Chapter 9
Luka doesn’t say a word on the walk back.
His shoes are almost silent on the parquet, just a soft thud every few steps. My own heels tap louder, like I’m broadcasting panic down every corridor in this ridiculous mansion.
My hands still shake.
I keep them jammed into the pockets of my coat so he won’t see, but the tremor runs up my arms and into my shoulders anyway. My knees feel weird, like the marble from Roman’s floor is still under them, and every time I blink I see myself there again.
On my knees.
Looking up at him while his hand is in my hair.
My whole body does this awful hot-cold flip. Shame, fury… and something I really, really don’t want to name.
Nope. Not going there. Absolutely not.
“Breathe,” Luka says.
“I am breathing,” I snap, but my lungs feel like someone pulled them out and left two empty spaces inside my chest.
He glances down at me, mouth twitching like he almost smiles, then thinks better of it. “You went white back there. I thought Roman was going to have to carry you out.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry my nervous system didn’t get the ‘be cool in front of the crime lord’ memo.”
I swallow and stare straight ahead at the endless corridor. There are paintings everywhere—saints, battle scenes, women who probably married horrible men in this house and never left it.
I dig my thumbnail into my palm until it hurts. Pain is simple. Pain means chemistry, something I can label instead of just “holy shit.”
I’m going to kill him.
The thought drops into my head so clean it almost makes me stumble.
One day, when I have the lab he promised and access, I’m going to put something in his body that looks like bad luck on the autopsy.
Cardiac event. No suspicious circumstances.
I picture Mishka on a train to somewhere safe. I picture Roman Volkov in a coffin.
My hands stop shaking so much.
We turn another corner. This house is insane. Wolves carved over half of the doors. Wolves on the wallpaper, wolves in the metalwork, wolves probably stitched into the damn bedsheets.
We stop at a heavy wooden door with two wolves snarling around a cross. Of course.
Luka knocks once. “Gospozha Volkova. Galina Ivanova is waiting.”
My new name stings.
Volkova.
It tastes wrong in my mouth, too many consonants, like I put on someone else’s skin. Anya Morozova wrote papers and argued about receptor binding over cheap wine. Anya Volkova belongs to the man who made her kneel on his office floor.
“Don’t call me that,” I mutter.
Luka gives me a quick sideways look. “You signed the contract.”
“I haven’t yet.”
“You will.” His tone is flat. “Better for everyone if you get used to hearing it.”
Before I can tell him exactly where he can shove his adaptation advice, the door opens.
A small woman stands there, blocking the doorway like a guard dog in house slippers.
She’s tiny—maybe five feet at most—but something about her makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Her spine is straight as a rod, her grey hair scraped back in a bun, and her eyes are the same grey as Roman’s.
“Devushka.” She takes one long look at me, from my scuffed boots to my tear-smeared mascara. “Pridyot. Tridtsat’ minut, chtob sdelat’ tebya nevestoy.”
The Russian hits me too fast. I catch “thirty minutes” and “bride,” and that’s about it. My brain is still stuck on the word devushka. Girl. Diminutive. Not woman. Not doctor. Girl.
“I, uh… sorry,” I say. “My… Russian is rusty. I live in Basel now. Lived.”
Her mouth flattens. “Bozhe moy.”
She waves me inside and switches to English with a scowl. “Fine. English. You’ve been living with Germans too long. Come. We don’t have time to waste. I am too old to be chasing hysterical brides.”
Luka gives me a little nod and stays in the hallway.
The room is big, but it feels cramped because every surface is covered in something—linen, lace, boxes, old wooden wardrobes, a full-length mirror. There’s a faint smell of mothballs and tea and cigarette smoke, and underneath that, some heavy Soviet-era perfume.
The woman marches straight to a wardrobe, muttering to herself in Russian. She opens it and pulls out something long and white and horrifying.
A wedding dress.
My stomach drops so fast I have to reach for the nearest solid object, the end of a carved wooden bed.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
She ignores me. She shakes the dress out, and the silk falls in a heavy, glossy wave over the bedspread. It’s ivory, with a full skirt and lace sleeves and about a thousand tiny buttons marching up the back like a spine.
I want to set it on fire.
“Roman’s grandmother,” she says, like she’s ticking off a line on a form.
“Galina Ivanova. I raised that boy after…” She makes a vague motion with her hand, like she’s swatting away a bad memory.
“After everything. He was twelve. Too much blood for a child. Vadim wanted a weapon. I wanted him alive. We compromised.”
I don’t understand anything, as my brain is latched onto the cage she is holding.
