Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Alex
There's nothing personal on the surface. No photographs, no objects that belong to a life rather than a room. Just clean lines and expensive materials, and the specific quality of space that belongs to a man who has not yet decided to occupy it as anything other than a position.
Victor takes off his jacket, drops it on a chair, and looks at me. I stand in the middle of his living room with my own jacket still on and my bag still on my shoulder and the note that's been in my pocket for days — Moya Sasha — pressing against my hip through the fabric, and I look back.
"How much do you know?" I say.
"Enough," he says. "But I want to hear it from you."
"Why?"
"Because David gives me facts," he says. "And I want more than facts."
I look at him for a long moment. He is standing with his arms at his sides and his expression doing the thing it does — not quite readable, not quite closed, somewhere in between. The one that says he will only wait so long for answers, and he means it.
The apartment is quiet around us. I’m both relieved and utterly rocked to be standing in the apartment of the Pakhan of the Russian mafia in my work clothes with someone three blocks behind me who knows my real name. Truly not knowing which one of the two to be more worried about.
Reluctantly, I take off my bag. Set it on the chair beside his jacket.
"My name. Before," I say. "Was Yarina. Yarina Koshkin." I say it out loud for the first time in thirty-seven months, and it lands in the room with a weight I didn't anticipate.
"I was a part of the Koshkin family from the time I was eighteen. Little more than domestic staff. Which means you do what you're told and you don't ask questions about anything you see." I look out the window as the memories bleed through.
"Nikita Koshkin is a very hard man. The kind who believes that people in his house are his in the same way his furniture is his. Property. To be used and maintained and discarded according to his needs."
Victor says nothing. He is watching me, listening, not breaking the moment with questions.
"Evie's mother worked in the house before me," I say.
"She died when Evie was two. An accident, supposedly," I look at my hands.
"I don't believe it was an accident. I have never believed it was an accident, I spent six years in that house watching Nikita. I know what he is capable of. I know what the people who work for him are capable of.”
"No," Victor says, quietly, finally breaking his silence. "Neither do I."
I look at him. He meets my eyes and holds them, and there is something in his face that is not pity — I have never been able to tolerate pity, and he seems to know this without being told — but something adjacent to it that has more weight and less condescension.
"She was two when her mother died," I say.
"And after that she was just — there. In the house.
Nikita's daughter, technically, but with no status, no protection, no one whose job it was to make sure she was alright.
She was just there, the way the furniture was there, and Nikita treated her the way he treated everything he owned that wasn't useful enough to justify proper maintenance. "
I stop. The words for the next part have always lived in a place I don't open often, stored carefully, the way you store things that have edges.
"He hurt her. Not consistently, not with any particular system.
Just — when it suited him. When she was inconvenient.
When she was too loud or too quiet or present in the wrong room at the wrong moment. "
I force my voice to stay level. "I watched it happen for years before I decided I wasn't going to watch it anymore."
Victor takes a slow breath. I watch him take it — the deliberateness of it, the control he applies to his own responses, the way I apply control to mine, two people who have learned that reaction is a liability and have built systems around it.
"Svoloch'," he says, under his breath. Just that. One word in Russian that I understand completely.
"I started planning the night I saw what he did to her hands," I say. "She was eight years old and I looked at her hands and I understood that I was going to take her out of that house or I was going to spend the rest of my life knowing I didn't."
I look at him directly, not shrinking myself, or the strength I’ve gained.
"So I planned. For eleven months. I skimmed money from the household accounts — small amounts, nothing that would be noticed.
I copied a key. I memorized bus routes. I found a shelter.
And when the right night came, we left."
He doesn’t react, just waits, listening.
"With four hundred and twelve dollars and a change of clothes and a photograph we took in a pharmacy booth.
" I pause. "I left everything else. Everything I'd had before.
The name, the history, all of it. We went to a shelter in Pilsen and I spent six weeks building something new and then we started moving, city to city, until I was sure the trail was cold enough to stop. "
"And then you came back to Chicago," he says.
"Yes," I say. "I thought — I thought we'd gotten far enough. I thought the cover was solid enough." I look at the window again. "I promised her we weren't leaving again."
The room is quiet for a moment.
"She told me," Victor says. "On the Ferris wheel. That you weren't always her mother."
"I heard her." I had and I had stayed very still and looked at the city and let it happen because Evie's trust is hers to give, and I have never once tried to take it back from her.
"They found me," I say.
"I know," he says. "Your co-worker called me. I was behind you before you reached the third block."
"You followed me?"
"I was protecting you; they were following you," he says. "There's a difference."
He moves then, and he stops close enough that I would have to step back to create distance, which I don't do, which has never once been the thing I do with this man.
"I know," he says. "I know who sent them. And I know why." He holds my gaze. "You're not running again, Yarina."
My name. My real name, in his voice, with that accent underneath the English that surfaces when he's saying something that matters to him, and it does something to me that I was not prepared for — something that has everything to do with the specific relief of being known, of having the thing you've been hiding held by someone else for a moment.
"You can't promise that," I say.
"Watch me," he says.
He reaches up and does what he did in the alley — his hand at my jaw, fingers curved against my face, tilting my chin up with the specific deliberateness of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and has decided to do it — and this time there is no phone call coming, there is no Evie at a sleepover one building away, there is no reason to step back that I am willing to use, and I don't step back.
"This is a terrible idea," I say.
"Znayu," he says quietly. I know. "I've thought that from the beginning."
He kisses me. Not like he did in the alley.
This is different. This is a man who has made a decision and is implementing it with the same total commitment he brings to everything else in his life.
I make a sound against his mouth, and I kiss him back with everything I have, which turns out to be considerable.
His hands move — one still at my jaw, one finding the small of my back and pulling me closer with a certainty that bypasses negotiation entirely, and I go, because this is the choice I've been not-making for weeks and I'm done not making it, and the warmth of him is immediate and total and exactly what I knew it would be from the first moment in the storage room when he held a jacket between us and I was still somehow more aware of him than I'd been of anything in three years.
"The jacket," he says, against my mouth.
"What about it.”
"Take it off."
I take it off. He takes his off. We do this with the particular efficiency of people who have been thinking about this long enough that the logistics are already solved, and then his mouth is at my throat — not gentle, never gentle with this man, always that specific quality of certain want that bypasses gentle entirely — and I tip my head back and let it happen and my hands are in his hair and he says something in Russian against my skin that I catch every word of and do not translate aloud.
“Ty moyo.”
You are mine.
I should argue with that. There is a version of me that argues with that, that has an extensive and well-reasoned case against being anyone's anything, that has spent thirty-seven months building a life specifically organized around belonging to no one and nothing except Evie and the promise I made her.
That version of me is somewhere in this apartment, and I will find her later.
Right now I am here, and he is here, and his mouth is doing something to my collarbone that makes the argument impossible to locate.
He walks me backward until the backs of my knees find the couch and then I am sitting and he is in front of me and he looks down at me with those pale eyes and the controlled want in them that is not quite controlled anymore, and I look back, and for a moment we just do that — look at each other, in the way that people look at each other when they are deciding something that cannot be undecided.
"You can still say no," he says.
"I know," I say.
"I want to hear you say it isn't that."
I look at him. "It isn't that," I say.
Something moves in his expression — not relief, Victor does not do relief, but something that functions like it, a small release of something held.
He reaches down and takes my face in his hands and looks at me for a moment with an attention so complete it feels like being read, like being understood at a cellular level, and then he says, very quietly, "Moya," and kisses me again.