Chapter 8 Katya
Katya
It’s been seven days.
Seven days in a house where the doors don’t lock.
Seven days with a husband who sleeps down the corridor and a mother-in-law who feeds me as if she is trying to fill something that has nothing to do with hunger.
Seven days of questions that are actually questions, of silences that don’t feel like punishments, of mornings that begin with voices in the kitchen instead of footsteps in the hall.
I lie awake in the dark most nights, staring at the ceiling, trying to understand what is happening to me.
I make lists in my head. Not on paper. I stopped writing things down when I was fifteen and my father read my diary, then used it to dismantle every friendship I had.
Since then, my thoughts have stayed where he can’t reach them, stored quietly behind my eyes.
Most of my lists are practical ones. Exits in unfamiliar rooms. The order people speak in meetings.
The subtle shifts in tone that signal danger or opportunity.
This list is different.
This one is about Killian.
Not the obvious things, not the fact that he married me or that he refused to touch me on our wedding night. It’s the smaller things that keep returning to my mind long after they happen. The details that settle quietly into my days and refuse to leave.
Every morning at breakfast he pulls out my chair before he sits down himself.
The gesture is so natural I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it.
The kitchen is always loud in the mornings, Saoirse cooking, Iris talking about three things at once, his brothers drifting in for coffee, but Killian always pauses long enough to make sure I’m seated first.
My father never did that for anyone. In my father’s house he sat first, always, and the rest of us arranged ourselves around him like satellites around something that didn’t care if we burned.
Killian does something else that unsettles me even more.
In meetings, when men are discussing shipments or routes or negotiations I barely understand, he will pause in the middle of speaking and look at me.
He doesn’t prompt me or explain the conversation.
He simply waits, creating a space where my voice could exist if I chose to use it.
The first time it happened I froze. The second time I offered a small observation about shipping routes in the Baltic, something I’d overheard days earlier.
Killian listened to me as if the words mattered, then turned back to the man across the table and said, very calmly, “My wife makes an excellent point.”
My wife.
He didn’t say it with ownership. He said it like you might say my colleague or my partner, a quiet acknowledgement that I belonged in the room. The man across the table looked at me differently after that. Not with the polite dismissal I’m used to, but with attention.
I’m still not sure what to do with that.
There was another moment, on the third day, that keeps replaying in my mind. A man arrived for a meeting and looked at me with the casual disregard of someone who believes women are decorative objects at best. “Ah,” he said when Killian introduced us, “the Lazovski girl.”
The silence that followed was surgical.
Killian didn’t raise his voice. He never raises his voice. But something in the room changed when he spoke.
“My wife’s name,” he said quietly, “is Katya Orlova.”
He gave me his name like it was a shield and wielded it like a weapon. The man didn’t make the mistake again.
Then there is the tea.
Every night around nine there is a knock on my door.
When I open it, Killian is standing in the corridor holding a mug of chamomile.
No sugar. He must have worked out my preference on the second night, because it has been the same every evening since.
He hands it to me, says goodnight, and walks away.
He never tries to come inside. Never lingers.
Just tea and the quiet sound of his footsteps disappearing down the corridor.
I drink it sitting on the edge of the bed and try not to think about his hands.
That is the part of my thoughts that refuses to stay organized.
His hands undoing the buttons of my dress that first morning, moving patiently down my spine, one after the other in careful succession, never once touching my skin.
The discipline of that still unsettles me.
Most men would have taken the opportunity.
Killian treated it like a boundary he had no intention of crossing.
I remember the way his hands gripped the sheet afterward, stripping it from the bed in one sharp motion. The way he held the knife. And the moment that returns to me every night when the house goes quiet and I’m left alone with my thoughts.
The way he slipped his bleeding finger into his mouth.
It lasted less than a second. Automatic. Meaningless.
Except my body didn’t seem to understand that.
I felt something then, low in my stomach. A slow, unfamiliar pull that had nothing to do with sympathy and everything to do with the shape of his mouth.
I’ve replayed it every night since.
That is the part I don’t know how to handle.
Desire is not something I have experience with. In my father’s house there was no room for it. Every emotion was reserved for survival and performance. Boys were threats. Men were dangers. My body was something to be protected, not something I inhabited.
And yet now I lie awake in Killian Orlov’s house, in a bed that was meant for both of us, thinking about the shape of his mouth.
I don’t know what to do with that.
What unsettles me most is that my feelings toward him are changing in ways I don’t fully understand.
I notice when he enters a room now. I recognize the sound of his footsteps on the stairs.
Sometimes I find myself lingering in the kitchen longer than necessary simply because he is there.
The habit of mapping danger has slowly become something else, something closer to anticipation.
That change should frighten me, and in some ways it does.
But it also feels like breathing deeply after years of shallow air.
And that is the part I trust the least.
Kindness in my father’s house always came with a price. Patience was simply another form of control. Every gentle gesture eventually turned into leverage.
So I wait.
Every morning when Killian pulls out my chair, I wait for the moment he expects something in return. Every night when he brings my tea, I wait for the conversation that turns it into a debt.
Seven days have passed.
The price hasn’t come.
And that leaves me with a new and deeply unsettling thought.
When I close my eyes, I see him again standing in the hallway earlier tonight, handing me the mug and saying goodnight the same way he always does before turning away.
I haven’t invited him into this room.
Not yet.
The word surfaces in my mind before I can stop it.
Yet.