Analiese
Analiese
Vasily is already gone when I wake up in the morning. It’s partially my fault; every day, between Vasily’s late-night wake-ups and the lack of an alarm clock, I’ve slept a little later. The morning’s already half over by the time I open my eyes.
But he could have woken me. That’s what people do, right? People who aren’t trying to sneak out and do plan to see each other again, people who shared something intense and then slept entangled with each other.
I roll my eyes and huff dramatically as I flop back down on the bed because that’s what I’m being: dramatic. Pathetic. He is literally my kidnapper. My rapist. I hated Beauty and the Beast growing up. Camilla loved it, and we would bicker so much at slumber parties over it. She literally had Beauty and the Beast themed birthday parties three years in a row just to make sure I’d suffer through it.
And now here I am, falling in love with my captor.
No.
Not falling in love.
“You are so stupid,” I tell the ceiling, adding, “Ana,” at the end of it so God doesn’t think I’m calling Him stupid.
Amending it to “Lacey” because no one even calls me Ana except Vasily.
Except he doesn’t.
But he did last night.
And then he called me the right name. A name that’s completely meaningless and I can’t spell and I can’t even ask Igor what it means because I don’t know if I could pronounce it right. For all I know, Vasily is calling me a different name every time, and each word sounds similar enough that I don’t catch it.
I yell wordlessly at the ceiling.
And then I drag my butt out of bed.
In the bathroom, I have the briefest scare when I see the blood and worry Vasily accidentally injured me last night. But then I crunch some numbers and realize I’m not upset with Vasily or in love with him. I’m hormonal.
And I’m definitely not pregnant, because I’ve started my period.
I don’t have any pads.
I roll myself up a little makeshift pad out of toilet paper so I can at least get through this morning while I give myself a pep talk about asking Igor for feminine hygiene products. He’s married, he’s got daughters, I’m sure he’s had to buy them before, but ugggh.
I hate everything Vasily packed in my suitcase, at least for right now, so I pull from his dresser some gigantic sweatpants and from his closet an absolute dress of a hoodie.
Coffee is critical. Pancakes are way too much work, but I go through all the cabinets and finally amass a loose packet of Pop-Tarts, some weird brownie thing with chunky rainbow sprinkles studded into it, and a bag of M&Ms. I hit the motherlode with a sleeve of Tagalongs that’s definitely been secreted away in the back of the cabinet above the refrigerator.
I had to stand on top of the counter to get them. I deserve them. I’m owed them. Vasily’s a jerk.
I’m not proud of my binge, but I deserve all of this.
I’ve polished off the M&Ms, the brownie, and half the Girl Scout cookies when the door’s thrown open dramatically, but it’s Kseniya standing there, so I don’t even get the satisfaction of Vasily catching me chowing through his precious hidden cookies. Today she’s only got her purse and a small shipping box, no food or nail kit, and I slide the remaining Tagalongs over to her as she approaches slowly.
“Can I . . . get you anything?” she asks hesitantly, the high energy from two days ago all but vanished. I feel like this is the treatment I should have been getting as a stranger who’d been kidnapped by her brother, but I guess this whole debacle is going to be exactly that. A debacle.
“No, I’m good,” I grumble, thinking I should probably tap out on the food binge before I make myself sick.
Sicker. There are definitely grumblies already happening in my belly.
That makes me realize I just lied, though. “No, wait! I just started my period and don’t have anything!”
Kseniya freezes in the middle of reaching for the Pop-Tart packet, but then she lights up. “Yes! Here.” She digs into her purse and produces a little make-up pouch that she hands to me. “I’ll get you more, but that’ll help for now, right?”
I peek inside and see a couple of pantyliners and a selection of tampons. I cringe but nod, hoping it doesn’t look weird that I’m taking the whole pouch with me, but I’m not about to tell her I’ve never used tampons, because jerk Tony said it would ‘damage’ my ‘virginity.’ Yes, I did discover that was totally a lie and men are dumb and hymens are more complicated than virgin/not-virgin-but-maybe-tampons, but I wasn’t going to set myself up for a rage meltdown from him if he was snooping in my bathroom and found tampons.
When I get into the bathroom, I realize I don’t even have a way to get a pre-teen tutorial online. And I know this makes me sound stupid, but I waste three of them before I figure out how the applicator works. Hopefully, Kseniya either doesn’t keep inventory of this pouch or thinks I’m just paranoid and palmed extra for later.
When I return to the kitchen, she’s got a big glass of water and some pain medication for me. Her eyes dart around for a minute, making me feel awkward about having asked for the tampons, but then she says, “You’re positive it’s your period, right?”
“I’m not pregnant,” I blurt out as it hits me that she heard that lie to Vasily about the birth control. “I was a couple days late, in fact— but only a couple. I’m not pregnant.”
