Chapter 24
KALINA
Thrust from the quiet of the cabin and back into this huge mansion with many people, I felt like I had left one world and entered another.
I was grateful that I hadn’t been taken back to the only world I thought I’d ever have to know, the oppressive conditioning that I had to endure under my brother’s order.
But the shift was jarring. Due to the big change of having to leave the cabin and be here again, I almost shut down completely again. Slipping into that mute nothingness was impossible, though. I couldn’t lock up when Misha wanted to cling to me for comfort.
As weeks passed and I tried to acclimate to being a longer-term guest here at the Dubinin mansion, I looked back and realized that the roles had been flipped.
In the beginning, I had sought Misha’s company for comfort.
Identifying him as someone who wouldn’t be a threat to me, I wanted to be near him as an offshoot of his innocence and safety.
Now, as we all tried to move on past the fire of the cabin and the thwarted kidnapping attempt, he saw me as an anchor. As someone who’d reassure him that we were okay. That we were alive and not under any present threat.
Misha was in my life. From morning to night, he would want to be with me. Meals were in my room. Aside from his lessons, I stayed in that one bedroom and didn’t plan to venture out of it.
Ironic.
I sat staring out the window, waiting for Misha to come back from his lessons.
I had spent fourteen years trapped in a room, and now I didn’t want to leave this one.
“Will you come walk with us?” Raisa asked after tapping on the door.
I could never bear to close it. Keeping it slightly ajar was just one facet of my insecurities, a fragment of how I feared being locked in again.
I turned to face my cousin, seeing her husband, Ivan, at her side.
I’d met them all. One by one, I was introduced to the extended family. Luka, the boss. Emil, who was Sadie’s husband. Gabriella came to check on me daily. Lev had come to say hello. Allan seemed like a stuffy old man but was the mastermind manager of this place.
Misha was instrumental in introducing everyone in the family to me, and he did it with a slight possessiveness, as if it was up to him to make the bridges.
My cousin and I had caught up, but I didn’t give too many details about the life Erik and Yusef had expected of me as I waited to be sold to my husband. I’d already let myself be vulnerable to tell Alexsei all of that, and I was sure he’d filled the others in.
What I hadn’t expected from her was the story of how her father, Konstantin Petrov, had almost killed her and her unborn son.
She’d hidden from him, and Ivan, for years, only coming back when she feared for her life.
As she—and Ivan—explained how Lev was conceived, more barriers were broken in my mind.
Perhaps she hadn’t been bred.
Maybe she’d fought to have this unplanned baby and spare him a life of violence in this Mafia world for as long as she could. Not because she was forced to be pregnant, but because she wanted to have a baby. All due to their being in love.
A similar explanation was given by Sadie. She sat with me often, always in my room, and she told me how she and Emil had met. How she’d realized she was pregnant after he stranded her.
I asked Gabriella about how she and Luka started a family.
She’d smiled secretly, as if she were waiting for me to appear interested and ask.
She, compared to Raisa and Sadie, wanted to encourage me to feel comfortable here.
To lose this meekness and speak up. It was very clear she had no compunction about speaking up. Not even to Luka.
Again, she painted a picture of love. That her children were conceived because she loved Luka and wanted a family with him.
“All I can say is that it was hell to go into labor the same day that Sadie did,” she’d told me. “Very stressful.”
While they mentioned the babies, Carina and Helene, even Andre, none of them brought the youngest ones to see me. I gathered that they were waiting for me to ask to meet them instead of assuming I would want to.
Ivan and Raisa seemed the most down-to-earth of them all, but I might have been biased since I knew Raisa as a child.
“Has he come to talk to you?’ Raisa asked as she and Ivan came in to sit with me near the window. Misha wasn’t home yet.
“Who?” I looked at her, then him.
“Alexsei,” Ivan said.
I scoffed. “Oh. Him. The one who put me in danger.”
“He didn’t,” Raisa argued.
I shot her a look.
“He didn’t deliberately put you in danger,” Ivan said. “He took every measure to choose a safe location for you to rest in peace and without the chaos of this household.”
He was right about that. Even though I hid in my room—mostly to avoid Alexsei—I was aware of how big of a place this was. How busy it was. It made me yearn for the simple coziness of the cabin again.
But it’s gone.
All of what happened there is gone.
“He endangered Misha, too,” I accused, hating the memories that would pop up of how terrified that young boy was.
“He took every precaution,” Ivan repeated.
I shook my head, stubborn to not make the same mistake twice.
I believed Alexsei when he said he cared for me and wanted to keep me safe. And he almost hadn’t.
After a while, they let me be and I wondered if this anger I held for Alexsei was another mask, another layer that was supposed to work as a defense mechanism.
The next day, when Sadie got me to talking more about why I refused to reach out to Alexsei, she agreed.
“You fear lowering your guard with him and the chance of it not being true.” She shrugged, like it was a simple, basic discovery.
“Of this connection with him being true,” she added. “This… love.”
