1. Alina #2
I’ve tested the limits exactly once my sophomore year of high school.
A lifetime ago, even though it wasn’t. A group of friends invited me to see a movie after school.
Something stupid and loud and full of CGI monsters that didn’t look at all interesting.
But the simple fact that I’d been invited had made me want to go anyway.
My father had postponed dinner again for a “state matter”, which meant no one would notice if I slipped away for a few hours. For the first time in my life, I wanted to do something without permission, without a bodyguard breathing down my neck.
So I turned off my phone for three hours and seventeen minutes.
Papa’s men were already waiting for us outside the theater when we finally left.
They didn’t drag me outside as I had imagined in my paranoid fantasies they would. They didn’t scold my friends or cause a scene. They simply approached with quiet disappointment, their expressions carved into polite severity as they said, “Miss Morozova, we should go,” and that was that.
I was escorted out to the car with barely any fanfare and packed away like a spoiled child finally coming down from a tantrum.
I thought I would be grounded when I got home, maybe even interrogated and have every bit of teenage independence I'd managed to scrape up ripped from my grip.
But Papa didn’t yell.
He simply told me, “Going out like that will get you shot, Alina. Or worse, taken right off the streets and used as blackmail against me. Is that what you want? You want the people of Moscow to mourn you like that? They see you as a daughter.” As if their feelings were more important than mine.
After that, I obeyed the rules because what other choice did I have?
I weave through the crowd now, clutching my bag strap tighter as I shove my phone back into my pocket and move past clusters of students. I envy them with a kind of muted ache. Freedom is such a normal thing when you’ve never gone without it.
I’m halfway up the Philosophy Building’s steps when Irene spots me.
“ Alinochka !” she calls, waving dramatically as she jogs toward me, nearly spilling her coffee all over the steps. “Oh, my God, you look like death. Did you sleep at all?”
“I did a little bit, but I was up half the night doing prep for Friday’s exam,” I admit, adjusting the strap on my bag.
“Ugh, tell me about it. I’m already freaking out. I hate that it’s worth thirty percent of our grade.” She bumps her shoulder against mine affectionately, and I let myself smile.
Irene is one of the few people who can make this place feel less like a set piece in a political drama and more like a campus I actually belong to.
“Sooo… yoga at four?” she asks as we push through the double doors.
I nod. “Apparently.”
She snorts. “I’ve never seen someone look so glum about a workout routine.”
“It’s not like I have a choice.”
She gives me that look she’s perfected over the years, half sympathetic and half annoyed on my behalf. She opens her mouth to say something else, something probably bold and reckless because she can never help herself, but then she clamps it shut.
Because she knows.
She always knows.
There has always been an unspoken rule between us, an invisible line neither of us can cross for fear that my father and his men will separate us.
Their watchful eyes are always over my shoulder, even when neither of us sees them.
One wrong word and I’ll be pulled from this campus faster than either of us can blink.
That’s how it goes with the daughters of political figures—public image is more important than personal feelings.
No matter how much I would scream and cry and beg for my father not to do something like that, I know he would in a heartbeat if he felt it would protect the career he’s spent my entire life building.
We climb the staircase toward the lecture hall and stop right at the Y-shaped hallways. She nudges me again, softer this time. “I’ll save you a seat at lunch?”
I nod. “Look forward to it. If you get there before me, grab me one of those grilled sandwiches before they sell out.”
She offers me a smile. “You got it.”
She disappears down the right-hand hall, her golden blonde ponytail swishing behind her like a metronome of effortless confidence.
Irene never seems weighed down by the things that drown me.
She breezes through life with a kind of boldness I envy and sometimes wish I could borrow for a singular day.
I sigh under my breath and shift the strap of my bag higher on my shoulder before heading left toward my own lecture.
When I step into the Econ lecture hall, the room is already half full. I spot a familiar face—Arin, the American exchange student who somehow manages to stand out even in a room full of polished, hyper-ambitious Muscovite elites.
He’s all sharp cheekbones and expensive cologne that definitely violates some university guideline on classroom distractions.
His family tree roots itself in American oligarch money, his father rumored to own half of Manhattan and a concerning chunk of Cyprus.
