12. Alina
ALINA
F or three days, I don’t step past the threshold of my room.
The curtains stay drawn, suffocating the daylight before it can reach me. Shadows cling to the corners like dust, thickening every hour I remain curled into myself under my covers. The air grows stale and too warm from the fireplace.
Even breathing feels like work.
Food comes and goes untouched. The tray Lev leaves each morning sits near the door until someone collects it and replaces it with another I ignore. I eat only enough to keep my stomach from twisting. A few bites, a little water, nothing more.
I don’t want nourishment. I don’t want comfort. I don’t want anything except answers that I’ve been denied my entire life. This estate feels like my tomb and my silence is apparently the only rebellion I have left.
I don’t scream, I don’t argue, I don’t cry where the cameras can see me.
I refuse to give Sasha any more vulnerable pieces of me like that. Not like the night of the storm when my body betrayed me. When I leaned into him and let him hold me as if he were something safe and steady to help me weather the storm raging inside my head.
I refuse to give him that power over me again.
Especially since he’s never earned it in the first place.
And yet inside I’m crumbling because every night, I dream of my mother.
Sometimes she’s laughing, her head thrown back in delight, the sunlight catching in her hair and coloring it in strands of gold. The light behind her is summer warm, the same kind she carried with her into every room, every hug, every whispered bedtime story.
But the dreams never stay that way. The warmth is always stolen. The laughter always fades into sinister sounds. Her face twists mid-smile into a scream, and then everything goes black, a scream frozen in time that doesn’t stop until I wake up.
It echoes. It burrows deep into me until that’s all I can hear.
I can’t unsee the ledger.
The neat columns, the date, the clinical language that reduced a woman’s life to a transaction.
I can’t unknow the truth of what my father did, can’t pretend it was a misunderstanding or a cruel coincidence or a lie told by men who profit from destroying families.
I can’t unhear Sasha’s voice either as it replays in my mind again and again until the words lose meaning.
I only pulled the trigger your father loaded.
The sentence loops endlessly, a blade sliding along the same raw place inside me until I want to claw it out. Sometimes, I imagine smashing my head against the nearest wall just to make it stop, just to fracture the thought into something more manageable.
I tell myself I should hate him.
I want to hate him.
Yet deep down in a place I don’t want to examine too closely, I know I don’t. Not fully. Not in the righteous way that would make this easier to survive. The hatred tangles with something else, something messy and unwanted and terrifying in its persistence.
Confusion.
He wasn’t the one who ordered it. He didn’t sit behind a desk and decide my mother was expendable.
He didn’t sign her death away with the same hands that tucked me into bed and told me to study hard and smile for cameras.
He executed the order, yes, but the command came from the man who raised me.
The man who kissed my forehead goodnight, who sold me long before I ever realized I was being priced.
My father is the real monster.
Knowing that should bring clarity. It should give my grief a direction, a target to latch onto. Instead, it fractures everything further. Because if he is the villain, then what does that make the man who held me while I shook apart in the dark nights ago?
The memory of Sasha’s arms around me intrudes without warning.
The way his chest rose and fell beneath my cheek, steady and unyielding, grounding me when I felt like I was slipping out of my own body. The heat of him that had been solid and real, cutting through the storm outside and the one raging inside my head. His voice murmuring my name like an anchor.
It’s me. You’re safe.
I should despise him for that moment and for the audacity of offering comfort when he is the reason my world shattered to pieces in the first place.
But that memory doesn’t sting the way the others do.
It doesn’t curdle and turn sharp. It lingers, warm and insidious, creeping under my skin like a fever I can’t sweat out.
It follows me into the waking hours, coils around my heart when the nights stretch too long and the silence presses in.
I hate myself for remembering how he felt.
For remembering the scent of him—tobacco and cedar and something clean beneath it like winter air.
For remembering how his heartbeat slowly pulled mine into rhythm, how my shaking eased without his ever asking me to stop.
I hate that my body responded before my mind could catch up, that some primitive part of me recognized shelter where logic screamed danger.
