6. Sofia #3
“It was,” I say after a moment. “Amazing, I mean. Sometimes.” I glance toward the windows, letting my mind wander back to those days.
“Switzerland was beautiful, but boarding school was still boarding school. Everyone thinks it’s spending the weekends skiing in the alps or traveling the countryside in a little town car, which it was, occasionally, but mostly it was just…
rules. And being surrounded by people and still feeling…
” I pause, searching for a less pathetic word and failing. “Alone.”
Her gaze stays on me, quiet and kind.
I swallow around the lump forming in my throat. “Italy was better. Warmer in every sense. I had friends there. A life.”
Alina must hear the past tense, because then she asks, “Were you brought back here suddenly?”
I let out a humorless breath. “That’s a delicate way to put it.”
Her mouth tightens. “I understand. It always seems that people like us are rarely ever asked what we want before something happens.”
“That sounds like experience talking.”
Something flickers across her face, gone almost instantly. She gives me a tight smile. “Unfortunately.”
The fire pops, sending a burst of sparks up behind the grate.
For a moment, neither of us speaks and a strange sense of awareness settles over me then.
This woman and I may have nothing obvious in common, coming from different lives and family histories with men we barely trust who stand between us and whatever freedom we might have once imagined for ourselves.
But somehow, sitting across from her in this room, I feel less alone than I have since being dragged from my life in Italy.
She looks at me like a person, not as an asset to be coveted and kept away from the eyes of the public. It’s comforting, in a way, to be treated normally for once.
Alina smiles at me. “Thankfully, I’m in a much better place now with my husband. He takes care of me and makes sure that everyone, including his subordinates, knows to respect my wishes.”
I look at her differently then. Not because of the husband part.
Plenty of women in our world have husbands—powerful ones, beautiful ones, violent ones.
Men who put rings on fingers and guards at the doors and call both gestures devotion.
A ring does not make a woman safe. Sometimes, it just makes the cage official.
But Alina doesn’t sound like she’s a woman trapped inside a pretty cage.
It sounds like she’s someone who’s survived one.
I wonder what it cost her to get to that better place and what she was forced to endure before she could speak of being respected without flinching. What sort of man earned her warmth instead of simply demanding it? Does that kind of man actually exist in a world like ours?
For a strange moment, my mind betrays me.
It offers Rowan.
Not when he is standing in doorways with his hands clasped behind his back and a permanent scowl etched onto his face, but the other glimpses.
Brief, dangerous flashes that I’ve caught myself ruminating over this past week.
The almost invisible tightening of his jaw when I called out the truth he was trying not to give me.
The way he watches everything. The way he watches me.
I shove the thought away, feeling too exposed for my own liking.
Ridiculous…
A man like Rowan Vasiliev does not seem capable of respecting anyone’s wishes, least of all mine.
He is duty wrapped in obedience and sharpened into a weapon only my uncle has the privilege of wielding.
If he ever decided to care for someone, and that is a far-fetched idea, I imagine it would feel less like being tended to and more like being locked behind a reinforced steel door while he stands on the other side of it with a gun drawn and a dead expression, convinced he’d done something noble.
And yet… no matter what I do, there is something deep inside me that keeps pulling me in his direction.
I force a tiny smile on my face. “I’m glad you’ve found that. I hope I can too one day.”
For a moment, I hate how painfully exposed the confession makes me feel.
I’m supposed to be angry right now, suspicious at the obvious secrets being kept from me.
The last thing I should be doing is sitting across from a stranger confessing that I still want some kind of soft life at the end of all this.
But… I do.
I want someone who sees me as more than my bloodline, more than leverage or a burden or an inconvenience to be handled until being passed off on someone else. Someone who doesn’t mistake control for care.
Alina’s expression softens, but she doesn’t rush to comfort me with empty reassurances or pretty promises. I appreciate that more than she probably realizes.
In Italy, comfort often came quickly. Giulia would grip my hand and say, everything will be fine! with such fierce conviction, I almost always believed her even when neither of us had any proof things would work out. Here in Moscow, easy comfort feels suspicious.
“I hope so too,” she tells me softly.
I look away toward the fire, blinking until the sting behind my eyes fades. The flames bend and flare behind the grate, devouring the wood in small, hungry snaps.
I wish my life could go back to being that simple.