He’s charming when he wants to be and unbearable when he doesn’t.
He lifts two fingers in a lazy salute when he sees me.
I roll my eyes and slide into the seat beside him. “You’re early. Miracles actually do exist.”
He grins, leaning back in his chair with an ease that borders on arrogance. “Had time to kill. Figured I’d bless you with my presence the entire lecture this time.”
“Truly a blessing,” I deadpan, pulling my notebook and pens from my bag.
He winks and then faces the opposite direction to talk to the girl sitting next to him as if he hasn’t already tried to charm the entire left side of the hall with a single tilt of his head.
He probably has. Arin is that type of guy, effortlessly magnetic in a way that should annoy me more but mostly just exhausts me.
Professor Ivanov begins exactly when the clock hits 8:30.
He never waits for stragglers. His opening slide flashes across the smart TV and within moments he’s droning on about supply curves, elasticity graphs, and the theoretical underpinnings of commodity pricing cycles.
His voice has the consistency of lukewarm tea with every note a monotonous and resigned sigh.
I fall into autopilot, my pen gliding in neat, slanted lines across my notebook despite the sea of laptops and tablets glowing around me. There’s something grounding about handwriting notes, something that makes the information stick even when I’m not truly present.
My phone vibrates against my thigh.
I don’t need to look to know who it is.
I suppress a sigh and pull it out, Yuri’s name flashing across the screen with another check-in. I angle my phone away from Arin’s wandering eyes, typing a short reply.
In class –A
The reply comes instantly.
Copy. –Y
I’m sliding my phone back toward my bag when my elbow bumps my water bottle. It tips sideways before I can grab it, then spills its entire contents across my notebook and my lap.
“Shit,” I hiss, jerking upright as cold water soaks through the fabric of my jeans.
“Language, Princess,” Arin murmurs beside me.
My head snaps toward him to give him a glare.
He gives me a sympathetic wince. “Need help?”
“No,” I mutter, rummaging through my bag until I find a wad of napkins I stuffed in there last time Irene and I were at the cafe on campus. “I’ve got it.”
As I dab at the water staining my notebook, he watches with a look that hovers somewhere between amusement and interest, the kind that makes me want to both shove him and hide under the desk.
I’m never good with people giving me their full attention like that because it usually either means I’m going to be questioned or hassled with something to do with my father.
“You’re supposed to be paying attention.” I flick my gaze toward the front where Professor Ivanov is still mid-rant about marginal utility.
He shrugs. “I’m already ahead on all this stuff.”
Of course he is. People with a silver spoon in their mouth like him are practically born ahead.
Then again, so am I.
“But I heard you aced the midterm,” he adds casually. “Nice job. Made my score look like it was bell-curved.”
“Someone had to show you all what a passing grade looked like,” I reply, shaking droplets off the corner of my notebook onto the floor behind us.
He smirks. “Apparently. Thanks for taking one for the team.”
I exhale, amused despite myself.
His attention flicks toward the front of the room before returning to me. “Hey, there’s this party at my apartment Friday night. Think you should come?”
I freeze.
Parties are… always a complicated storm.
They require the kind of permission I’ve never been granted before, and least of all, a conversation with my father which always ends the same way.
“ Too many variables. Too many people. Too much risk. Come on, Alina. Be realistic. I can’t have you getting photographed drunk with a bunch of other students.
That’s a bad look for my next campaign.”
Once, only once, I worked up the courage to ask him when I was sixteen. The answer was a simple, clipped, “No,” followed by a fifteen-minute lecture over dinner on the dangers of compromised environments, unsecured buildings, and the potential for kidnapping.
Sixteen-year-old me cried in my bathroom afterward until mascara streaked down my neck.
Now at twenty, I don’t cry. I simply just don’t ask.
Arin watches my hesitation with a small frown. “It’ll be fun. Low-key, I promise. Just a few people from class and friends from the dorms. You wouldn’t even have to stay long.”
I swallow, trying to keep my expression neutral.
“I’ll think about it,” I lie, because it’s easier.
He leans forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “If your father’s guys are the issue, there’s a garage entrance no one uses. And an elevator that goes straight up to my place. No one would even see you come in.”
I tense.