I rolled my eyes and dismissed that. I wasn’t going to get my hopes up high and distract myself with the fantasy of a happily ever after again.
Since she said it, though, it lurked in my mind like a scary threat.
That I could’ve lost love with him, and I was further ruining the chances of finding it again by being so stubborn as to push him away.
In my mind, I saw no other explanation, no other way to perceive it.
Was I supposed to just go up to him and tell him that he hurt me, and it would be okay again? That it broke my heart when I realized I couldn’t trust him? That I’d never be free to actually be safe?
How was I supposed to move past the trauma of almost being taken when I was in a safe place? I had gone there to learn how to live and just be, and then that had happened.
Gabriella and Sadie approached me the following day about whether I'd like to move to a guest suite. It had more space and wasn’t so central in the mansion.
“It’s quieter,” Sadie said. “And it’s got bigger windows. Alex—”
Gabriella elbowed her hard, shutting her up.
“What?” Sadie shot her a look. “It was his idea.”
I raised my brows.
Gabriella rolled her eyes. “Fine. It was Alexsei’s idea. He said you like looking out windows and he thought you might like more of an apartment space to yourself. He also told us not to tell you that it was his idea.”
“Which is dumb,” Sadie said. “Because he clearly loves you.”
I laughed. “I highly doubt that.”
Gabriella got a sassy look on her face. “No. He actually said that. Several times.”
I crossed my arms, skeptical.
“Yeah. He does.” Sadie nodded.
“He could only be saying something like that out of guilt,” I quipped.
Gabriella set her hands on her hips, looking down at me like she was annoyed.
“Well, he does have a ton of that. He takes security very seriously, so this rift between you after your safety was compromised—through no fault of his—is agony on his self-imposed guilt trip.” She smirked a bit, like she was glad to have the chance to give it to me straight like that.
“Now, this guest suite. You want to see it?”
I did, but on the walk there, I tried to rationalize with myself whether they were lying. Whether he was joking or mocking me.
Love?
If he loved me, why would he stay so far from me?
Moving into the guest room was a great idea.
Not only for the windows and the outdoor access to a patio and green space, but because it was more of a room in which I could decide how I wanted to live my life.
Luka was clear that I was welcome as family, since I was a relative through Raisa.
He also added that I shouldn’t leave the premises of any Dubinin property until all threats were removed.
“He means when Erik and Yusef are dead,” I told Gabriella when she was helping me hang up artwork that she'd gifted me.
“He does,” she agreed. Suddenly stopping in the middle of positioning a picture frame, she exhaled harshly and peered at me. “And you’d know that if you’d talk to Alexsei. Why are you punishing him for that night?”
I sat, wincing at her blunt attitude. It wasn’t mean or abrasive. She wasn’t cruel like Erik was. I heard the frustration in her tone.
“Because I feel so weak. I feel ungrounded and lost because I can’t trust myself now.”
She sat next to me, furrowing her brow and listening.
“I opened up to him when I was at my worst, when I was stuck reliving the hell of the last fourteen years. I trusted him with… so much, and I’d almost died. I was almost taken.”
She lifted her chin. “Then do something about that.”
I frowned at her. “Oh, like it’s that easy.”
“No. Nothing worthwhile in life is easy or free. But learn from your mistakes. If you leaned on him and you took a risk on counting on him in any way, don’t be so na?ve the next time. Grow. Push yourself. Learn how to be stronger.” She tapped my shoulder gently. “Work on you, Kalina.”
As I lowered my gaze and considered what she said, I couldn’t help but recall how Alexsei had said something similar. That people made their happiness come true and didn’t wait for it to happen.
Maybe that was why he was staying here, as a guest in the mansion instead of taking Misha back to his house which was supposed to be nearby.
This might be his way of making happiness come to him, holding on to hope that I would one day stop pushing him away.
His way of making amends was by suggesting I come here with windows and space to enjoy.
Because no matter how long I stayed mad and made no effort to speak to him, he didn’t leave.
Not once did he come to whine and make excuses.
He didn’t come here and try to coerce me into letting him star in my life again like he had in the cabin.
According to what the others said, including Misha, he didn’t seem to like it when others defended him.
Settled into this guest suite, I tried to understand how to forgive. How to move past the near-death experience I’d survived when Alexsei had me thinking I wouldn’t be harmed again.
Sadie taught me self-defense. Misha and I worked on his school projects. For the first time in my life, I had the power to choose what I wanted to do. What I ate, what I wore. No one was bossing me around, and I began to wonder what my future could hold. A job? A family?
The options seemed endless, and I slowly gave myself grace to simply learn how to be. To try on the concept of being free, and on my own terms, too.
Winter began to pass into spring, which led to Alexsei maintaining his space while he personally installed birdfeeders and birdhouses outside my window.
He showed me patience.
But the longer I missed him, I had to wonder when mine would run out.
And when it did, if I would have the courage to confront him once and for all after this long spell of agonizing distance.