26. Anya
ANYA
The house goes into lockdown less than an hour after Yaromir leaves.
No one says lockdown.
No one has to.
It happens quietly at first. A guard appears outside the breakfast room.
Then another near the main staircase. The front doors are closed and bolted from the inside.
Men move through the hallways with clipped voices and weapons tucked beneath their jackets.
The staff disappears into corners, speaking in whispers.
By the time Nina comes to take me to the library, I already know something is wrong.
“Madam,” she says, careful and polite as always, “Mr. Volkov has asked that you stay away from the windows.”
My stomach tightens. “Why?”
Her expression doesn’t change. Everyone in this house is trained not to react.
“Just a precaution.”
“A precaution against what?”
She lowers her eyes. “Please come with me.”
The library is on the west side of the house, with tall shelves, heavy curtains, and a fireplace that hasn’t been lit. Two guards stand outside the door. Another waits near the window, watching the grounds through a narrow gap in the curtain.
Nina brings tea.
I don’t drink it.
I sit on the edge of a leather chair with my hands clasped in my lap, trying not to imagine every possible thing that could have happened. Yaromir went to inspect a warehouse. That’s all he told me. A warehouse fire. Damage. Men injured.
But the house doesn’t lock itself down because of a fire.
Something else has happened.
Something worse.
Nina sets a small plate of biscuits near me. “You should eat something.”
I look at the plate. “I can’t.”
“You said the same thing at breakfast and still ate half the fruit.”
I blink at her. There’s no humor on her face, but I realize, after a second, that she’s trying to distract me.
It almost works.
“Has this happened before?” I ask.
Nina stills. That’s answer enough.
I turn fully toward her. “Nina.”
She folds her hands in front of her apron. “There have been security concerns before.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No,” she admits.
The guard near the window shifts slightly, but says nothing.
I press my palms against my knees. “Has the whole house ever been locked down like this?”
Nina hesitates. Then she shakes her head once. “No, madam.”
The fear in my chest grows teeth. “Why now?”
Her gaze flickers to my face, then to my ring. “Mr. Volkov has enemies,” she says.
“I know that.”
“Yes.” Her voice softens slightly. “But he did not have anything precious in the house before.”
I stare at her. I should reject it. I should laugh, or tell her this marriage began as a bargain, or remind both of us that Yaromir Volkov doesn’t think in soft words like precious. But my throat closes before I can say anything.
Because I remember his face this morning when I asked to go out.
I remember the way he said no.
I remember being angry at him for turning the estate into a cage.
Now the guards outside the door don’t feel like a cage. They feel like fear made visible.
His fear. For me.
The realization shakes me more than I want it to.
I stand and walk toward the window.
The guard immediately steps in front of it. “Madam.”
I stop. Anger flashes, but it dies quickly because he looks almost apologetic.
“Fine,” I say. I turn away and start pacing instead.
The library is too large, too quiet. Every sound from outside the room makes me look up. A footstep. A door closing. A low voice in the hallway. Each time, my heart jumps before disappointment settles back in.
Nina keeps trying. She asks if I want to see the household accounts.
No.
She asks if I want to choose fabrics for the dresses.
No.
She asks if I want the cook to prepare lunch.
Absolutely not.
Finally, she brings a stack of old photo albums and places them on the table.
“What are these?” I ask.
“House records. Renovations. Garden plans. Staff events.”
“Does Yaromir know you’re showing me these?”
“No.”
That gets my attention.
Nina’s face remains composed, but there’s a tiny spark in her eyes now.
I sit slowly. The first album is mostly photographs of the house before restoration. Broken windows. Overgrown gardens. Rooms stripped bare. Dust on staircases. It looks abandoned, nothing like the controlled, severe place it is now.
In one photograph, Yaromir stands in the main hall, younger, maybe in his late twenties, sleeves rolled up, face harsher somehow without the silver in his hair. The scar is there already. He’s looking at the floor, not the camera, surrounded by men carrying out broken furniture.
I touch the edge of the photograph. “He looked angry even then,” I say quietly.
Nina looks over my shoulder. “He was.”
“Is he ever not?”
She thinks about it. “With the horse.”
That surprises a small laugh out of me.
Then the laughter fades. Because I imagine Buran in the stable, Yaromir feeding him apples from his coat pocket, and suddenly I want him back so badly it frightens me.
Not because I need protection.
Not because he’s my husband.
Because somewhere between his bloody knuckles and his hand at my waist, between the white sheet and the fireplace, between his anger and the rare moments when he stops hiding the man underneath it, something has changed inside me.
I care in a way that makes waiting feel unbearable.
I sit there for another hour. Maybe more.
Time becomes strange. Nina pours more tea. The guards change once. Someone speaks urgently in the hallway, and I stand so quickly the album slides from my lap.
Still nothing.
Then the front door opens downstairs.
I know because the whole house reacts. A shift. A movement through the walls. Men speaking. Footsteps. The library guard turns his head toward the hall.
I’m already moving before anyone tells me.
“Madam,” Nina says.
I ignore her.
The guards outside the door move to stop me, then seem to think better of it. Maybe they see my face. Maybe they value their lives. Either way, they step aside.
I run down the corridor.
Not gracefully. Not like a wife of a Volkov should.
