3. Alina #2
I shove back from the table so abruptly, the chair legs shriek against the polished floor, the sound ricocheting around the vast room. “This is insane. I have a life to get back to. I have midterms . You can’t completely derail my life like this. You and Papa have no?—”
“You had a life,” he corrects. “Your father traded it to me.”
The words crack through me harder than the blast that tore through my campus. For a second, I forget how to breathe. My fingers curl against the table’s edge, clinging to it because if I let it go, I know it would send me plummeting to the floor.
“He wouldn’t,” I whisper.
Sasha leans forward, his elbows resting casually on the linen tablecloth. His posture is deceptively relaxed, deceiving in the way a man would act as if discussing the weather, not ruining the very foundation of my life as I know it.
“He did. You’re here because he cashed in a favor.
He brought you here and asked me to keep you safe.
Do you think that was for free? Your being here forces him to behave himself until I say you can go.
He doesn’t get a choice in how long you stay here.
Neither do you,” he says, his tone matter-of-fact.
The room spins.
The concept of being stuck here in this gilded cage is so foreign that my mind refuses to make sense of it. It slams against every belief I’ve held, every memory of my father doing whatever he felt was best to protect me, every illusion I’ve clung to about who I am and where I stand in this world.
“You’re lying,” I whisper, but my voice sounds hollow. “He would never agree to a deal like that. This is temporary.”
Sasha doesn’t blink. He just watches me with that unnervingly steady gaze. “Are you that naive to believe your father isn’t capable of striking a deal like that? When you know he has done deals under the table for years? Surely, you aren’t that blind, Printsessa. ”
There’s a dark stillness in his eyes that says he has no reason to lie. That he never lies about things like this.
Because why would he?
My stomach twists violently, my legs threatening to give out beneath me the longer I stand here and try to make sense of all of this.
The chandelier above blurs into a smear of gold as my eyes begin to water.
I grip the back of my chair to steady myself before I fall, but even the polished wood feels grotesque and wrong under my fingertips.
All the years of being protected, watched, hovered over… had it all been leading up to this end? For me to eventually be handed over to a man like Sasha Sokolov?
I try to speak again because maybe he’s wrong, maybe he misunderstood Papa’s intentions and the deal they agreed on when I was dropped off here. Maybe this is all some twisted power play to convince me I had been left behind in order to use me against Papa.
“What favor did he cash this in for?” I ask, the sound barely audible.
He sits back in his chair, setting his wine glass down with lithe, careful fingers.
“A longstanding one. Your father has made many deals with me in the past and has racked up quite the laundry list. He wanted you out of the public eye and asked me to take you in. In return, I get to say when you go home.”
I choke on my next words. “So, that’s it? You just accepted it? You’re a sick freak if you think I’m going to roll over and agree to this.”
“Careful, Printsessa. Not very wise to bite the hand responsible for feeding you at the moment,” he says softly.
The pet name is a warning, a reprimand disguised as something sweet. Yet somehow, that softness makes it feel even more threatening.
It reminds me of years ago when we first met. I had been sixteen, maybe seventeen, at the time. Too young to understand the danger I’d been surrounded with, too sheltered to recognize the tension humming beneath polished smiles and tailored suits.
Papa had dragged me along to one of his political dinners, the kind where the women wear diamonds heavy enough to bruise their bony chests and the men talk in half-truths over expensive liquor.
I remember being bored and sneaking away from the clusters of overly fake conversations, my heels clicking softly across marble floors while searching for somewhere that wasn’t filled with empty conversation.
That was when I’d seen him.
Sasha Sokolov had been standing over by the balcony doors, one hand in his pocket, the other wrapped loosely around a glass of something dark. He hadn’t been smiling. He hadn’t been speaking to anyone around him. He’d just been watching the room like a predator surveying unfamiliar terrain.
When his eyes had met mine, something electric had passed between us. Not attraction—not then—but awareness. A sharp, unsettling sense that I was being seen in a way no one had ever looked at me before.
“Lost, Printsessa ?” he’d asked, his voice low and amused as if he’d already known the answer.
