Chapter 23 Polina
Polina
Dmitri gives us separate rooms, separate guards, and enough rules to make one thing clear: we’re contained, not welcomed.
My room is on the east wing. Lev’s is on the west. I know because I asked, and I asked because not knowing was worse. The fact that he’s under the same roof at all is insane. Not that Dmitri is taking requests.
The first day, I sleep fourteen hours. My body was just waiting for permission to shut down. Before I pass out, I call Dr. Savin and tell him there’s a family emergency. He doesn’t ask questions. He just covers my shifts until I can return.
The second day, I eat the food they bring me and stare at the wall, trying to reduce this to something clinical. Doctors survive by compartmentalizing. We’re trained to set aside what we feel and focus on what we know.
What I know is simple: I’m in a secure compound outside Moscow. Dmitri controls where I go. Lev is still here. What I feel is harder to pin down, and every time I try to force it into something logical, it slips sideways.
I’ve been turning the word over in my mind since the moment he said it. Obsession. Not infatuation. Not interest. Not some prettier word a man might choose if he were trying to soften the damage. He said it plainly, the way he says everything, and I haven’t stopped hearing it since.
On the third morning, someone knocks on my door.
I assume it’s the guard with breakfast, so I stay in the chair I’ve been sitting in since six. “Leave it outside,” I call.
“If you think I drove two hours to leave breakfast outside a door, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”
I’m on my feet before she finishes the sentence.
Daria stands in the hallway with a duffel bag over one shoulder. Her eyes are red and glassy. She’s been crying, or she’s about to, and either way it undoes me. I start crying so hard my chest burns.
“How did you—”
“Dmitri called me.” She steps inside without being invited. “I’ve been calling you for months, Polina, and all I’ve gotten is voicemail every single time.”
“I know.”
“You know?” She drops the bag and turns on me, both hands fisted at her hips. “That’s what you have for me? You know?”
“Daria—”
“I thought something happened to you. Like you were sick, or hurt, or that I’d done something so terrible you wouldn’t even tell me what it was.” Her voice breaks on the last word, and she presses her lips together until she has herself back under control. “Do you understand what that was like?”
I reach for her arm. “I do. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry,” she scoffs. Then she pulls me into a hug so sudden and fierce I stumble forward, and her arms lock around me before I lose my balance. She’s three inches shorter than me and at least twenty pounds lighter, but she holds on like she means to keep me from going anywhere.
Something in my chest splinters, and I hold on just as hard. We cry together, soaked in tears, gasping for air and choking out nonsense. It’s the first moment since I walked into this house that I’ve felt anything but fury or fear.
Eventually, she pulls back and studies my face. Then she takes my hand, leads me to the edge of the bed, and sits beside me. “Tell me everything.”
So I do.
I tell her all of it. Not the sanitized version I’ve been rehearsing.
I knew this moment would come, and I meant to shield her from the worst of it, the way any older sister would.
Instead, the truth comes tumbling out, and before I can stop myself, I’m telling her about the night Lev came through my doors and the choice I made.
The weeks of lying to my colleagues. The way I let him into my apartment, my kitchen, every corner of a life I’d spent years keeping empty. I tell her about the obsession. About the two years. About finding out I was never on equal footing.
Daria listens without interrupting once. She’s the only person I know who can do that—hold still while someone else bleeds out and not start applying pressure before they’re finished, without making it feel clinical.
When I stop talking, she brushes a strand of hair out of my face.
“You thought if you told me, you’d have to admit it was real,” she surmises. “That’s why you haven’t been answering.”
“Yes,” I admit with a sniffle.
“And now it’s real whether you admit it or not.” She draws in a shaky breath and asks, “How do you feel about him? Not the situation. Him.”
I stare at the floor as I reply, “I don’t know how to separate those two things right now.”
“That’s fair.” She tucks one leg under herself. “But I think you do know, and I think that’s the part that’s making all of this harder.”
She’s not wrong, which is why I don’t respond.
“What is he like?” she asks. “When it’s just the two of you.”
The question catches me off guard, which is probably why she asked.
I look down at my hands, buying myself a second.
“He listens. Not the way people listen when they’re just waiting for their turn to talk.
He reminds me of you that way. Things I say in passing, he brings back weeks later without making a show of it.
The night I lost that teenage patient, he showed up at my door and didn’t say a single useless thing. He just… stayed.”
Daria tips her head and watches me.
“I’m sorry, he did what?”
“He literally tracked my schedule. Hell, he came straight to my hospital after he got shot because he knew I would be on shift.”
“That’s not romantic, Polina. That’s unhinged.”
“Exactly,” I throw my hands in the air.
“No, I don’t think you do, because you’re sitting here talking about him like he’s swoonworthy instead of a man who surveilled you.” She points at me. “You are allowed to be angry about that. Fully, completely, without qualification.”
“I am angry about it. But… he did come forward. He brought me here himself and handed over everything he had on his father’s organization.”
Daria levels a look at me that could strip paint. “Do not do that.”
“I’m just saying—”
“You’re making excuses. Already. It’s been thirty seconds.” She holds up a finger. “Stay angry. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
I look at her, and despite everything, a short laugh escapes me.
She’s not wrong, which is the most irritating part.
After everything he did, here I am arguing with my little sister about whether the man who surveilled me deserves mitigating circumstances.
