Chapter 21 Katya
KATYA
Iwake to the sound of footsteps wearing a path in the hardwood floor.
My body aches in places I didn’t know could ache, and when I shift under the sheets, pain radiates across my ribs.
The cut on my cheek throbs with my pulse, and my wrists burn where the ropes bit into my skin.
Someone bandaged me while I slept.
The gauze clings around my forearms, and a smaller bandage sits taped below my eye.
I don’t remember any of it.
Dimitri paces at the foot of the bed with his phone pressed to his ear.
He speaks in English too rapid for me to catch more than a few words, but it sounds like he's giving commands.
His shirt hangs unbuttoned and wrinkled, and dark circles shadow his eyes.
He hasn’t slept.
I wonder if he stayed awake watching me breathe.
The thought makes something in my chest feel too large for the space it occupies.
He ends the call and notices I’m awake.
His pacing stops, and for a moment we simply look at each other across his bedroom.
The morning light slants through the windows and catches in his dark hair, turning the edges gold.
He looks exhausted and dangerous.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
"Like I got kidnapped and tied to a chair."
I try to force the joke but my throat feels raw, probably from screaming for help.
"But alive, so that's something."
He moves to the bed and sits on the edge near my hip.
His hand reaches out as if he wants to touch me, then stops halfway and drops to the mattress instead.
"I need to ask you more about your mother."
I just woke up. I'm not ready for this, but I push myself up against the headboard despite the way my ribs protest the movement.
"I already told you everything I know."
"Tell me again."
His eyes search my face with an intensity that makes me want to look away.
"The details matter now. Where exactly does she live? Who does she see? What name does she use?"
I take a breath and let it out slowly.
"I don't remember the exact address, but it's on Komsomolsky Prospekt. Third floor of a yellow building with blue shutters. She remarried a man named Arsenty Korovin five years ago. Last I heard, he taught literature at the university."
"Anything else I should know? We have to track her down."
The question opens something inside me that I’ve kept carefully sealed.
Memories surface of packed boxes in the middle of the night, of my mother's face drawn tight with fear as she hurried me out of apartments I'd barely learned to call home.
"She told me my father had dangerous business associates. That we had to stay invisible to stay safe even though he was dead. We moved six more times in four years. She said it was to make sure no one could find us."
Dimitri's jaw works as he grits his teeth.
"She knew exactly what she was protecting you from."
"I guess she did."
I look down at my bandaged wrists.
"I never understood why she was so paranoid. Why she changed our last name. Why she made me promise never to tell anyone my real name. I thought she was just traumatized by losing him and it was her way of dealing with the grief."
"She was protecting you from men like me."
He says it without emotion, as if he's simply stating a fact.
"Your father made agreements that would've bound you to the organization and its allies if anyone had known you existed."
I'm only now realizing how messed up this is.
He stands and moves to the window, putting distance between us.
"Your father supplied weapons and intelligence to mine during the territorial wars. In exchange, my father guaranteed protection for the Morozov family and a share of the profits. When your father died, the pact should've transferred to his heir."
"But no one knew he had an heir."
"No one knew he had a daughter."
He turns to face me, and something in his expression makes my stomach clench.
"If the other families find out who you are, they'll come for you. Some will try to use you as leverage against me. Others will claim you owe them loyalty based on old alliances. You represent power and legitimacy in a world where both are constantly being challenged."
I push the sheets aside and swing my legs over the edge of the bed.
My head spins for a moment, but I make myself stand. "So, what happens now? You lock me in this apartment forever? You marry me off to secure some alliance? You kill me to eliminate the problem?"
"Katya," he groans, and he moves toward me.
"I told you last night that you're mine. That hasn’t changed."
"What does that mean?" I ask hesitantly.
I want to hear him say it with his own mouth so I can stop wondering.
I need him to tell me he cares about me.
"It means I know exactly what you are."
He approaches and stands close enough that I'm forced to raise my head to look him in the eye.
"I don't risk my life to save assets."
I want to ask him what he means by that, what he expects from me now that he knows who I really am.
