8. Alina #4
His gaze flicks to the papers again, then returns to me, steady and unreadable.
“Put it down.”
The command is quiet and absolute.
My throat burns as I try to swallow past the knot lodged there. The sound that comes out of me is closer to a breath than a word. “What is this, Sasha?”
Something flashes across his face at the sound of his name on my tongue. It’s brief—so quick, I might have imagined it—but it’s there. A tightening around the eyes. A flicker of irritation. Or something worse.
He starts toward me.
Each step is measured the way a predator approaches prey that has nowhere left to run. His gaze never leaves mine even as the distance between us closes. “I remember telling you,” he says evenly, “when you arrived here not to go where you weren’t invited.”
My entire body goes numb.
The folder slips from my grasp as if my body no longer remembers how to hold on. It hits the desk with a soft, awful sound, the contents spilling out in every direction. Papers slide across the polished wood. Photographs scatter like confetti.
Her face stares up at me from the desk.
My mother’s smile is frozen mid-laugh, caught in a moment she never knew would be her last. She looks warm, alive… unaware of how close death already was.
A broken sound tears out of my throat.
“Did you kill her?” I whisper. My vision blurs completely now, tears spilling freely as I look at him through the distortion. “Why would you do it?”
He stops a few feet away. The space between us feels deliberate, a line he has drawn across the carpet that he refuses to cross.
“Because your father asked me to.”
The air leaves my lungs all at once, as if someone has reached inside me and hollowed me out. The room tilts sideways. The walls feel too far away, the chair unstable under me.
“What?” I choke.
“He ordered it,” Sasha continues, his voice low, stripped of all emotion. “Paid for it. I executed the deal.” His eyes hold mine, unwavering. “That’s what I do, Alina. I make problems disappear.”
Something inside me collapses.
The story I have lived with my entire life—the speeches, the interviews, the grief I’ve suffered in private when no wandering eyes were watching me, waiting for me to crack—explodes in real time, crumbling under the weight of a truth too heavy to carry.
My father didn’t lose my mother. He removed her.
And Sasha didn’t just know about it.
He pulled the trigger.
I shake my head violently. “You’re lying.”
I say it again in my head over and over like a mantra that might make it true. He has to be lying. He has to be. This can’t be real. Not him. Not my father. Not both of them standing on either side of my life like executioners.
He can’t… he can’t.
His voice is steady. “I’m not. Your father wanted her gone. I only pulled the trigger he loaded.”
The sentence lands with surgical precision, clean and devastating, slicing through the last thin thread of denial I’ve been clinging to. My hand flies out to grip the edge of the desk for balance, my fingers digging into the wood like it might anchor me to something solid.
I look at him again, really look at him, and suddenly, I can’t reconcile the man in front of me with the monster those words describe.
“You’re disgusting,” I breathe.
The word is small compared to the hurricane ripping through my body, but it’s the only one I can find. It’s all I have left that feels sharp enough to cut him back.
He doesn’t argue.
That’s what makes it worse.
He just stands there with his shoulders squared and eyes locked on mine.
For the briefest moment, so fast I almost miss it, something fractures across his expression, a flicker that I have barely any time to register.
Regret, maybe. Or pain? Something so close to guilt that it makes my stomach churn.
It’s gone before I can name it.
Tears spill freely now, hot and relentless, streaking down my face as the truth finally overwhelms me. My throat tightens until it feels like I’m choking on it. “I hate you.”
He exhales slowly. It sounds like acceptance.
“You should not have opened that folder,” Sasha says. He finally moves, rounding the desk with slow steps as if approaching a skittish animal instead of a girl whose world has just collapsed.
I stand too fast. The chair legs scrape against the floor as I stagger backward, dizziness swamping me all at once. “Don’t come near me.”
My heel catches on the rug and I sway. He reacts without thinking, his hand shooting out to steady me.
“Don’t touch me!” The scream rips out of my throat, raw and uncontrollably louder than I intend it to be.
He freezes, his hand hanging suspended in the air between us, fingers curled slightly as if they ache to close around something solid.
The moment stretches, taut and unbearable, every breath heavy and loud in my ears.
I can see it on his face, the instinct battling with discipline, the man fighting the monster he’s taught himself to be.
Slowly, he lowers his hand.
The softness quickly vanishes. Whatever humanity flickered there is gone in an instant, replaced by the cold armor I’ve come to recognize. His jaw sets. His eyes harden, turning unreadable, impenetrable.
“You wanted the truth. Now you have it,” he says flatly.
