21. Thea
THEA
Pasha beats me at chess for the eleventh consecutive time. “I’m sorry, but you castled too late,” he says, resetting the pieces with real regret. “Also too early, the game before. There’s a window.”
“You could let me win once. As a treat.”
“Mr. Vernigora says never to let you win. He says you would know.” Pasha looks up, earnest to the roots of his hair. “He is right. You would. You are too smart not to.”
This is my life now. I play chess in a mansion with a bodyguard who calls checkmate in a doctor’s diagnostic voice. He leaves printouts of famous games on the hall table for me. It’s the most tactful tutoring I’ve ever received.
I lose anyway.
Afterward I practice Russian with the door to my room shut. My accent remains a crime. My comprehension, though, is getting sharp, and that’s what matters.
Maxim tells me things now, which is great. Cartels and kumichos and honesty on demand. He’s very open with me.
On the surface.
But I hear him switch to Russian with the staff when I leave a room, and the switch itself is telling on him. So, I’ve developed a hobby of arriving on soft feet and lingering near doorways with a book. Perfectly innocent—I was just quiet because I was engrossed in the reading.
Two days ago, I heard him say something about tonight’s shipment. Yesterday, Lev took a call in the hall, and I caught a name I didn’t know. Then he said something about being careful. And he caught me listening.
He knows what I’m doing—there’s no denying that look in his eyes.
He has started speaking more slowly near me, like he wants me to understand what he’s saying in Russian.
It’s either courtesy or a trap. Hard to know which with him.
He’s far more suspicious than Maxim. But I suppose that’s what he’s paid to be.
I spend mornings in Max’s bed, which has become the bed, while mine develops the untouched look of a guest room. I don’t hate the change.
Then there’s Galina in her evening chair with knitting needles going, producing something small and yellow. I asked her what it was.
She said, “Warm,” and kept knitting.
The thing has grown sleeves this week. The sleeves would fit Potato or a small human.
Potato, who spent years redistributing my things to the floor regardless of their breakability, now spends his afternoons on the nearest windowsill like a small brown gargoyle.
I think he likes supervising the gardeners.
And he adores Pasha. I’ve never seen him warm up to a man before, so it’s odd that he happily weaves around the guard’s legs.
And Galina feeds him from her hand now, which I’m not supposed to know about. He escorts her on her evening rounds, hall by hall, tail up, a furry deputy. Two months ago, he was an anarchist.
The house absorbs everyone eventually, regardless of species. I’ve been feeling it, too. Absorbed. Assimilated. It’s almost the way I felt when I came to the city in the first place.
Back in Pennsylvania, I never fit. It was like wearing the wrong size clothes for the first two decades of my life.
But when I came to Queens, it fit me the moment I put it on.
At my old apartment, there’s a bakery around the corner, a diner on the other corner that doesn’t mind if patrons linger, a few random shops that I always find a reason to frequent… it was home.
Here, it took a little while due to the possibility of a torturous death, but now it feels like home. And that should bug me, shouldn’t it?
Things are weird. But I don’t hate it.
This morning is a good example of why, because this morning Maxim didn’t leave for the city until midmorning. He rolled me onto my side, gripping my hip as he licked the nape of my neck and murmured, “You’re going to make me late again.”
And then I felt the hard press of him against me.
I grinned into the pillow, because my face was half smooshed there. “And whose fault is that?”
His large hand skimmed over my hip to my ass, pulling me open. “Yours. Entirely yours.” His fingers explored me until he found the right spot to make me shudder. “You like that, don’t you, bratty girl?”
His touch stole my breath, and when I could manage words again, I whispered, “Yes.”
A simple yes, and suddenly, I felt his cock replace his fingers in one smooth thrust. He bit my shoulder as he pounded me from behind like a man half his age and possessed. The pain and the pleasure sent me somewhere else, somewhere deep inside, until I was dizzy on him.
He warned, “Soon.”
“That’s not like you,” I teased.
He grabbed my hips and pulled me onto my knees, so I had to prop myself up on my hands. Then he swelled inside of me just as he reached around for my clit. He worked me in time with his thrusts, and the tension built and grew and took over everything as we came together in a sweaty heap.
In the gasping quiet, he said, “Round Two,” and made good on that. Thorough is the only word for it. Afterward, I came downstairs walking carefully and humming, and I saw Maxim out with a kiss on the cheek. Normally, he’s not big on public displays of affection.
Today, he grabbed my ass for it.
Every night now, after the light goes off, he slides down the bed and talks to my stomach. In Russian. His hand spreads warm over skin that looks exactly the same as it did a month ago, because there’s nothing to see yet.