I’m not a psychiatrist, but if this were a patient presenting like this, I’d diagnose catastrophic failure of judgment with a secondary presentation of willful denial.
“I don’t know how to stop caring about him,” I admit. “And I hate that.”
The fierceness in Daria’s face dissolves into something more like understanding, and she lets out a long breath.
“Okay. Fine. I’ll be reasonable. I think the truth is, you’re not angry because he’s a stranger who violated your privacy.
You’re angry because you trusted him and then found out the foundation was already built before you got there.
Those are not the same thing, and the second one is much harder to recover from. ”
“I don’t know if I can.”
She chews the inside of her cheek like she’s deciding whether to tell me something.
“I know you don’t know much about how things started with Pyotr, but he moved into my apartment the day we met.
Dmitri sent him. He was building a case against me.
I knew he was there to decide whether I was guilty.
I was terrified of him for weeks. Then… I wasn’t, and that scared me more, because I had no business feeling anything for a man reporting my every movement back to our cousin.
For a long time, I told myself what I felt wasn’t real.
That I was vulnerable. That I was mistaking proximity for something deeper.
That trusting him would be the stupidest thing I’d ever done. ”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Parts of it aren’t,” she agrees. “But the part where you can’t stop, even when every reasonable instinct is screaming at you to?
That part felt exactly the same. I’m not going to tell you how to feel.
I won’t tell you to forgive him. I’m asking you to consider that what he did came from somewhere, even if that doesn’t make it acceptable. ”
There’s nothing to argue with, which is its own kind of frustrating. She’s not telling me anything I haven’t already tortured myself with. She’s just saying it out loud.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I tell her.
“I know.” She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “You don’t have to know today.”
We spend the afternoon together. She unpacks the bag she brought: a change of clothes for me, my good face wash, some makeup, and a bar of the chocolate she knows I reach for when I’m stressed.
She sits on the floor with her back against the bed while I sit behind her and braid her hair the way I used to when we were younger.
For a while, we just talk about Kira, who apparently told her kindergarten teacher last week that her mother’s new husband taught her how to disassemble a pistol.
The phone call that followed is still causing problems.
I laugh for the first time in days. It feels strange in my chest, like using a muscle I forgot I had.
“She’s going to be terrifying when she’s older,” I tell her.
“She’s already terrifying. I’m raising a small warlord.” Daria tilts her head back against my knee. “Pyotr is completely useless when she turns those eyes on him. He gives her whatever she wants and then looks at me like I’m supposed to be the bad guy.”
“You are the bad guy. You’re the mother.”
She giggles, and for a while, my life stops feeling like a bad drama, and some sense of normalcy settles around us.
Before she leaves, she pauses at the door with the now empty bag over her shoulder.
“By the way, Pyotr told me Tony intercepted a Morozov shipment yesterday. Millions of rubles’ worth of product was seized before it cleared the port, based on Lev’s intel.
Dmitri hasn’t said much about it, but Boris told Pyotr it bought Lev some breathing room. ”
I open my mouth, trying to figure out how to respond to that, but all that comes out is a broken sound.
“I’m not telling you what to do with it,” she adds. “I just thought you should know.”
She hugs me once more, shorter this time but no less firm, and then she’s gone, and the room settles back into quiet.
I sit with what she said for hours.
What I can’t get over isn’t whether he has genuine feelings for me. It’s whether a man can spend two years building you up in his head and still love the real version once he has her—or if he only ever loved the version he made.
I don’t know. And that’s its own hell.
But underneath all of it, there’s one question I can’t let go of. Before I do anything else, I need to hear the answer.
Once Daria leaves, I lock myself in the bathroom, turn on the shower, and wait for the pipes to start rattling. There’s a guard outside my door, but he won’t come in unless he has a reason.
The bathroom window opens onto a narrow stone ledge that runs along the side of the house. It’s stupid, cold, and exactly the sort of thing Daria would call a terrible idea, but it gets me out without asking permission.
I edge along the wall to the service stairwell, slip inside, and make my way to the west wing, my pulse pounding harder at every turn. By the time I reach Lev’s door, I’m furious all over again that I’m here at all. I knock before I can talk myself out of it.
He opens the door and for a second, neither of us says anything. He looks like he’s slept about as well as I have. He’s in a gray shirt, barefoot, and he doesn’t move to let me in or ask me to come inside.
“I’m not here to forgive you,” I declare straight away. “I want to be very clear about that.”
He presses his lips into a hard line and nods. “All right.”
“I haven’t moved past what you did. I don’t know if I will. But I have one question, and I need you to answer it honestly.”
He nods for me to continue.
“Did you ever plan to use me against my family?”
He doesn’t look away or even take a moment to breathe before he answers, “Never.”
He says it the way I state a diagnosis I’m certain of. No qualification, no softening, nothing attached to it.
I look at him for one beat longer, long enough to check the answer against his face and find nothing there that fights it. He lets me look. He always has. Whether that’s the most honest thing about him or the most practiced, I can’t tell right now.
I nod once, then walk back down the corridor.
I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t know what to do with any of this. But I know the difference between a man who tells you what you want to hear and a man who answers before he has time to come up with something better. His answer came without hesitation.
What the hell I’m supposed to do with that, I don’t have a fucking clue. But forgiving him isn’t in the cards right now. Maybe not ever.