I’d bristled immediately. “Don’t call me that.”
He’d smiled then, just barely. “All daughters of powerful men are.”
Before I could respond, Papa had appeared at my side, his hand clamping down on my arm too tightly for me not to flinch. His face had been pale beneath his practiced composure. He’d muttered apologies before dragging me away, later warning me very sternly never to speak to that man again.
At the time, I hadn’t understood why.
Now I do.
It’s a painful realization.
His gaze drags over me. It’s a slow and assessing measure of me. Not lustful, not in that way that should send a shudder rolling up my spine. This feeling is far more unnerving. It’s a pressure that makes my thighs squeeze together when heat pools between them.
He sets his chin down onto his closed fist. “Tell yourself whatever you need to. But you are here, under my protection, under my roof, under my rules, for the foreseeable future. Whether you accept it or not is irrelevant.”
I shove away from the table so violently, my chair topples back onto the floor. The wineglasses on top of it tip, red liquid spilling across the linens in a blooming stain that looks disturbingly like fresh blood. It seeps and spreads, reaching toward him like a living thing.
His frown is immediate.
I don’t care.
I don’t even try to apologize and soak it up with the napkin that had been on my lap and is now lying on the floor at my feet.
Instead, I turn and storm out of the dining room, my vision blurring with a mixture of rage and humiliation and something far more disorienting.
Desire. It’s thick and unwelcome, tangled in with the fear that I’ve somehow managed to find myself sentenced to a lifetime in an inescapable prison, forced here against my own will with absolutely no say in the matter.
Sasha’s guard, the one from before, stands in the doorway when I finally reach the hallway heading upstairs. For a moment, I think he’ll stop me and drag me back into the dining room and force me to finish dinner with his Master. I brace for his hand on my arm, but strangely, it never comes.
He steps aside just enough for me to brush past him, watching me with the same dead-eyed expression he’s had since I arrived.
I storm up to the second floor to my room, refusing to look back.
Hours later, the fire inside the hearth in my room has died down to soft, smoldering embers. The glow barely reaches the corners of the room, leaving the walls looking darker and more haunting than they did before.
I throw another log onto the grate out of pure annoyance, watching the sparks leap upward like furious little stars before falling back into exhaustion, settling into the coals as if surrendering to the inevitable just like me.
Midnight comes and goes, and the silence around me only grows heavier.
My pulse hasn’t slowed once since dinner. The edges of my thoughts are frayed, everything inside me stretched thin to the point of nearly snapping. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how I’m supposed to survive here without losing the few threads of sanity I still have left.
I’ve already torn through every inch of this room looking for something that could tether me to who I was before this house. Before I’d walked into my own cell and realized too late that the door had been shut and locked behind me.
I’m a prisoner in silk sheets and gold molding.
Rummaging through the dresser drawers, the wardrobe, even the bathroom cabinet has brought me no closer to finding a way out, either. Everything has been curated, arranged and staged as if this entire room was built to make a hostage look like a guest.
I search my bags too, finding nothing in them but clothes and my first aid kit. My laptop? Gone. My phone? Gone.
They’ve stripped me bare without ever laying a hand on me.
I hate it.
Eventually, when the hopelessness swells too tightly in my chest to stand under, I sink down onto the carpet in front of the fire once again.
The heat ghosts across my shins, barely warming me despite the roaring flame licking up toward the chimney.
I wrap my arms around myself and stare into the flames until my eyes burn.
I’ve been here for… I don’t even know how long.
I don’t cry. I won’t give him—or whoever is listening outside my door—the satisfaction of hearing me break down. But God, I feel the tears pressing behind my eyes like shards of glass.
I don’t know how I’m going to get out of here.
I don’t know if I’ll ever escape.
Everything seems completely hopeless right now.
When one a.m. strikes, I force myself back onto my feet.
At the very least, I have to find a way to get my hands on a phone.
If not to contact someone from the outside world to help me get out of here, it would at least give me some kind of lifeline to what’s going on outside the walls of Sasha’s estate.
I can’t let him cut me off from everything.