“It’s not that,” she says, and then her eyes— her pale blue eyes, that same color as Vasily’s— stare me down hard. She puts her hands over mine as soon as I take a drink of water and says, “Ana, what happened last night, are you okay?”
I nearly choke on the ibuprofen. “Oh. Oh, God. You saw that?”
She shakes her head quickly.
Too quickly.
Like, she’s definitely lying at least a little, although hopefully that means she only caught a glimpse of it, and ideally when . . . I don’t know, honestly. The first three seconds would be perfect, because the rest of it would have been my vagina or Vasily’s penis or a combination of both or his spit or his semen or—
“Oh God.”
“I just know what it was,” she promises. “I didn’t see it, and I don’t know who all got it other than Artyom. He wanted me to check on you, and he told me enough that I was concerned you might have been hurt by . . . by Vasily.”
Her skin goes ashen at that, and that’s totally understandable. I know Tony’s not a good guy. At the end of the day, he does bad things, and he does some of them for bad reasons. But I would still be devastated to know he raped a woman.
My eyes mist up as reality hits me. My sinuses tingle. Kseniya sees it immediately and throws her arms around me, crying out, “I will cut his dick off, I swear!”
I laugh, the sound ragged but my spirits lifted marginally for it. “No, it’s not Vasily. I just . . . I was thinking about my brother.”
Every glimpse I get of Vasily— and really, that’s all I get from him— has me further doubting who’s my villain. Tony sold me. For such a paltry sum that I don’t understand why this was the better deal to him. He sanctioned my rape.
The fact remains it was Vasily who physically did it, and as careful as he was with me last night, he did seem to know exactly what he was doing with the show he set up.
Bracing myself for an answer I don’t want to hear but need to hear before I let this go any further and end up trading the frying pan of Mafia men for the fire of a Bratva psycho, I ask, “Has Vasily hurt women before?”
“Never!” Kseniya cries out, appalled. “Never. Oh my God, like, he’s got his issues, some really terrible issues, but never. But then, he hasn’t been serious about a woman since, well, you know.”
She doesn’t know how I ended up here, so I can’t trust that she would know if he’s hurt women in the past. But at least I can get some other questions answered. “I don’t know, actually.” I turn my head bashfully and shoot her some innocent eyes, a move I perfected as a child and have already used on Vasily several times. “We haven’t been together very long.”
“Oh. Well, I was away in college for a while, so I might be wrong, but I don’t think he’s had a girlfriend since Brooke died. Gosh, six years ago now.”
I was wearing a dead girl’s clothes. Yikes.
“There’s something else Artyom wanted to know. About what Vasya did last night.”
“It’s fine,” I bristle, not wanting to explain how it was my own stupid fault for giving him the idea. “It wasn’t what it looked like. I’m fine.”
She’s in no way bothered by my attitude. Instead, she has a laugh and another cookie. “Well, thank you for being protective of Vasya because hardly anyone is, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Artyom wants to know if he was acting strange last night. I guess one of the guys told Artyom that Vasya was weird this morning.”
It feels like she’s hinting at something, but I genuinely don’t know what. “No? I mean, he was intense. It was an intense night, but he didn’t seem strange to me.”
Not that I would know. There was the strangeness when I asked to shower by myself, but that seemed resolved by the time I finished up.
Kseniya lifts an eyebrow. I’m thinking with my face.
“It’s nothing.”
“Sometimes something seems like nothing with him.” Her eyes flit around thoughtfully before she makes up her mind and says, “Drugs. What drugs was he on? Or . . . fuck. Here we go. Did Vasya shoot up last night?”
“What?!” I squawk, hopping to my feet. “No. What? No. I don’t—look, I know hardly anything about drugs,” I admit as I start pacing around the kitchen island. “But he was super intense last night. And I know he takes drugs. But I don’t, so I don’t know what’s what. But doesn’t . . . heroin ,” I whisper as though saying it out loud will conjure it into existence, “turn you into a zombie?”
Kseniya shrugs, but she looks as helpless as I feel in this moment. “Sometimes? It works in different ways? And listen, I promise this isn’t normal for him. It’s been ages since he was on it. He does do a lot of drugs, and we’re doing the best we can to help him, but he’s kicked heroin. There’s just . . . glitches, I guess. After you two did that thing you did last night, did he take anything? To mellow out?”
“Not that I saw.” My heart sinks as, yet again, I think about how I told him I wanted to shower alone. “But I wasn’t with him the whole time.”
Kseniya sighs and reaches out to me to reel me back to her so she can squeeze my hand. “Did you smell anything? Really sharp, almost like vinegar?”
I clench my eyes shut against the tears. I shouldn’t be emotional about this. Vasily isn’t my problem. Did I briefly think he was my salvation? Yes. Was that incredibly naive and pathetic? Yep.