I run like a woman who has been sitting for hours imagining the worst and cannot bear one more second of not knowing.
When I reach the top of the stairs, I see him. Yaromir stands in the main hall below, surrounded by men. His suit is dirty. One sleeve is torn. There’s soot on his shoulder and blood on his shirt, his hands, the side of his neck. For one terrible second, the sight of the blood empties my lungs.
Then he looks up. Our eyes meet.
He’s alive.
I descend too quickly, one hand skimming the railing, barely feeling the steps beneath my feet. By the time I reach the bottom, everyone in the hall has gone still.
I don’t care. I go straight to him.
“Are you hurt?”
His expression changes, but he doesn’t answer fast enough.
I grab his jacket, searching him with my hands. Chest. Arms. Side. His shirt is stained near the ribs, but when I touch it, he doesn’t flinch.
“It’s not mine,” he says.
My hands stop. “What?”
“The blood. Most of it isn’t mine.”
Most.
The word nearly makes me dizzy.
“Most?”
“A cut. Nothing serious.”
I see it then, along his forearm, shallow but angry-looking beneath the ruined sleeve. I should focus on that. I should demand a doctor or bandages or explanations.
Instead, I grip the front of his shirt and kiss him.
The hall disappears. The men. The guards. Nina somewhere behind me. The entire Volkov house holding its breath.
I kiss him because he came back alive.
Because I spent hours pretending I was only worried in the normal way a wife might be worried, when the truth is something much deeper and far more terrifying.
I kiss him because when I saw blood on him, something inside me cracked open.
For a second, he’s still. Then his hand comes to the back of my head, hard and careful at the same time, and he kisses me back once. Only once, but it’s enough to make my knees weaken.
His eyes move over my face. “You were scared.”
I swallow.
The hall is silent around us.
I could lie. I could make a silly comment. I could step back and remember that we’re not alone, that half his men are watching, that wives in houses like this probably don’t throw themselves at their husbands in the foyer.
But I’m tired of pretending with him.
“Yes,” I say.
Something shifts in his eyes. A crack in the control. Small, but I see it.
I touch his face, careful of the soot near his jaw. “Are you okay?”
His hand covers mine. For a moment, he says nothing.
Then, in a voice so low I barely hear it, he says, “Now I am.”
My chest tightens.
I hate how much those three words do to me.
Behind us, someone clears his throat. Viktor, probably.
Yaromir doesn’t look away from me. “Leave us.”
The command moves through the hall like a blade.
Men scatter. Viktor says something to one of them and steps back. Nina disappears toward the side corridor, though I can feel her looking at me before she goes.
When the hall is empty enough, I finally notice my hands are trembling against Yaromir’s shirt. He notices too. He takes them in his.
“There is no breach here,” he says. “The house is secure.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. I’m telling you.”
I look up at him. “And I’m telling you that knowing doesn’t make it less frightening.”
His jaw tightens.
Not in anger. In recognition.
He looks tired now. Not weak, never that, but worn at the edges. Smoke clings to him. Gunpowder too. There’s a dark smear of blood across one knuckle. His scar looks pale against the soot on his face.
I have the sudden, painful urge to wash it all off him. To put my hands on every place the world touched him and check that he’s still whole.
That thought frightens me so much I almost step back.
He doesn’t let me.
His fingers tighten around mine. “I thought of you,” he says.
My breath catches. “When?”
His eyes hold mine. “When the shooting started.”
The floor seems to tilt beneath me.
There it is. The thing I felt all morning, returned to me in his voice.
I look down at our joined hands because I don’t trust my face. “You told me I couldn’t leave because it was dangerous,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I hated you for it.”
“I know.”
“I still might.”
His thumb moves once over my knuckles. “Good.”
This time, I don’t get angry when he says it.
I almost laugh, but it comes out shaky. “You are impossible.”
“Yes.”
I lift my eyes to his again. “I’m glad you’re alive,” I say.
The words are small compared to what I feel.
He understands anyway.
His hand rises to my cheek, thumb brushing just beneath my eye. I didn’t realize there were tears there until he touches one. He looks at the moisture on his thumb as if it’s something dangerous.
Then he looks back at me. “Don’t cry for me, Anya,” he says.
“I’m not doing it on purpose.”
“That’s worse.”
That does make me laugh, even through the fear. I wipe my face quickly. “You need to clean up.”
“Yes.”
“And someone needs to bandage your arm.”
“Yes.”
“And then you need to tell me what happened.”
His expression closes slightly.
I point at him. “Don’t.”
His brows lift.
“Don’t do the thing where you decide what I can carry.”
For a second, he only looks at me. Then, slowly, he nods. “All right.”
The answer should satisfy me.
It does. But my chest still aches.
I step closer and wrap my arms around his waist carefully, avoiding the blood where I can. He goes still, as if I’ve done something more shocking than kissing him in front of his men.
Maybe I have.
Then his arms come around me. Strong. Possessive. Warm.
I press my face against his chest and breathe him in beneath the smoke and iron.
Alive.
He’s alive.
And whatever this is between us, whatever dangerous, inconvenient, impossible thing has started growing in the middle of revenge and blood and an unwanted marriage, I know one thing with terrifying clarity.
I have fallen in love with him.