Chapter 014 Isabella
I wake to the scent of him on the sheets and the absence of him in the room.
For a moment I lie still, suspended between sleep and the memory of last night—his hands cradling my face, the tremor in his thumbs, the way he pulled back as if I were a live wire. My skin still carries the ghost of that almost-touch. My pulse remembers it too, quickening beneath the thin cotton of his shirt.
I sit up. The bedroom is empty, the chair he slept in pushed neatly against the wall. He left before dawn, the way he always does—meetings, calls, the endless machinery of his empire. He paused at the door, looked back at me tangled in his bed, and something raw flickered across his face. A promise that we would finish what we started. Or end it. I couldn’t tell which.
Now the silence presses in.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The lacerations on my soles protest, but the pain is distant, muffled by the restless heat under my skin. I’m wearing nothing but his white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, hem brushing mid-thigh. My own underwear is still damp from last night’s hurried washing; I couldn’t bear to put the rough cotton dresses back on. So I borrowed this without asking. The fabric is soft, expensive, and it smells of cedar and gun oil and Viktor. Every breath I take is him.
I start pacing.
Bed to window. Window to dresser. Dresser to locked door. The cameras follow me, red lights steady. I wonder if he’s watching from whatever war room he’s in today. The thought should anger me. Instead it sends a slow throb between my legs.
I am losing discipline.
Last night I told him—vodka-loose and reckless—that I might not regret letting him take me. To the man who has sworn to destroy me. To the man who slept in a chair rather than risk losing control.
My nipples peak against the shirt. I hate how easily my body answers him.
I need to move. To reclaim some fragment of control. The main door is biometric; I’ve tested it. But there’s another door, the one leading to the private study I glimpsed when the guards first brought me here. Not the formal office where he receives Kazimir and the others. Something smaller. More guarded.
Curiosity overrides caution.
I slide the lockpick from my hair—warm from my scalp—and approach the connecting door. The lock is German, high-end, but not beyond Emilio’s training. Forty seconds of delicate work. The mechanism sighs open.
I step inside.
The air is different here—older, quieter. Sunlight filters through half-closed blinds, catching on dust motes. Books line the walls floor to ceiling: Russian classics, military theory, thick volumes on architecture. A younger bonsai sits on the windowsill, branches trained with the same meticulous care as the one in the bedroom.
His scent is stronger, concentrated, as if the room has been holding its breath for years.
Against the far wall: cardboard boxes stacked neatly, labels in Cyrillic. My spoken Russian is fluent—I’ve known that for days, catching fragments from the guards—but reading it has always felt just out of reach. Until now. The letters resolve slowly, then all at once.
Personal effects. Dimitri.
My chest tightens.
I should leave. This is sacred ground, grief made physical. But my hands move anyway, lifting the lid of the nearest box.
Photographs spill out. Dimitri as a child, gap-toothed and laughing. Dimitri at sixteen, serious over a chessboard. Dimitri at eighteen, head thrown back in laughter at something off-camera. Architecture journals, margins filled with precise notes. A compact telescope, still in its case.
A boy who wanted to build, not break.
His face pulls at something buried deep. Not just recognition. Resonance.
The second box: folded clothes, a stopped watch, and at the bottom, wrapped in tissue—a leather diary. The cover is soft, edges worn from handling. Dimitri Sokolov embossed in gold Cyrillic.
I unwrap it with shaking fingers.
The entries are in Russian. I shouldn’t be able to read them. But the words rise up effortlessly, as if my mind has been waiting eleven years for permission.
Daily complaints about his father. Notes on light and structure. Dreams of designing buildings that breathe.
Then:
“S came to the garden today. She’s learning Russian faster than I expected. Her accent is still terrible but she laughs when I correct her. I think I’m teaching her more than words. I think I’m teaching her how to be brave.”
My breath catches.
I turn pages with increasing urgency.
“S taught me a new English word today. ‘Serendipity.’ She says it means finding something good when you weren’t looking for it. I think that’s what she is. Something good I wasn’t looking for.”
More entries about S. How she makes him laugh. How she sees past the Sokolov name to the boy who wants to create.
Then, two weeks before his death:
“I have to tell her the truth soon. About what Father is planning. About the meeting. I have to warn her, even if it means she’ll hate me. Even if it ruins everything. She has to know.”
And the night he died:
“I’m going to warn her tonight. Whatever happens after, I can’t let her walk into what Father has planned. She deserves the truth. Even if she hates me for it.”