Did I smell something like vinegar? I did.
“It’s okay,” she says, hugging me again like I’m not the villain in her story. “It was probably a fluke.”
Before I can answer, the door is thrown open so hard I hear the dry wall behind it crack.
Vasily stands there, red-faced and breathing hard. His eyes are wide and wild. “Get out,” he snarls.
I tuck Kseniya behind myself reflexively, although I’m little more than a fly for him to swat. I don’t even know why he’s so angry.
But then he points at her — well, both of us, but obviously meaning her — and says something in Russian. He only gets a few words out before he shakes his head and says, “You and Artyom, I’m done with both of you. We don’t need you in our business. Get out. Come here, zvyozdochka .”
He holds his hand out to me, but I hesitate. It’s the nudge from Kseniya that gets me moving. I know I shouldn’t be trusting anyone, but I don’t have a choice, and the way Vasily pulls me in tightly and rests his head against mine is enough reassurance I need.
“That package was delivered to my house,” Kseniya says as she grabs her bag and heads for the door. Before she leaves, she says something in Russian that makes Vasily squeeze me more tightly. I glance over my shoulder and see that his already pale skin goes ashen, his lips parted in shock or distress. Whatever she’s just told him, he wasn’t prepared for it.
“We love you, brother,” she says in English before letting herself out.
Silence follows the slamming of the door. There’s so much I need to say to Vasily. What Kseniya’s told me is the reality check I’ve desperately needed, and now I need to both push Vasily for some essential truths about him and also set up boundaries that I have no choice except hope he’ll respect.
But he’s so damn warm.
I fit so damn well against him.
His hold on me feels so damn vital.
I need this right now before the harsh truth of reality does its damage. So I ease into it with the gentlest, “Kseniya’s my friend, and she loves you. You need to apologize to her.”
“It seems I need to apologize to my entire family,” he mutters. “Do I need to take you to the emergency room?”
I rear back, so startled by the question that I gasp and end up choking on my own spit. “I’m sorry, what?” I bark out, only afterward realizing it could be a threat. Tony does that sometimes, acts all sweet with me only to punish me for something I didn’t know I’d even done.
He puts his hand on my shoulder, and again I have to have faith in the way he rubs it and looks at me with kind eyes hinting at the blue they once were and could be again. “Kseniya told me,” he says with a level, calming tone. “Don’t be upset with her. She’s just making sure I get you whatever you need.”
I run through the conversation I just had with Kseniya, and nope, nothing in it indicated I was sick or hurt. Very much the opposite. “I’m sorry, what did she tell you?”
“That you’re bleeding.”
Laughter erupts from me so aggressively I accidentally spit on Vasily’s shirt. “Oh. Oh! Oh, no. Not—I’m bleeding down there .”
“Right. Because I was too rough last night.”
“Because I started my period, dum-dum.”
Vasily, whose coloring was already returning from whatever Kseniya told him, mottles into angry shade. He mutters in Russian, making me think the anger is directed at his siblings. Maybe Kseniya’s wrong about him taking heroin, and this whole thing has been an awful misunderstanding.
He again takes my shoulders. “ Zvyozdochka, are you positive it’s your period?”
“Oh my God, why does no one think I can tell the difference between a period and a medical emergency?” I huff even though I had the exact same thought process. For, like, half a second. “Trust me. It was time. I’m fine. She was supposed to be asking you to pick me up pads. Or, not even you. Someone. I just needed them, and I’m stuck here.”
He looks around the apartment, the prison he’s given me. Not quite gilded but comfortable. Not quite a cage, but a tether. He’s denied me nothing so far, but I don’t know if it’s because he won’t or because I’ve only ever asked for what I expected him to agree to. Perhaps I’ve behaved myself enough that, just like at home, I get special privileges, but perhaps what I’ve just said, he takes to heart when he says, “Would you like to go out?”
“You mean now?”
“If you want. Or later. We can go get dinner, stop by the store, pick up whatever you need. Or if we go now, there’s a bakery right down the street that’s still open. We can pick you up something sweet.”
I was in enough of a state yesterday that I ignored the homework I need to do, but it’s Wednesday, which means I’m already late on a schematic for Lighting Production. I have an essay due in Shakespeare II tomorrow, and I’m only halfway through Twelfth Night. I have no idea what I’m going to write about. But I take one look at the carnage from my breakfast binge and know the choice I’m going to make.
“I can think of nothing I want more.”
“Perfect,” he says so happily that there’s no way I’m going to ruin this moment with questions about his pass. But then he snatches the pack of Pop-Tarts and dumps it right in the trash.
“Hey! I was still going to eat those!”
“No, you weren’t. Strawberry.” He smacks my butt playfully and says, “Go get dressed for outside. We’ll take a walk around the park after we get some pastries and hot chocolate.”