ARTYOM
Ithought being away from Nina for five years was unbearable. Living in the same house as her, while she refuses to look at me, speak to me, or touch me… That’s worse. A thousand times worse.
She’s still wearing my ring, but calling her my wife means nothing when she’s pretending I don’t exist. Nothing has been the same since I found out about Valentin's engagement. Since she found out about Vanya’s announcement.
I don’t regret lying to Nina. She never would have agreed to marry me if she'd known the truth. And the last thing I wanted was to marry someone else.
But those were my options.
Finding Nina, winning her back, that was two birds with one stone.
An efficient, win-win situation. She wasn’t exactly complaining about being married to me until she found out my motivations.
But the silent treatment is grating on my nerves. If Nina wanted to torture me, it's working.
“What?” I snap at Vanya when she asks for another meeting.
I swear she always asks at the worst possible time. Normally, she’s the one person in my family that I will drop everything for. Not lately.
“Is something the matter? Marriage troubles?” She purses her lips together.
“You know what's the matter. Valentin is the matter.”
The bastard never showed a scrap of interest in claiming our family’s council seat, until now. Valentin is my enemy, he’s lying to me about why he’s engaged to Karolina, which means there’s no one in this family I can trust anymore.
“And Nina.” She wags her finger. “Don't think I don't know what goes on in my household, Tyoma. Nina has been sleeping in Ava’s quarters.”
“That's temporary. We’re here to talk about business.”
“Nothing works unless you have a strong foundation.” Vanya is staring out the window, her face thoughtful.
“Stop talking in riddles.”
“You can't expect your business to be in order when your house is not.”
I know she’s right. Every day that Nina doesn’t speak to me, my tolerance for work slips a little further, until I’m getting pretty close to cutting ties with some close allies. Like that call with theArgentinian Cartel earlier today, where I hung up only five minutes into their speech.
“I’m trying.”
“Then try harder.”
Ava wanders into the sitting room, begging Vanya to read her a story.
“Not one that will give her nightmares,” I interject quickly. I still remember sleepless nights when Vanya would tell me traditional Russian folk stories about Baba Yaga, the ogre lady who eats bad children.
“She can handle it,” Vanya insists, her eyebrows waggling. I decide to stay and supervise her storytelling, not wanting Ava to suffer the same fate as me.
Babushka adopts a bone-chilling thick Russian accent for Baba Yaga, doing her best to make the monster as terrifying as possible, but it doesn’t affect Ava. She sits there grinning, then bursts into a fit of giggles when the monster eats the children.
“Aren’t you scared, Ava?”
“No,” Ava says simply, taking my hand. “Because I know you can stop the ogre, Daddy.”
She turns her blue eyes up to me and smiles with such trust that I feel a twist of regret in my stomach. I never trusted an adult like that when I was a child, not even Vanya. And I want to shelter Ava so that she never loses that trust in the world.
That’s when it hits me. I don’t only have myself to think of in this family drama. Nina and Ava are affected by this power struggleas well.
Unless I get things under control, they’ll be at risk.
