It's not that different from the way I wish you would have considered that I wouldn't just give a piece of myself to just anybody. More than anyone else, dude, it fucking kills me that you could believe otherwise.”
Iosif groans, vexed, and probably feeling guilty. “Jeez, fuck, okay. What can I say? What can I do here to make it right?”
“You can let the man I’m in love with the fuck go. How about that?” I burst out, shocked by the flash of anger inside me.
He blurts back, “He’s as good as dead, Nads. Ask me for literally anything fucking else.”
He may as well have punched me in the face.
His words sit like bile in my stomach. They sufficiently silence me.