Little bean, he calls her. I’ve decided she’s a her. The house is warm, he says. Your mother’s stubborn and eats nothing, so you must work on her from the inside. We are partners in this.
I don’t mind them conspiring to feed me. There are worse fates.
I lie in the dark, pretending to sleep with my chest aching, while he believes the Russian keeps the secret. I allow him to think so because if he realized I understood, he might stop—something I can’t let happen.
So that’s the state of things. And I don’t know how to feel about any of it.
I’m sitting by the window with tea, rain streaking the glass, Potato on my feet, a blanket, and a book I’m not reading. Suddenly, I realize—like stepping into a puddle in socks—that I have no plans.
Not one singular escape plan. In fact, I haven’t thought about running in days. Weeks?
When the thought hits, I make myself plan an escape out of habit. The laundry van comes twice a week for the sheets and other large linens. Usually sometime around eleven in the morning, and the gate guard logs it in and out. Nobody checks the back.
But I don’t want to use the plan. There’s no pull toward it in my heart. Instead, I’m repulsed by the thought. Leaving this mansion puts a target on me and the little bean. It’d be foolish to flee now.
I should be fighting this. I shouldn’t give in to captivity.
My sister thinks I took a work sabbatical for an overdue vacation. She always said I worked too hard for Klaus, so I said the new CEO agreed and insisted I take time off. It’s in the realm of reality. Sort of.
A man controls when I leave. Two months ago, I threw a sugar bowl about it. Now I realize I forgot to clean up that mess. My rent is paid for the year by Maxim, so no one will notice.
At some point, between the orchard, the clinic, and the Russian in the dark, I let go of my outrage. This situation no longer feels like captivity. Instead, it feels comforting, like being looked after.
And honestly, that should be a little frightening.
But I’ve never been looked after. I’m the oldest between Tiny and me, and our mother worked full-time, so I was always taking care of her. Always packing Mom’s lunches. Checking Tiny’s homework. I was a mom long before I was ever pregnant.
After I left home, I thought I would never have kids. But then Potato came along, and I thought he was enough of a kid for me to take care of.
Then I had Klaus to take care of. Him, and his massive parties, and the rest of the executives… Now, though, it’s different. It’s all different.
There’s a man who worries about whether I eat. He checks that I sleep. He walks me in the orchard because the doctor prescribed walking.
I should want the laundry van, but I want Galina’s yellow thing with sleeves. Whoever it’s for. And Pasha’s chess lessons, because I have a feeling the lessons will help me with being an actual mom.
Kids are sneaky.
The next morning, Maxim leaves for the city early.
I’m crossing the front hall with my decaf when the doors open.
Pasha comes in from the gatehouse with rain-wet hair, carrying a large wicker gift basket wrapped in green cellophane.
He carries it wrong. Stiff-armed, held out from his body, his eyes down on it the entire way across the hall.
“Pasha, what’s wrong?”
“It arrived at the gate,” he says. “Courier service, prepaid, no sender. I swept it. Twice.” He sets it on the hall table with visible relief.
“Swept it for what?”
“Everything we sweep for.” He says it lightly, which is how I know it’s not. “It’s clean. No wire, no powder, no metal. Whoever sent it wanted it to reach the house intact. I have to call it in, but it’s safe to look.”
There’s no card. I circle the table once. Glimmering green cellophane, a gold ribbon, professionally put together. Inside are the usual suspects of an expensive basket. Crackers, a wedge of pricey cheese, dark chocolate, and pears wearing little foam sweaters.
It’s the bottle of wine inside that stops me cold.
A cabernet from a little vineyard in the Finger Lakes called Haven. A name nobody knows. A label nobody stocks. A bottle you cannot buy in the city, because you can only buy it at the winery.
I know because I stood at that bar. With Klaus. We tasted a dozen wines and bought a case of the cabernet because I loved it, and he teased me for a week about my cheap palate.
He knows it’s my favorite. He’s the only person who knows.
Among all the details about me that he’s let slip over eight months—like my coffee order, birthday month, sister’s name, or my birthmark—this one stuck around in his thick head.
Pasha’s saying something about the courier company and our security, and his voice sounds like he is underwater because I’m freaking out.
My hands have gone cold around the mug I’m still holding. It’s the only thing keeping my hands from shaking.
Klaus knows where I am. The bus ticket, the special phone, the invisible weeks, all that work, and my ex-boyfriend just reached through the walls and set my favorite wine on the hall table like a calling card.
Klaus knows where I am. The same Klaus that has been betraying Maxim to his enemy. The enemy who likes to peel faces.
The mansion is no longer safe. If it ever was.
Strength flows out of me with my next breath. “Oh, God.”