He shrugs. “Since I met someone who doesn’t lie to impress me.”
The elevator opens into a penthouse lobby. An actual lobby. Not a hallway. Not a shared floor. A lobby that belongs entirely to his family. He enters a code. The door unlocks with a soft chime. The moment we step inside, I know I was wrong to assume anything about privilege. This is not luxury. This is a cage made of glass and gold. The space is massive. White walls. Cold lighting. Art that probably costs more than my brother and I will make in the next five years combined.
But it is silent. Too silent. The kind of silence where emotions are not allowed.
“I hate this place,” Mikhail says like he is commenting on the weather.
“Looks expensive,” I say.
“Expensive doesn’t mean good.”
He tosses his bag onto a couch that looks like it’s never been sat on. I remain standing.
He glances back, irritation flickering. “Sit, Kilovac.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sit,” he repeats, not as an order but as a request threaded with something he doesn’t know how to name.
I sit.
He grabs two waters from the fridge and tosses one to me. Then he drops onto the floor instead of the couch, stretching his legs out like a kid who never learned how to relax properly.
“We can work here,” he says, spreading out textbooks. “No one will bother us.”
“No parents?”
He scoffs. “My father’s in Geneva. My mother’s in Dubai. Or maybe Milan. Depends on which friends she’s pretending to care about this week.”
I pause. “You live alone?”
He smirks. “Not alone. Staff.”
“Staff?”
“Yes,” he deadpans. “People who raise me, so my parents do not have to.”
He says it like a joke. It is not a joke.
I watch him for a long moment. “You okay?”
He looks up sharply, not expecting that question from me.
“No one asks me that,” he says.
“That is not an answer.”
He exhales. Slow. Controlled. Too controlled for fourteen.
“This life is not what people think,” he says quietly. “You think privilege means freedom. It doesn’t. It means expectation. It means never being allowed to be weak. It means being molded into a product.”
Something twists in my chest. Recognition. Not the same kind of suffering. But suffering all the same.
I sit next to him on the floor. Not close. Not far. He gives me a hesitant sideways glance.
“You do not fit here,” he says.
“I know.”
