Chapter 6 – Ilya
The first few days passed like a blur, and she seemed to be settling in just fine. I made sure she was fed three times a day and treated like a guest, not a prisoner.
In my head, the question she asked me the night I brought her here still lingered.
“Why didn’t you just kill me yourself?”
Even Boris and every other man on my team hadn’t expected such generosity from me. To be fair, I was just as shocked about my softness toward her as everyone else.
I simply couldn’t bring myself to hurt her or let her hurt. It didn’t sit well with me for reasons I hadn’t yet discovered. Perhaps I had already, but refused to accept it.
Iris barely left the room. The times she did, she spent the whole evening roaming the mansion inside and out. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was cataloging the place—probably watching out for the fastest way to escape.
However, attempting an escape would only lead to the loss of her own life. I wanted to believe she was smart enough to know not to pull a stunt like that.
I recalled the look on her face after I broke the news that the Bratva had their eyes on her. She was petrified, but beneath that fear was skepticism.
In her mind, she wasn’t sure she could trust me, and I honestly couldn’t blame her. I mean, I practically kidnapped her and locked her up in my mansion. Any reasonable person would sense something fishy.
She was wrong, though.
I had no ulterior motives toward her, which was still a mystery I had yet to solve, by the way.
The few times she wandered the mansion, her exploration always ended in the same destination.
The library.
A part of me loathed how invested in her affairs I’d let myself become. I watched her every move around the house, like a documentary for my own entertainment.
Nothing special about the way she spent her days. It was always the same routine. She’d wake up, stay curled up under the sheets for some time before getting into the bathroom.
In there, she’d spend roughly an hour or so. Then she was done; she’d step out, wrapped in a towel.
She’d change into new clothes from the variety already stuffed in her closet and then spend the next few hours sitting in silence.
Because she refused to eat with me, every meal was sent up to her room, and most of it was barely touched by the time someone collected the tray.
Her silence was useful. That’s what I told myself. Uncomplicated. A woman who kept to herself caused fewer problems.
Except I started noticing things anyway.
When she was bored, she’d pace the length of her room, chewing absently on her fingernails. I noticed she did that when she was deep in thought. She also tapped her feet when she was restless.
She was always switching between sitting on the couch, the bed, and even the table by her window, just to pass the time. A TV was mounted on the wall in her room, but she never turned it on.
Not sure why, though, considering how bored out of her mind she was.
Sometimes she’d simply sit with her legs pulled up against her chest, her arms wrapped around them. She could stay in that position for hours, as if her soul had traveled to another world, leaving her body behind in the room.
Her body might be in a gilded cage, but her mind was free.
Yesterday, she stayed in that position for almost three hours. Unmoving.
Boris thought that was somewhat creepy. But if I was being honest, I found her ability to master isolation at that level rather fascinating.
Whenever she finally decided to leave her room, she avoided the guards entirely. Wouldn’t speak to them, wouldn’t look at them longer than she had to.
By then, I was already familiar with her daily routine down to the minute details.
For instance, I knew which books she reached for first on the meticulously arranged bookshelves. I knew how long she stood at the library windows, arms crossed, as if she were calculating something.
I studied her like an open book, noticing the simplest things. The way she piled her chestnut hair in a messy bun when she read. How she pulled her sleeves down over her hands when she thought too hard about something.
And as boring and predictable as her life was, it still was worth paying attention to.
One evening, I found the book she’d left behind on the armchair. She’d already gone upstairs. The library was empty, the fire dying in the hearth, and the book sat there as if she’d forgotten it existed.
I picked it up without thinking.
Pages full of pencil marks. Underlined passages, notes crammed into the margins in small, careful handwriting. Betrayal. Human behavior. Whole paragraphs circled twice, like she’d needed to make sure she understood them.
I flipped through more pages than I should have.
I caught myself doing it and stopped, the book still open in my hands, and stood there for a second, feeling like an idiot.
I’d interrogated men until they gave up the names they’d sworn to protect. I’d buried three bodies this month without losing sleep over any of them.
And here I was, alone in a library, studying a woman’s reading habits as if they meant something.
I put the book down exactly where I’d found it.
Over the next few days, I made changes around the estate. Small ones. Nothing anyone would question.