I want to tell him that I feel the same impossible pull toward him, that being near him makes me feel both safer and more reckless than I’ve ever felt in my life.
But the words stick in my throat, too big and too dangerous to speak out loud.
I reach up and touch his face.
My fingers trace the hard line of his jaw, feeling the tension that lives just beneath his skin.
"I swear to you I didn't know," I say quietly.
"I came to Moscow because I wanted a life that was mine. Not my father's. Not my mother's. Mine."
He covers my hand with his own, pressing my palm flat against his cheek.
Then he draws it over his lips and kisses it tenderly.
"I believe you."
I lean forward, and he comforts me with an arm around my waist.
His other hand cups the back of my head, careful of my injuries, and he holds me against his chest with a gentleness that contradicts everything I know about who he is in the world outside this apartment.
"You need to rest," he says into my hair before kissing the crown of my head.
"I have to meet with my men, but I’ll be back in an hour. Don’t leave this apartment. Don’t open the door for anyone. Don’t even look out the windows."
"I'm not helpless."
"I know."
He pulls back just enough to look at me.
"But right now, every man in Moscow who wants to hurt me will be looking for ways to do it. You're the most obvious target. So you stay here where I know you're safe, and let me handle the rest."
I want to argue, but the exhaustion stops me.
"Okay. I'll stay."
He kisses my forehead and then he's gone.
The apartment is too quiet without him in it.
I stand in the center of his bedroom for a long moment, trying to wrangle the chaos of my thoughts into something manageable.
I'm Ekaterina Morozova?
The name feels strange even thinking it, as if I’m trying on clothes that belong to someone else.
I remember a man in fragments now—the smell of cigarette smoke and cologne, the way he'd lift me onto his shoulders and carry me through crowds, the sound of a man's laugh that always seemed too loud.
Those fragmented memories are all I have of him.
But I'll never forget my mother's face when the police came to tell us he was dead.
She was devastated and terrified.
And I remember it was the first time I was rushed out of a home with nothing but a duffel bag.
We moved that night to a different district.
She cut my hair short and dyed it darker.
Told me my father died in a car accident, and over time, the facts blurred.
I went by Katya, which makes sense looking back.
I sit on the foot of Dimitri's bed as pieces knit together in my head.
Ekaterina to Katya, just a nickname that became my identity.
And I never remember being called Morozova, but I was a Sokolov and then Volsky, but I never knew why she made me change it.
I obeyed because I was young and terrified and because my mother's fear had become a living thing that filled our apartment like thick smoke.
But I never understood why we had to become ghosts of ourselves, drifting from place to place with no roots or history.
Now I know.
She was hiding me from the obligations that came with being Lyovik Morozov's daughter.
She was trying to give me a life free from the violence and politics that had defined my father's world.
She was trying to keep me away from men like Dimitri, who live and breathe the same dangerous air my father once breathed.
The irony of it would be funny if it didn’t hurt so much.
I ended up in the exact place she kept me from as if it's my destiny and I can't escape it.
I move through the apartment on autopilot, needing to do something to quiet the storm in my head.
The bathroom mirror shows me a stranger's face, pale and bruised with haunted eyes.
I peel off the bandages carefully, examining the damage beneath.
The cut on my cheek is shallow but angry, and my wrists are ringed with deep purple bruises and scabs.
I feel like I’m still waiting for the next blow to land.
I turn on the shower as hot as I can stand it and relax under the spray.
The water beats against my skin like absolution, washing away the blood and sweat and fear of the past thirty-six hours.
I stand under the heat until my skin turns pink and my fingers prune, letting the steam fill my lungs and the sound of water drown out the questions circling in my mind.
When I finally turn off the water and step out, I feel fractionally more human.
I find a pair of Dimitri's boxers and one of his shirts in his closet and pull them on.
The shirt hangs to my thighs and smells like him, like expensive cologne and clean laundry.
The scent makes my chest ache with emotion I can’t even admit to right now.
I curl up on his couch with my knees pulled to my chest and let myself think about all the things I’ve been avoiding.
My mother is still in Perm, living under a false name with a husband who probably knows nothing about her real past.
