Chapter 11
NATALIA
I’m waiting up for Aleksandr, very patiently, when he arrives at three in the morning shirtless and covered in sweat. Dasha hisses at him as soon as he walks through the door and skulks off to hide in her new cat tower.
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” His voice is ragged with breathlessness as he strides into the loft, walking towards the kitchen. I follow him, barefoot on the cold, polished concrete.
I don’t ask him where he’s been, though the curiosity surges through me. I’m even more curious about the many tattoos that mark his tanned, liquid-coated skin. He has so many muscles, bulging in places where I didn’t even know muscles existed.
He dips his head and drinks straight out of the faucet, then douses his face under the water too, slicking his hair back. Something about it stops me from saying what I need to say, making my tongue feel heavy in my mouth.
He sees me staring and meets my eyes evenly, waiting for me to speak. It takes me a minute to collect myself after watching him.
“I wanted to talk to you about something.” I cling to the instructions my father gave me and the hope that I can get out of here soon. “I’m bored here. I would like a job.”
Aleksandr lets out a confused laugh. “At the port?”
I nod.
“No.”
His refusal makes me more determined. Of course, I want to get out of here and help my father…but I also hate being told the word no.
“Why not?” I put my hands on my hips and stand in front of him in the kitchen, raising my chin.
He looks down at me with a smile tugging at the edge of his lips, but shakes his head. “You’re not qualified. You don’t seem to get out of bed before ten a.m., ever. Not to mention, you would hate the work we do.” He marks each item by counting them on his inked fingers.
This man has known me for all of one week. He has no idea what I hate.
“How can you say that if you don’t give me the chance to find out?”
He rakes a hand through his hair. Somehow, despite the sweat coating his skin, he smells good. Masculine and clean with a hint of cedar.
“Trust me, princess, work is not more fun than hanging out in this apartment all day. You are not a prisoner here. You can do whatever you want.”
“Like what?”
He lets out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t know — what do you normally do?”
Look at artworks. Read books. Hang out with Dasha. Gossip with Mama and her friends. Whatever my parents are doing on a given day.
I press my lips together in a pout. “More exciting things than this.”
The long pause while I wracked my brain for things I like to do may have given away the fact that this is a lie.
“Then go do those.” He shrugs those muscled shoulders, and I feel heat creeping up my neck. I’m not used to pushback when I ask for something.
“No.” I fold my arms across my chest. “I want to work here. It’s part of our family territory. I should know how it works.”
Aleksandr raises his eyebrows at me, his mouth set in a line. He takes a step closer and my pulse quickens at his proximity.
“I don’t think you really want a job here, Natalia. And I’m not sure you have any skills that would be useful.”
“I have skills,” I protest.
I can write. I can read. I can analyze artwork.
“I’m sure you do. But I don’t think manual labor is for you. You know, carrying things. Operating machinery. Do you even have a driver’s license?”
Damn. He does have me there.
“No,” I admit reluctantly.
I’ve never seen either of my parents drive, either. We always have a driver.
Aleksandr nods at me as if to say this conversation is over, walking into the living room. I follow him. This conversation is not over. He doesn’t know how persistent I can be.
“You don’t understand, Aleksandr. This is boring. I’ve been here a week and I’m dying for something to do.” I add an edge of whining into my voice, hoping to irritate him into giving me what I want.
For some reason, my whining doesn’t seem to irritate him the way I’m trying to. He gives me a mocking smile as he flops onto the couch, resting his arms behind his head.
“You’ve been locked up your whole life, princess. What’s one more week?”
“I’ve been locked up in a mansion. At home. With books. Artworks. People.”
The sheer size of him is overwhelming. He takes up the entire couch with his body, his feet hanging off the end as he stretches lazily.
“What, is this not up to your standards? I didn’t promise a five-star resort experience.”
“You did promise me something, though.”
The truth about my brothers. I’m not going to let him forget it.
His brows lower over those penetrating eyes. “You’ll get that once your parents stop trying to undermine this deal, Natalia. I don’t trust you, not by a long shot. Don’t think I don’t know that you want out of here. I can smell it on you.”
