Chapter 19
Zoya
The first thing I tasted was blood. Not enough to choke on, just enough to coat the back of my tongue and make every breath metallic and wrong.
My cheek was pressed against cold leather, my shoulder throbbing where someone had grabbed me hard enough to bruise. My wrists burned, skin abraded and raw from the binds my father wrapped around them after he tossed me in the vehicle.
I didn’t panic or alert him to the fact I was conscious. I catalogued every little thing.
The engine vibration beneath me, and I smelled blood and gunmetal coating the inside of my nose.
I shifted my head just slightly to see if it was just me and my father in the car.
We were moving fast but efficiently. I inhaled again and smelled expensive cologne… the same kind I’d known my entire life.
The interior was dark except for the occasional slash of passing streetlights cutting through tinted windows. My hands were zip-tied in front of me, and I looked over at my father and saw there was blood on his side, dripping down his arm and over his hand.
Good. I’d hit him.
He sat in the passenger seat, speaking low and almost inaudible in Russian to the man driving. But in a matter of seconds, he sensed I was awake, and he looked over his shoulder to look at me sprawled out in the back seat.
“There she is,” he murmured, his voice calm and measured, as if I’d just woken from a nap instead of being dragged out of my car at gunpoint.
He adjusted the folded handkerchief pressed to his side, and I watched the white fabric darken as blood soaked through it in slow, spreading stains.
“You shot me,” he continued evenly, as if commenting on poor table manners.
His gaze lifted to mine, cool and assessing.
“That was unnecessary. It seems we’ll need to revisit your understanding of consequences. ”
“You took me,” I replied evenly, and when my voice didn’t shake, I held on to that minor victory.
His gaze speared into mine fully now, sharp and clinical as ever. He wasn’t looking at me like a father checking on his daughter. He was evaluating damage, calculating risk, and measuring his loss in me already.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
He adjusted the blood-soaked cloth at his side with a slight wince, though he tried to hide it. “Somewhere quiet,” he said, a faint smile ghosting across his mouth, like this was all still under his control.
I didn’t respond and let his words hang in the interior of the SUV. I knew that bothered him more than anything I could say.
It felt like we’d been driving for hours before we finally veered off the main road onto something narrower and unmarked.
The pavement gave way to rougher asphalt, then gravel, the tires crunching loudly in the silence.
I was sitting up now and saw trees closing in on both sides, their branches scraping along the SUV like fingernails dragged over metal.
The glow of the city disappeared in the rearview mirror, and now there was just darkness pressing in from every side. He’d chosen isolation again.
The SUV rolled through a rusted gate that groaned open and then clanged shut behind us. The engine idled down and cut. Cold air rushed in sharply when the door opened. The driver yanked me out of the vehicle and steadied me, keeping a vise-like hold on my arm.
We stood in front of a house on the river, though it didn’t feel like a home.
It was a structure of poured concrete and dark glass built low along the bank, modern and cold against the wild stretch of land around it.
Birch and pine trees crowded close, their pale trunks stark in the faint wash of moonlight, half concealing the building from the narrow access road.
Beyond it, the river moved slowly and black, wide and silent. A thin wooden dock stretched out over the water, damp and weathered, disappearing into darkness. Across the river there were no lights, just forest and open land.
And then I recognized it.
The shape of the roofline, the way the dock angled slightly to the left, and the narrow path that cut through the trees where I’d once been told not to wander. Memory rose slow and sickening.
I’d been here as a child, but rarely. Only when my father said he had “business to attend to” and I was to stay in one of the upstairs rooms with the curtains drawn and a handler keeping watch over me.
I remembered the long drives out of the city, and the way the air smelled different near the river like wet earth, pine sap, and cold water.
On one of his retreats… was what he’d called it, anyway. But I understood now it hadn’t just been about negotiations. This was where alliances were shaped, where power was measured in daughters and signatures.
I hadn’t been brought here because he wanted me close. He wanted me here to be displayed.
I remembered being dressed carefully on those trips. Silk dresses in muted colors, hair brushed until it shone. I was told to sit straight, to smile when spoken to, and to answer politely but not ask anything.
Vodka glasses would clink in the next room while men with cold eyes assessed more than just contracts.
They assessed me for the potential to expand bloodlines.
I hadn’t understood it then. I’d thought I was simply accompanying my father because I was his only child. But I’d seen the way older men would look at me from across the table. Appraising me as if I were something that would mature into leverage.
A future marriage, bond between families, and a quiet exchange of loyalty sealed with a daughter instead of ink.
This house had been a showroom, but at night… I remembered the sounds when I should have been sleeping.
The sounds were always muffled and distant, like something heavy being dragged across the floor below. Doors slamming, and muffled voices arguing. And once, on the verge of sleep, a scream that cut sharp and sudden through the walls before it was suddenly extinguished.
I had pressed my hands over my ears and told myself it was just the forest making noises, wild animals hunting. But deep down, I felt like I knew the predators were right in the house with me.
This wasn’t just where alliances were made, it was where obedience was enforced, deals created, and blood was spilled.
And tonight, he had brought me back here not as his daughter, but as property he intended to reclaim.
Inside, it was exactly how I remembered. Cold, controlled, and built for function, not comfort.
Concrete floors, exposed steel beams, and furniture placed with intention instead of warmth. No art or photographs. No trace that a child—his daughter—had ever stepped foot inside these walls.
This place had never been a home. It was a staging ground.
Two men stood near the far wall. Not bodyguards I recognized from the city house.
These were quieter, cleaner, and the kind who didn’t ask questions.
One of them stepped forward and cut the zip ties from my wrists.
