Chapter 6 Katya
Katya
I don't sleep.
Not really. Not in any way that counts. I drift in and out of a shallow, restless half-consciousness that feels more like sinking than resting, my body exhausted but my mind refusing to shut down.
Every time I close my eyes, I see him standing in the doorway.
Every time I start to go under, those six words drag me back to the surface.
I don't take what isn't given.
I've turned them over so many times they've lost their shape.
Rearranged them. Searched for the hidden meaning, the trap door, the angle.
Because there's always an angle. My father taught me that before he taught me anything else.
People don't give freely. They invest. Every kindness is a deposit.
Every gesture is a loan. And eventually, always, they come to collect.
So what is Killian Orlov collecting?
The ceiling stares back at me, pale and unhelpful.
At some point during the night, I tried to take the dress off.
The dress my father chose, the dress that has been slowly strangling me since ten o'clock this morning, has forty-two buttons running from the nape of my neck to the base of my spine.
Forty-two small, fabric-covered buttons set into tight, hand-stitched loops, each one requiring the kind of precise, backward-reaching dexterity that is functionally impossible to achieve alone.
I know this because I spent twenty minutes trying.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with my arms twisted behind my back, fingers cramping, shoulders burning, managing to undo exactly six buttons before my hands gave out. Six out of forty-two. Enough to loosen the collar, not enough to free myself.
The irony is not lost on me. My father put me in a dress I can't remove without help, and my husband left me alone.
I considered cutting it off. There are scissors in the sewing kit I packed, one of the few practical items I managed to fit into my single suitcase.
But something stopped me. Not sentimentality.
I have no attachment to this dress. It was chosen to advertise my virginity, not to make me feel beautiful.
But destroying it felt like an act of rebellion I hadn't yet earned, and old habits are difficult to break when you're standing alone in an unfamiliar bathroom at two in the morning.
So I kept it on.
I'm still wearing it now, lying on top of the bed in a cage of white fabric, my hair half-collapsed from its pins, my makeup smudged into shadows. The sheets beneath me are smooth and clean in the way they weren’t supposed to be.
The sky outside the window is shifting from black to grey. Dawn, or close to it. I don't know what time it is. I don't have a clock in here and my phone is in my suitcase. Getting up to retrieve it feels like more effort than I'm capable of right now.
I stare at the ceiling and think about what happens next.
The sheets.
The council expects evidence. That was explicit in the contract; consummation verified, proof provided. The medieval performance of a tradition that reduces a wedding night to a transaction and a woman's body to a receipt.
He didn't touch me. The sheets are clean. And when someone comes to collect them, they'll find nothing. No blood. No evidence. No proof that the arrangement has been honored.
And the first person to suffer the consequences of that absence won’t be Killian Orlov.
It will be me.
Because that's how it always works. The man refuses, and the woman is blamed.
He'll be seen as disinterested. I'll be seen as insufficient. Not appealing enough, not compliant enough, not enough. My father will hear about it within days, and the shame he’s been trying to scrub from the Lazovski name will come flooding back worse than before.
Now his daughter isn't just the sister of a traitor, she's the bride who couldn't even manage to be taken on her wedding night.
The ceiling offers no solutions.
I close my eyes and feel the dress tighten across my ribs as I breathe.
The knock comes when the light through the window has shifted from grey to pale gold
I sit up. The dress crumples around me, the skirt twisted from hours of restless shifting, the sleeve creased where I lay on my side. I must look exactly like what I am, a bride who spent her wedding night alone and awake and still trapped in the costume.
"Katya." His voice through the door. Low, measured, carrying that same quality from last night, the one I still can't name. "May I come in?"
May I.
Not I'm coming in. Not the handle turning without warning, the way my father's hand always found the door before his voice found the courtesy. A question. An actual question, requiring an actual answer, with the implicit understanding that no is an option.
I look down at myself. The dress. The wrinkles. The six undone buttons at the back of my neck exposing a strip of skin I can't reach to either cover or reveal further. My hair is a disaster. My face feels tight and dry from hours of makeup I should have washed off.
I am a mess. A visible, undeniable, humiliating mess.
"Yes," I say, because what's the alternative? He'll see me at some point. Might as well be now, when I'm too exhausted for the mask to function properly and too uncomfortable to care.
The door opens and he steps inside.
He's changed. Grey trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to just below the elbow, no tie.
His hair is slightly damp, which means he's showered, which means he had access to his clothes and a bathroom and the basic infrastructure of a normal morning, all of which feels unreasonably enviable right now.
His eyes find me on the bed and stop.
I watch something move through his expression, fast, almost invisible, but I catch it because I've spent my entire life reading faces for danger.
It isn't pity. It isn't amusement. It's something heavier.
Something that tightens the skin around his eyes and hardens the line of his jaw for exactly one second before the composure slides back into place.
He's looking at the dress.
He knows.
"I couldn't get it off," I say, because there's no point in pretending. My voice comes out flat, stripped of the careful modulation I usually maintain. I'm too tired for performance.
The silence that follows is brief but dense.
He crosses the room toward the wardrobe. Opens it, finds it empty because my suitcase is still packed at the foot of the bed, closes it again. Then he moves to the suitcase, crouches, and looks up at me.
"May I?"
Again with the asking. I nod, because speech is becoming increasingly difficult when the man keeps treating my belongings like they require permission to approach.
He unzips the suitcase and sorts through it with the efficient, unselfconscious practicality of someone who has packed and unpacked a thousand times. He finds a pair of jeans and a sweater, the soft grey one I packed because it’s comfortable, and sets them on the bed.
Then he straightens and moves behind me.
My whole body tenses. Instinct. Automatic. The kind of full-body brace that happens before the conscious mind can intervene, because my spine has learned that someone standing behind me is never good.
