“What, again?” asked Julia, my closest friend, whoran the women’s shelter where I volunteered twice a week.
“I’m never going to get out of this house. Fifty years from now, I’ll be rattling around the big old empty place, just me and about four dozen cats.”
Julia laughed, but sobered up quickly enough. “I’ve told you that you’re welcome to seek shelter here, Pauls. You don’t have to have been in an abusive relationship with a romantic partner to qualify for our program—”
“I know, but my father isn’t abusive. He’s just super overprotective because he used to be in with a bunch of bad people before he left Russia and he thinks everyone in the world is just lurking outside the house, waiting to nab me and hold me for ransom.”
“Maybe they are,” she answered lightly, then spoke rapidly to someone who had evidently come into her office before returning to me. “He is the flooring king of Sacramento, after all.”
“And environs,” I said glumly. “He’s very big about making sure people know how far-reaching his flooring empire is.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to remain a captive in your own home.”
“I’m not a captive,” I pointed out.
“You might as well be one. Paulie, you can leave! I keep telling you that. I’ll help you break free.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” I said with a sigh. Sometimes it was difficult making people understand my father. “Dad is very old-school. Daughters, to him, stay at home until they get married.”
Julia snorted. “This is not Soviet-era Russia. You don’t have to give in to outdated and misguided thinking. You are a modern woman.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that the couple of times I started to move out, Dad made himself sick with worry.I mean physically ill. Cardiac-unit kind of ill. I just couldn’t put him through that again.”
“That’s emotional blackmail, and you know it,” she argued.
“Yes, but it’s easier to deal by staying here than to risk killing my dad with worry.”
“Pfft,” she scoffed. “He’d survive. You’re just too devoted to family—that’s what it is.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said, not wanting to continue the argument. We’d had it before, and nothing would change until Dad finally saw reason. “Change of subject time—oh hell.”
“Your life again?”
“No, Angela just texted me. She said she wants to talk to me at dinner about a new opportunity that just came to her attention. Probably she has another charity for me to spend time with. Ugh. Speaking of that, I have to get to the farm and help out with the horses. Today is the farrier’s day.”
“I’ll talk to you later. Maybe we could go see a movie.”
“Ha! Without escort?” I mimicked my father’s heavy accent. “Is not reasonable. Pipples want to take what is not theirs. Pipples want to break Rostakov, to make him much pain. Is not good to go out without protection.”
She giggled. “Well, then we can just get a pizza and binge-watch something on Netflix.”
“We’ll see. Maybe some handsome stranger will be at the stables and want to sweep me off my feet in a nonkidnapping sort of way, and then I can escape the Rostakova Dictatorship.”
“Laters,” Julia said, and hung up.
I spent the day at the rescue stable, enjoyed my time among the horses, donkeys, and other four-legged beasts, chatted with the other volunteers, and returned home in time to find a raging argument going on in what my fathercalled his study (but was really just a large panic room that he’d outfitted as if he was a nineteenth-century British lord).
“—is not safe!” my father was saying in his loud, gruff voice. “You want her dead? Or worse? You work with my enemies? You want her fingers cut off slowly and sent to me, one by one?”
“No, of course not,” Angela said, her voice as calm as my father’s was emotional. Two large men with no necks and distressingly gruesome tattoos on their arms and hands stood flanking the door to the study. “But this opportunity seems heaven-sent, and I would hate to see her miss out on it. You remember me speaking of my niece Mercedes, don’t you?”
“Boys,” I said, deliberately being obnoxious. Boris—the no-neck on the right—had frequently been assigned to follow after me when I threw caution to the wind and went out on my own. He had no sense of humor and delighted in tattling on me to my father. Igor, his buddy, was almost as bad, although he was less bright, and sometimes I could bribe him into leaving me alone in a store for an hour.
“Paulina Petrovna,” Boris acknowledged in return, using both my first and patronymic names in the manner that he knew I disliked.
“I bet there’s a wall outside you guys could find to hold up,” I said, sailing through the doorway. “Preferably the one where the revolutionaries are taken to be shot.”
Igor cast a worried look to his comrade. “How does she know about the wall?”