Does she think about me?
Does she wonder if I’m safe, or has she convinced herself that staying away is the kindest thing she can do?
I’ve not called her since I moved to Moscow.
I told myself it was better this way, that I was more stable without her, but I turned out worse than her.
But now I wonder if she knew this would happen.
If she saw the trajectory of my life and recognized the patterns from her own.
Maybe that's why she tried so hard to hide me, because she knew no matter how far we ran, the past would eventually catch up.
I think about my father and try to remember him as something more than fragments.
What kind of man makes pacts with people like Dimitri's father?
What kind of man lives a life so dangerous that his widow has to erase his name and disappear into the margins of society?
I want to ask my mother these questions, but I’m not sure I’ll like the answers.
And then there's Dimitri himself, pacing through my thoughts like he paces through his apartment.
I don’t know what to do with the feelings that rise up when I think about him.
They're too large and complicated, tangled up with fear and desire.
He saved my life.
He killed for me without hesitation.
He holds me like I’m something precious and rare, even though I’ve brought nothing but trouble to his door.
I don’t know if what I feel for him is real or if it’s just the intensity of our circumstances warping everything into something bigger than it should be.
I don’t know if he feels the same pull toward me or if I’m just another obligation he has to manage, another piece of his world that needs to be controlled and protected.
But I know that when he looks at me, something inside me settles.
When he touches me, the chaos in my head goes quiet.
When he tells me I’m his, I want to believe him even though I know better than to trust promises made by men who live in the shadows.
The sound of a key in the lock pulls me from my thoughts.
Dimitri enters carrying two bags of food that fill the apartment with the smell of garlic and herbs.
He looks at me curled up on his couch wearing his shirt, and something in his expression softens.
"You showered," he says.
"I needed to wash off the warehouse."
I unfold myself from the couch and move to the kitchen.
"And I was getting tired of smelling like sweat."
He sets the bags on the counter and begins unpacking containers of food.
There's borscht and dark bread, roasted chicken with potatoes, pickled vegetables, and a container of honey cake that makes my mouth water just looking at it.
He moves around his kitchen, pulling out plates and silverware, pouring water into glasses.
I watch him work and feel something shift in my chest.
This isn't the dangerous man who stormed a warehouse and killed two people without blinking.
This is someone who knows how to take care of the people he loves even if he can’t say the words out loud.
We eat at his small dining table.
The food is rich and good, and I realize I’ve not eaten in days.
My body responds to the nourishment with a wave of exhaustion that makes my eyelids heavy.
Dimitri watches me push food around my plate and reaches across the table to cover my hand with his.
"You need to sleep more," he says.
"I just woke up a few hours ago."
"Your body is trying to heal. Let it."
He stands and clears our plates, then moves to where I sit and holds out his hand. "Come on."
I let him lead me back to the bedroom.
He sits me on the edge of the bed and kneels in front of me, pulling the first aid kit from his nightstand.
His hands are steady as he cleans the cut below my cheek bone and applies a fresh bandage.
Then he tends my wrists with the same gentle fingers against my bruised skin.
"Does it hurt?" he asks.
"Everything hurts."
I watch his face as he works, studying the concentration in his eyes and the set of his jaw.
"But I'll survive."
"You'll more than survive."
He finishes with my wrists and looks up at me.
"You're stronger than you think."
He makes me smile.
I reach out and touch his face again, needing the connection.
"I'm scared of what might happen. Of who else might come looking for me."
"I know."
He covers my hand with his and turns his face to press a kiss against my palm.
"But you're not alone in this. Whatever happens, we face it together."
His promise settles me, though doubt still lingers.
I lean forward and rest my forehead against his, breathing in the same air, sharing the same space.
We stay like that for a long moment, neither of us speaking, both of us holding on to something we can’t name but desperately need.
Finally, he pulls back and stands.
"Sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up."
I lie down and let him pull the covers over me.
My eyes are already closing as I hear him settle into the chair by the window.
The last thing I see before sleep takes me is his silhouette against the morning light and eyes that burn with indignation over everything that's happened to me.