"I'm going to undo the buttons," he says. "Nothing else."
His voice is close. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath against the back of my neck where the six undone buttons have left a gap. My fingers curl into the bedsheet.
"Okay," I whisper.
His hands are careful. That's the first thing I register, the deliberate precision of his fingers as they find the seventh button and work it free of the loop.
No fumbling. No impatience. Just steady, methodical progress down the line of my spine, each button released with a quiet efficiency that feels less like undressing and more like unlocking.
I stare at the far wall and try not to breathe too deeply.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
The fabric loosens incrementally across my ribs, and the relief is so immediate, so physical, that I have to press my lips together to keep from making a sound. I've been compressed into this dress for nearly twenty hours. The sensation of the bodice releasing its grip is almost dizzying.
Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't comment on the fact that his wife spent her wedding night buttoned into a dress she couldn't escape.
Twenty-five. Thirty.
The dress is gaping now, the fabric falling away from my back in a wide V that exposes skin I can feel the air touching for the first time since yesterday morning.
I'm suddenly acutely aware that I'm not wearing anything underneath the bodice.
The dress was structured enough that a bra wasn't necessary, which means—
Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.
His fingers stop.
"Last two," he says. His voice is slightly rougher than before, though the change is so subtle that anyone who hasn't been listening as carefully as I have wouldn't notice. "Can you manage those yourself?"
He steps back. I feel the distance open between us like a change in temperature.
"I'll wait outside," he says. "Take your time."
The door opens and closes. He's gone.
I stand there for a moment with the dress hanging open down my back, the cool air raising goosebumps across my skin, and I realise my hands aren't shaking anymore.
I reach behind me, undo the last two buttons, and let the dress fall.
It pools around my waist like a deflated thing, and I stare down at it with the dispassionate exhaustion of someone who has outlasted the object of their confinement. Then I step out of it, leaving it in a heap on the floor.
I wash my face in the en-suite, brush my teeth, pull the last few pins from my hair and run a brush through it. The mirror shows me a woman who looks hollow-eyed and pale and approximately a thousand years old.
When I open the bedroom door, he's leaning against the opposite wall with his arms folded, waiting. His eyes move over me, and something in his posture relaxes by a fraction.
"Better?" he asks.
"Yes." A pause. "Thank you."
He nods. Then: "Breakfast is in twenty minutes. But before that, we need to talk about the sheets."
The directness catches me off guard. I expected to be the one to raise it, carefully, obliquely, the way I've been trained to deliver difficult information. Not like this. Not head-on, standing in a hallway with no script prepared.
"You're thinking about the council," he says. It's not a question.
"Yes." I drop my eyes from his and hate myself for it.
"You're thinking that my decision last night will have consequences, and that those consequences will fall on you before they fall on me."
My eyes shoot back to his in surprise. Because yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking, and the fact that he knows it, that he's already mapped the fallout of his own restraint and calculated where the damage will land, destabilizes me in a way I didn't anticipate.
"They'll want the sheets," I say. The words come out clinical. Factual. "That was part of the arrangement. If they come back clean..."
I don't finish the sentence. I don't need to. We both know what clean sheets mean in this world. Rejection. Failure. A bride who wasn't wanted, or worse, a groom who couldn't perform. Either version ends with my father's voice in my ear telling me I've embarrassed him again.
Killian watches me for a moment. His expression is unreadable, but his eyes are not. There's something burning in them, low and steady, like the pilot light of a fury he's keeping in a very tight box.
"Come with me," he says.
He walks back into the bedroom. I follow because I don't know what else to do, and because the way he said it wasn't a command. It was an invitation. The difference is thin, but I've become an expert in thin differences.
He stops at the side of the bed and looks at the sheets. Clean, white, smooth. Undisturbed except where I lay on top of them all night in a dress I couldn't remove.
Then he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a knife.
It's small. Folding. The kind of blade a man carries out of habit rather than threat. Well-used, the handle smooth with wear. He opens it with a quiet click.
I don't flinch. I'm too tired to flinch, and too curious about what happens next. Too aware that if he wanted to hurt me, he's had ample opportunity and hasn't taken any of it.
He looks at me. Holds my gaze for a full second, making sure I'm watching.
Then he draws the blade across the pad of his left index finger.
The cut is precise. Deliberate. Deep enough to bleed immediately, a bright line of red that wells up and spills over before he can contain it. He doesn't wince. Doesn't react. Just holds his hand over the centre of the sheet and lets the blood fall.
One drop. Two. Three.
He smears it with his thumb, dragging the red across the white in a streak that looks exactly like what the council expects to see. Then he presses his finger down again, adding more, building the stain with the focused concentration of a man signing a document.
I watch him bleed for me and feel something inside my chest crack open a second time, wider than last night, harder to close.
"This is what they want," he says, his voice flat and cold, but the coldness isn't directed at me. It's directed at them. At the system. At every person who decided that a woman's worth could be measured in blood on a bedsheet. "So this is what they'll get."
He folds the knife closed and pockets it. Then he slips his bleeding finger between his lips momentarily and sucks.
I don’t expect the level of awareness that punches through me. I don’t even know why it does.
Then he grips the sheet with both hands and strips it from the bed in a single, violent motion. The fabric billows and snaps, the bloodstain vivid against the white, and he bundles it under his arm with the efficiency of a man who has decided something and will not be questioned about it.
He turns to me. His eyes are dark, and the controlled fury I've been sensing since last night is closer to the surface now, visible in the set of his shoulders and the tight line of his mouth.
"No one touches you," he says. "Not the council. Not your father. Not me. Not until you decide otherwise."
My lips part, my brain still partially stuck on the way he sucked the blood from his finger, and now stumbling over the words that he just said like a baby deer taking its first steps.
“We should head down, Ma is making breakfast.”