The diary cuts into my palms.
Garden. Russian lessons. A boy teaching me to be brave.
The pressure in my skull builds, slow at first, then violent. Not pain—something worse. A dam cracking.
I collapse.
The floor is cold against my cheek. The diary is clutched to my chest like a shield. Copper floods my mouth; I’ve bitten my tongue.
Images surge:
Summer roses climbing a trellis. A boy’s patient hands guiding mine over Cyrillic letters. “No, like this. The curve matters.”
“Misha,” I say, and the nickname feels ancient, inevitable.
“You’re getting better, Sofiya.”
Laughter—mine, bright and unafraid. Fifteen years old and certain the world could be gentle.
“You’re my best friend,” I tell him. “I’d never tell anyone about us. I promise.”
“I know,” he says. “I trust you.”
The memory fractures. Pressure crests into white-hot agony. Words tear out of me in flawless Russian:
“Misha. Misha, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You tried to warn me and I didn’t listen. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
I curl on the hardwood, shaking, speaking a language I’ve hidden even from myself.
The door slams open.
Viktor.
He goes white. Drops to his knees beside me. Hands frantic—pulse, eyes, hair pushed back from my face. His palm burns through the shirt.
“Isabella?”
I look up through tears. “Misha,” I whisper. “We were…”
He flinches as if struck.
“What are you saying?”
The pain spikes. Vision splinters. I hear him barking orders—doctor, now—as he lifts me. One arm under my shoulders, the other sliding beneath my thighs where the shirt has ridden up. His fingers grip bare skin. Even unconsciousness can’t dull the spark.
Darkness takes me.
I surface hours later. Night beyond the windows. My head throbs, but the pressure has receded, leaving only echoes.
He’s in the chair again, vigil unbroken. The diary rests closed in his hands.
The moment my eyes open he rises, moves toward the door.
“Viktor?”
“I’ll be in the study.” His knuckles whiten on the frame. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The door shuts with deliberate quiet.
Then the sounds begin.
Glass shattering. Wood splintering. Something heavy hitting the wall. Each crash lands in my sternum like a fist.
Then silence—long, suffocating.
Footsteps return.
He enters without a word. Stands over the bed. I keep my eyes closed, but I feel him cataloguing every inch of me—the woman his brother loved—sprawled in his bed, wearing his shirt.
“Open your eyes, Isabella.”
I do.
His shirt is rumpled, knuckles bleeding. Grief and hunger war in his face until it’s almost unrecognizable.
“I read it.”
I say nothing.
“You loved him.”
“Yes.”
“He loved you.”
“Yes.”
His hand rises, stops inches from my cheek, trembling. Heat radiates.
“What am I supposed to do with you now?”
I swallow. “I don’t know.”
“You said ‘I promise’ over and over on the floor. What did you promise him, Isabella?”
“I don’t know.” Tears slip into my hair. “Something about a warning. He was going to tell me something important.”
He studies me for a long moment.
“My brother wrote about you for months. Called you the best thing that ever happened to him.” His voice cracks on the last word. “And then he died. And you forgot.”
The accusation slices clean.
“I didn’t choose to forget.”
“Only family called him Misha.” His eyes glitter. “And you.”
The weight of it settles between us like lead.
His fingertips finally land—feather-light on my cheekbone. My body arches toward the touch before my mind can intervene. His breath catches.
“You respond to me,” he says roughly. “Even now.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Don’t.” His hand cups my face fully, thumb settling on my lower lip. “Don’t help it. It’s the only thing that still makes sense.”
He presses. I part my lips. His thumb slides inside, slow, deliberate. My tongue brushes the pad instinctively. Salt and copper and Viktor. His pupils blow wide.
“Dimitri is dead,” he whispers. “But you’re here. In my bed. Wearing my shirt. Wet for my touch.”
The crude truth of it shivers through me.
“What would he think?” His voice drops to a ragged thread. “His lover and his brother…”
He withdraws his thumb abruptly. Steps back.
“What am I supposed to do with you now?”
He turns and leaves without looking back.
The door closes.
I lie in the dark, cheek still burning from his palm, lips tingling from his taste, body aching with denial and grief and something darker.
Somewhere in the fractured past, a fifteen-year-old girl promised a boy she would keep his secrets.
I still don’t know if I kept that promise.
Or if it killed him.