He turns away from me, toward the door, as if this conversation is already over. As if the devastation he’s just delivered is a closed transaction.
“Wait.”
He pauses with his hand on the doorframe.
When he speaks again, his voice is quieter. “Your father didn’t just bring you here to keep you safe from that bombing, Alina.”
I shake my head, a small, frantic motion. I don’t want to hear this. I already know in some terrible, instinctual way that whatever comes next will destroy something that cannot be repaired.
Sasha turns back to face me. His gaze pins me in place, heavy and unyielding. “He offered you up before you even finished school.”
My eyes widen.
“You were always going to end up here,” he continues, unrelenting.
“With me. Why do you think he paraded you through those galas? The dinners? The charity functions where men twice his age watched you like inventory?” His mouth twists.
“He was shopping you. Waiting for the highest bidder to come knocking on his door to take you off his hands. Your mother wasn’t there to stop it. So, he did what he wanted with you.”
I can’t breathe.
My mind fractures under the weight of it, memories rushing in all at once.
Of Papa’s hand tight on my elbow as he steered me across marble floors, the way he corrected my posture before introductions, the subtle pressure to smile, to be charming, to be pleasing .
I had thought it was politics. Optics. Parental pride warped by ambition.
But this…
This is something else entirely.
“What…?” The word barely makes it past my lips.
Then why allow me to go to school? To make me more appealing? Why the illusion of choice? Why let me believe, if only in the smallest, most fragile way, that my future belonged to me?
“So you bought me…” I whisper, “before anyone else could?”
Sasha’s brows draw together, not in confusion, but in grim acknowledgement. “Yes.”
That single word guts me.
I scramble backward, panic taking over. My hands push uselessly at the desk as I retreat until there’s nowhere left to go. My back hits the corner behind it hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. I curl in on myself instinctively like distance alone might protect me.
He doesn’t follow. He just watches me from where he’s standing, eyes dark and unblinking.
“You’re sick,” I choke out.
He doesn’t deny it. Somehow, that feels worse than any denial ever could. Worse than rage. Worse than excuses. Worse than lies dressed up as mercy.
The door closes with a quiet, absolute finality when he leaves. The click of the latch echoes around me, reverberating through the study and my body. Silence rushes in to replace him. It presses down on me, thick and suffocating.
The papers still lie scattered across the desk where the folder slipped from my hands. My mother’s face stares up at me from every direction. Her image repeats again and again, fractured by the chaos, half-hidden under pages stamped with my father’s signature like a brand burned into flesh.
A sob tears out of me before I can stop it, and then my legs give out.
I collapse to the floor, my knees slamming into the carpet hard.
The sound I make doesn’t even feel human.
It’s raw and animalistic, ripping from somewhere deep in my chest where words no longer exist. I crawl forward blindly and grab the nearest photograph off the edge of the desk and clutch it to my chest like it might anchor me.
Her smile is bright, unaware of the evil that lives under the same roof as her, plotting her demise.
She looks so alive in this picture, as if death is some abstract thing that only happens to other people.
I press my thumb against the edge of the photo, tracing the curve of her cheek, the familiar warmth of her eyes.
He killed her.
My father paid him to.
The words repeat in my head, relentless, merciless.
Two monsters wearing different skins. Two betrayals intertwined so tightly, I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
I had believed, maybe stupidly and naively, that whatever cage I’d been locked inside here existed because Sasha Sokolov wanted something from me.
But now I know the truth.
I was bought.
Traded like a piece of meat.
And for what? Personal gain?
My father carved my fate long before Sasha ever laid eyes on me. Long before the bombing, long before the escort details and the suffocating rules and the gilded prison that was eventually traded for another one. I was always currency. Always an asset waiting to be liquidated.
And now I’m here.
Outside the windows, snow drifts down in slow, gentle spirals. It’s soft and peaceful. The world continues as if nothing has happened. As if this estate isn’t standing atop graves of secrets and blood-soaked agreements. As if my heart isn’t coming apart one jagged piece at a time.
Suddenly, a new fear blooms, worse than the ones that came before.
If my father sold me once, he will do it again.
If Sasha eventually grows tired of me, he’ll return me back to my father.
And next time, there may very well be a monster worse than Sasha Sokolov hiding in the shadows waiting, unrestrained by his own twisted sense of ownership.
Next time, there will be men who won’t hesitate to pay whatever it takes.
Men who won’t pretend that protection or boundaries or rules are what is stopping them from claiming me.
I pull my knees to my chest, curling inward, clutching the photograph.
I have to get out of here before that happens.