“I can dress myself,” I say. My voice sounds thin and weird in here, like it doesn’t belong.
Her eyebrows go up. “Can you? There are forty-three buttons on this dress. Are you planning to grow a third arm? Or you want to stand here and argue until Vadim comes himself to drag you to the chapel?”
She says his name like a diagnosis. Vadim. Terminal.
I don’t move. My fingers dig into the bedpost.
She comes closer, hands on her hips, and looks me over properly this time.
“Listen, golubushka. Little dove. You are thinking old witch helps monster grandson trap sweet innocent girl. Devil with apron.” She snorts.
“Maybe you are right. I have been in this house too long. I have seen too many bad men and too many stupid women.” Her eyes lock on mine.
“If you want to hate me, hate me after we get you dressed. Because if you make Vadim wait, you won’t like the story that comes next. ”
She reaches for my coat.
I flinch back so fast my heel catches in the rug. I almost go over and have to grab her shoulder to steady myself. Her bones feel small and hard under my hand.
She sighs, long and theatrical. “Arms up, devushka. I have delivered calves with less drama.”
A hysterical laugh bubbles up in my throat. I swallow it.
Fine. Survive now, break down later.
I shove my arms up. She pulls my coat off and folds it over a chair. Then she yanks my T-shirt over my head before I can protest, and suddenly I’m standing there in my bra in front of a stranger who looks like she could kill a man with a teaspoon.
“Good,” she says, like I’m livestock. “No bruises. Some men like to show off on wedding day. Roman is not stupid.” She unclasps my bra too; she doesn’t care about modesty. “Slip.” She holds up a white slip and waits.
My face burns. My skin feels too tight. But I pull the slip on because I have no other moves right now, and standing here arguing topless with Roman’s grandmother is not the hill I’m dying on.
“Do you know about my brother?” I ask, voice barely above a whisper. “Mishka. When does he leave, Luka said seven…”
“Private jet.” She starts unknotting my messy bun with surprisingly gentle fingers. “Seven in the morning. He sleeps at a secure house tonight. You will not see him.”
I freeze. “What?”
She meets my eyes in the mirror. “Clean break is kinder. He is fourteen. He’ll understand.”
“No.” My throat closes around the word. “I need to say goodbye. I need to tell him—”
“You need to stay alive,” she says. “You start begging for last meetings and goodbyes, Vadim smells weakness. He likes weakness. He plays with it.” Her fingers keep working my hair, separating it, smoothing it.
“Your brother gets on that plane and never comes back. That is the gift. Do not ruin it by trying to drag him into this house one more time.”
My chest aches. For a second, I see Mishka as he was three weeks ago, hunched over his math homework at our tiny kitchen table, chewing on a pen cap while he argued with a YouTube lecture about integrals.
He had chocolate powder on his cheek from my failed attempt at cocoa.
He smelled like cheap deodorant and teenage boy.
I’ve raised him alone since I was eighteen, while studying in Switzerland and waiting tables. He’s the only family I have, save for my father, but he doesn’t count, not after showing up drunk at Mama’s funeral.
Tears burn behind my eyes. I blink hard. No. Not in front of her.
“Arms,” Galina says again, softer now.
I lift them. She slides the dress over my head. The silk is cold against my skin and heavier than it looks. It settles around me like water.
She starts on the buttons.
I feel every single one of them close along my spine, a steady, relentless series of clicks.
“One, two, three,” she mutters under her breath.
I count with her in my head because numbers are still the only thing that makes sense. Four. Five. Six.
“You beat him at chess,” she says casually.
“What?” My voice squeaks.
She smirks at my reflection. “You think the walls here do not talk? By the time I came upstairs, kitchen already knew. Kitchen told drivers. Drivers told security. Now even gardener knows that chemist girl wiped the board with Roman Viktorovich.”
Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.
A small, traitorous part of me wants to smile. “He let me win.”
She snorts. “Roman does not ‘let’ anyone do anything on that board. His father used to starve him for losing. Lock him in a dark room with no supper until he learned not to make mistakes.” Her hands keep moving.
“You beat him because you are clever and because he was looking at you. Both are interesting.”
Heat flashes up my neck. “He was not—”
“Devushka.” She rolls her eyes. “I watched that boy grow up. I know when he is thinking with brain and when he is thinking with something a little lower.”
Thirty. Thirty-five.
“He made me kneel,” I whisper before I can stop myself. “In his office. Just because I said he was like the others.”
Her fingers don’t pause. “Did he hurt you?”