The plastic snapped away, but he didn’t retreat.
He stayed close, close enough that if I lunged or ran, his hand would be on me before I made it three steps.
My father removed his coat with slow precision, folding it over the back of a chair like we were about to have dinner. The white of his shirt was ruined, red blooming steadily from the wound at his side. Not gushing or fatal, but real enough I knew he was hurting. Good.
“The physician is already here in the back setting up. He came while you were on route,” one man said quietly.
My father didn’t even look at him because his attention never left me.
“You should have aimed higher,” he said, voice calm, almost thoughtful, as if he were correcting a minor mistake at the table instead of commenting on the bullet I’d put in him.
“Believe me,” I said evenly, meeting his stare, “I tried.”
His lips twitched, almost amused, as if we were sharing some private joke. “I always knew you had a sharp tongue.”
The words slid between us, thin and poisonous.
“You dishonored me,” he continued, taking a slow step closer. His shoes echoed softly against the floor. “Running off with him. Letting him touch you.” His gaze dragged over me, clinical and cold. “You made yourself worthless. His whore.”
The physician, the guards, even the blood spreading through his shirt were secondary. What mattered to him was that Dmitry had taken what he considered inventory. Not a daughter. A commodity.
“Well,” he added lightly, as if considering options at an auction, “maybe not entirely worthless. Perhaps I should sell you to the highest bidder. Let them take what they want and recoup some of the loss.”
The men behind him didn’t react, and neither did I. He wanted my outrage, wanted me to beg. But what he wanted most were my tears.
I gave him nothing.
“Do you understand what that means?” he asked.
I kept my mouth shut, and let him hear his own voice echo back at him.
“It means,” he said, tone flattening, “I can’t allow you to exist like this. You were meant to secure alliances, strengthen networks, and increase value.”
“I’m not a stock portfolio,” I snapped back.
He smiled slowly. “You’re exactly that.”
His fingers caught my chin, not violently, but firmly enough that I felt the pressure in my jaw. He tilted my face upward, examining me like something damaged but salvageable. It was ownership disguised as discipline.
“I was never yours to bargain with,” I whispered.
His grip tightened, thumb pressing into the hinge of my jaw. “I fed you, clothed you, educated you, and gave you every single fucking thing you have. I paid for you.” His voice dropped lower. “By every account, you are an investment. And I can do what I want with my investments.”
Something inside me went still. “You caged me,” I said, the words coming sharper now. “You monitored my calls, chose my friends, and decided what I wore, what I studied, and who I would marry.” I swallowed the burn in my throat. “You were never a father.”
His expression didn’t change.
“You never loved me.”
His grip stayed firm and painful. “Sentimentality is a weakness,” he said.
“No,” I answered. “You are.” For the first time, something flickered in his eyes, something he’d let no one see. Offense.
“You think Dmitry is different?” he asked. “You think he isn’t part of the same machine?”
“I know he is,” I said. “But he doesn’t pretend it’s clean.”
“And that makes him noble?”
“No. It makes him honest.”
His jaw clenched slowly, like he was grinding down something bitter. “You’ve chosen wrong,” he said.
“I chose myself.” The words didn’t shake, and that seemed to irritate him more than if I had screamed and hit him.
For a moment, no one moved. The physician appeared at one of the bedroom doorways, and my father’s men stood at attention, weapons visible but not raised.
The blood soaking through my father’s white shirt was spreading steadily, dark and heavy, but he ignored it.
Maybe I’d get lucky, and he’d bleed out.
His gaze never left me as he let go of my chin and took a step back. “You think this is rebellion,” he hissed. “You think this is strength.”
“It is,” I replied and kicked up my chin.
His lips curved faintly, but there was no humor in it. “No,” he corrected. “This is emotion. And emotion is a weakness that needs to be purged from the body.”
His presence had always filled a room in a dark, ominous way. As a child, I’d thought it was authority. As a teenager, I’d thought it was the strictness of a parent. Now I understood it for what it was. Control.
“You embarrassed me tonight,” he continued. “You shot me. In front of hired men. Do you understand what that does to perception?”
I said nothing.
“You think he loves you?” my father asked quietly. “Men like Dmitry do not love. They possess and consume. And when you are no longer useful, they discard. They are exactly like every other man in this world, in the Organization.”
When I stayed silent, my father turned slightly, speaking to his guards without looking at them. “Take her upstairs.”
One man stepped forward immediately. I didn’t fight because I knew it would only end up hurting me. They guided me toward the back of the house, down a narrow corridor I recognized too well. The concrete walls felt colder here. As a child, I’d been told this wing was for “private meetings.”
I knew better now.
The guard opened a steel door at the end of the hall. The room had no windows. Just reinforced concrete and a single overhead light, a table and a few chairs. My father appeared behind us before I was pushed inside.
“You’ll stay here,” he said calmly. “Until I decide what your existence is worth.”
The words should have broken me, but they didn’t.
“You’re bleeding a lot,” I whispered, the only way I could fight back right now. I pointedly stared at the dark stain spreading across his side.
His eyes sharpened.
“And you’re locked in a room with no exit,” he replied.
The guard shoved me fully inside, but I kept my footing. The door slammed shut with a heavy metallic echo, and a lock clicked into place as silence settled immediately. All I could hear was the hum of electricity from the single lightbulb, and the distant murmur of male voices beyond the door.
He thought this was control. He thought he had me again. But this time, I wasn’t the girl waiting to obey orders from my father. I knew Dmitry would find me. I knew he’d come for me.
And when he did… Andrey would finally understand what it meant to lose everything.