That’s the worst part of all.
Not the betrayal.
Not even the truth.
It’s the fact that when everything in me was breaking, I found solace in the arms of the man who helped destroy my life, and a part of me is still aching for that warmth even now.
It makes the need for answers burn hotter until it feels like it’s eating me alive from the inside out.
Not Sasha’s half-truths delivered in that calm, lethal tone of his, stripped of anything resembling mercy. And not the pity either from those fleeting looks I catch in Lev’s eyes when he thinks I’m not paying attention, when his jaw tightens just a fraction too much before he looks away.
Sympathy is just another cage, softer but no less confining.
I want it raw and unfiltered, ripped straight from the source.
I want it from the man who raised me. The man who taught me how to stand still while cameras flashed in my face, how to tilt my chin just enough to look confident but not defiant.
The man who drilled into me that optics mattered more than feelings, that appearances were currency, that weakness was something predators smelled from miles away. The man who told me over and over again that everything he did was for my future.
My father.
Lev arrives at my door shortly after lunch, a silver tray balanced in his hands looking like an offering he already knows will be refused.
He knocks once out of habit, a soft, almost apologetic sound against the wood, then opens the door without waiting for permission.
He crosses the room in measured steps and sets the tray down on the small table beside the bed, arranging it neatly even though neither of us believes it will be touched.
He avoids looking at me as he does it.
I sit where I always sit now, cross-legged against the headboard, my spine straight and hands folded loosely in my lap. I’ve learned that if I stay very still, the panic doesn’t rise quite as fast. Movement always makes it worse for some reason.
“You should eat,” Lev says quietly.
His voice is gentle, too gentle for a man built like him, broad shoulders filling the doorway, forearms corded with muscle beneath his sleeves. I can tell he’s disarmed men twice his size without breaking a sweat, and yet when he speaks to me like this, it feels almost… careful.
“I don’t want food,” I say flatly.
It’s not a protest. It’s a statement of fact. The idea of swallowing anything right now makes my stomach churn.
Lev exhales slowly through his nose. “He’ll be upset if you starve yourself, you know.”
The words hit something sharp inside me.
“Really…” I say, my mouth curling around the word. “I don’t think my appetite is going to be the thing that pushes him over the edge.”
Lev’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t respond right away. Instead, he stands there studying the floor. I can almost see the war playing out behind his eyes, orders versus conscience, loyalty versus whatever fragile shred of humanity he hasn’t managed to burn out of himself yet.
Finally, he straightens. “Try. Even just a little.”
Then he turns toward the door.
Panic flares sharp and suddenly hot in my chest. If he leaves now, the moment will be gone. I don’t know when, or if, I’ll get another chance like this.
“Lev.”
He stops with his hand on the doorframe and turns back toward me. His expression is guarded now, wary in a way that makes my stomach twist.
I swallow hard. My throat feels raw. “Take me to my father.”
For a split second, he just stares at me.
Then fear washes over his face so quickly, it’s almost startling. Not fear for me, fear for himself. I see it settle into his posture, into the way his shoulders stiffen and his stance widens like he’s bracing for impact.
“You know I can’t,” he says immediately. “If he catches me taking you off estate property?—”
I cut in, forcing myself to keep my voice steady. “I know. I know exactly what would happen if we got caught.”
He shakes his head. “Alina…”
I interrupt again, softer this time. “You told me once… that you have a daughter.”
That stops him.
His face tightens instantly. I know I’ve struck something bruised and long-buried. Pain flickers in his eyes before he can mask it, raw and unmistakable. A ghost of a memory, maybe, of someone he no longer gets to see. Someone he still thinks about when the nights get too heavy.
“You said she lived with her mother,” I continue, my hands curling around the sheets beneath me. “That you only see her once a year if you are lucky.”
Lev doesn’t move. His breathing has changed to grow shallow.
“Wouldn’t you want to see her? If you had the chance to? To make sure she’s okay, even if you know she’s being protected?” I ask quietly.
The silence that falls over us is heavy.