All I can smell on Aleksandr is his deep, clean, cedar scent. I’ve never been good at reading people, and I hate how he can read me like a book.
The next morning, he makes a suggestion.
One that would have had my heart soaring as a child. After so many crushed dreams, it simply twists the knife that my father stabbed me with.
“You’re an artist. Why don’t you paint something? I can bring you materials, if that’s something you’d want.”
I shake my head, confused. Why would Aleksandr think that?
I had wanted to be an artist, once. When I was a child. When my brothers were alive. But even then, my father laughed at me. He took me down into the storage cabinet and slid open one of the wooden doors.
Behind it was a single piece of paper, framed in glass, with an almost comically simple sketch of a horse. One continuous line. Breathtaking in its simplicity, in the stark difference between the black ink of the animal and the bright white of the paper.
Just a line on white paper. It looked almost like a doctor’s note rather than an artwork.
Papa let me get close, looking at it through the glass, studying it. It was closer than I’d ever been to the collection before. “This was probably a draft. A scribble. Nothing serious. And now it’s worth more than our house. Us mortals are nothing in the face of true artists like that.”
He tapped the glass covering the painting.
“This is what great men can do, Natalia. Nothing in that pretty little head of yours would ever approach the value of a few scribblings from a great artist like Picasso.” I’d nodded my head, trying my best to hold back the tears that threatened to fall. They spilled over anyway.
My papa made sure I was looking at him and bent down to my level. He saw my tears, and he did nothing to stop them.
“It takes someone special to be an artist, Natalia. You are nothing special.”
That day destroyed every hope I had of becoming an artist.
I couldn’t argue with my father. Of course, my work was never going to be as good as Picasso’s.
His words landed like sharp arrows. Each one pierced the bubble of hope that had formed when my art tutor praised my work, when I wrote a strong analysis of an artwork, or when I even looked at a beautiful work of art and dreamed about being the kind of person who could share my ideas with the world in that way.
So when Aleksandr suggests it, I tell him no.
“Please, don’t. I have no idea how to make art.”
He shrugs those giant shoulders. “I don’t want you to be bored here. I’ve already ordered materials. There’s a spare room that you can use as a studio.”
Which is how I end up standing in a room full of art materials. A ton of them — sketchbooks and charcoals, watercolors, oil paints. This could keep an art studio going for months.
“You didn’t say what you wanted, so I ordered a little bit of everything.” He leans against the doorframe, frowning at my overwhelmed expression.
“I’m not an artist.”
Aleksandr comes to stand in front of me. His brow creases in confusion. “You’re always talking about paintings.”
I can tell that this is good-quality equipment. Aleksandr must have gone to a lot of effort to find these things in just one day.
I don’t know how to tell him it’s all pointless.
“I analyze art. I know the value of art. I study art. They’re different things. I don’t…make it. I don’t know what I would even paint.”
“Are these the wrong kind of paints? You know, if you want something else, we can get it.”
I shake my head, confused. I can sketch, but I barely know how to use a paintbrush, let alone an easel. I was hardly even past using crayons when my father fired my art tutor for giving me false hope and putting ideas in my head.
I feel panic rising in my chest.
“Natalia. Hey, Natalia, look at me.” With the gentlest touch, he pushes my chin up. There’s something grounding about the rough, warm feel of his touch. I bring my eyes up to his. Behind the harshness, the intensity, the unpredictability, Aleksandr can be strangely kind.
“I don’t want you to suffer here, zolotse.” Aleksandr pushes a strand of hair away from my forehead. “You are my wife. I want you to feel at home here.”
It’s too much.
I know that I can’t produce anything worthwhile. People will never want to look at my art. Why would they? I’m a spoiled Bratva princess with nothing to say. Artists bring a new perspective to the world. That’s something I don’t have.
I shake my head, trying not to notice the disappointment that this causes Aleksandr.
“Fuck it, don’t use them then.” His face shutters, that earlier softness gone now. He was trying to do something nice for me and I’ve ruined it. “They’ll be set up here. You know, in case you want to.”
Then he leaves me alone with all my inadequacies looking back at me.