I told the kitchen to stop sending up the heavy Russian meals. She barely touched them anyway.
I noticed she was awake early, before the house stirred, and that she drank tea instead of coffee. So the kitchen started leaving tea instead.
I told one of the staff to have the library fireplace lit before nightfall. She always ended up near it eventually, curled into the chair closest to the warmth, whether she noticed or not.
None of it was strategic. That was the problem.
I’d stopped pretending it was for information, for control, for anything I could justify to Boris if he asked. I just did it.
Deep down, the fact that I couldn’t explain my newfound behavior toward her irritated me almost as much as the rest of what I felt whenever I was near her.
I found her in the library one night, wrapped in a blanket, curled up in the chair by the window. The fire was burning. Rain against the glass behind her.
I walked in quietly. Quiet enough that she didn’t hear me until I was already behind her chair, close enough to see the page she’d stopped on. She’d been sitting on the same page for a while. Not reading it. Just staring at it.
I reached past her shoulder and turned the page for her.
She flinched and yelped, the book nearly slipping from her hands. Her head snapped up to find me standing right behind her.
“What the hell, Ilya!” she barked, a hand on her heaving chest. “Don’t creep on me like that again—unless you want me to die of a heart attack before the Bratva finds me.”
That was funny. I almost smiled. Almost.
“I told you. You’re safe here.”
She paused. “Yeah, safe from everyone else but you, apparently.”
I looked down at the book properly.
Criminal psychology, one of the older texts from the back shelves, the kind most people in this house had no reason to touch. She’d picked it at random, probably, reaching for whatever was closest in the dark.
The case in the chapter she’d stalled on was one I actually knew, having read the book multiple times myself.
“That case,” I said. “The details in here are wrong.”
She glanced down at the page, then slowly raised her brows in disbelief. “Really?”
Silence.
“Are you claiming you know the case better than the authors?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes squinted slightly, fazed by the confidence in my voice. “That’s not arrogant at all,” she whispered to herself, her tone laced with sarcasm.
I didn’t respond to that.
“Have you ever read the book?”
“This is my library. What do you think?”
“The fact that it’s your library doesn’t mean you’ve read every single book in here.”
I had, actually. All of them. But I didn’t tell her that.
She stared at me, suspicion creeping into her gaze as though she could see the possibility that I had indeed read all the books in the library.
I kept my eyes on the page instead of her, although doing that was more difficult than I imagined. She wore an oversized sweater, the hem barely reaching her knees.
Instead of piling her hair in a messy bun, tonight she let it spill over one shoulder. Beautiful.
“I know the details in there are wrong because I used to know the man they’re writing about.” My calm voice cut through the silence.
Her breathing changed. Slight. Barely there. But I noticed.
I could smell her perfume, mingled with shampoo and conditioner. Her fingers had gone still against the page, holding it too carefully, as if bracing for something.
I leaned in slightly, close enough to briefly explain the next paragraph over her shoulder. At that moment, I felt her go rigid beneath the blanket.
Her voice came out smaller than before. “That’s not in the book. What you just said.”
“No.”
“How do you know it, then?” she asked. She added almost immediately, “Oh, I forgot, you used to know the man personally.”
A beat.
The silence stretched, and I stayed in that position longer than I should have. I heard her breath catch as I shifted my weight. She didn’t move. Didn’t pull away. Just sat there, spine straight, fingers pressed flat against the page as if holding herself together through it.
I should have stepped back.
I didn’t. Not right away.
Her hand trembled slightly against the paper. Small. She probably didn’t know I could see it.
The tension in the room had gone sharp, too sharp, faster than I’d meant to let it. I felt it the same way she must have—that shift in the air, the kind that made staying in the room a decision rather than an accident.
She closed the book before I could say anything else.
“Um…” She scratched the back of her head, clearing her throat. “I’m tired.”
I watched her stand, blanket slipping off her shoulders, and only then did I step back a bit.
We held each other’s gaze a little longer, my heart swelling with something I still didn’t want to name.
Without a word, she broke eye contact and moved past me toward the door. She didn’t look at me on her way out.
The door shut behind her, softer than the ones upstairs, and I stood in the empty library with the fire still burning and her scent still lingering in the air where she’d been sitting.
What had just happened?