I still remember the sounds that came from the basement when I was seven years old, the way my mother would turn up the television and pour herself more vodka and pretend we couldn’t hear the screaming.
Anya wakes as the car stops, consciousness returning in stages—first the tension in her shoulders, then the flutter of her lashes, then those grey eyes focusing on me.
“We’re here,” I say.
She straightens, and I catch the way she winces—subtle, almost hidden. Her thighs press together when she shifts, remembering the knife, the blood.
“It’s beautiful.” She’s already scanning the perimeter.
“The beauty is camouflage.”
“Like you?”
The observation lodges like shrapnel.
One of my soldiers—Dimitri, twenty-three, good with a knife—looks at her too long. His eyes drop when he catches me watching, but not fast enough.
If he looks again, I’ll break his fingers. If he touches her, I’ll make him dig his own grave in the frozen ground and kneel in it while I put a bullet in his skull.
The thought settles me.
“Like both of us now,” I say. “Come. I want to show you something.”
I take her to the master suite first—wolf-carved headboard, reinforced windows, panic room behind the wardrobe—but I don’t stop there.
Through the bedroom, down a narrow hallway, to a room that exists on no blueprints. The door is solid steel behind a wooden facade. The lock requires a code, a fingerprint, and a key I’ve worn on me since I was seventeen.
“Roman, what—”
I push the door open and immediately wonder what the fuck I’m doing.
Another violin sits in a climate-controlled case by the window—the Guarneri. Next to it, a wall of books—read books, spines cracked and pages soft from handling. In the corner, a small wall icon of the Theotokos, my mother insisted on, candle wax stains pooled at its base.
Anya’s breath catches.
“This is—” I stop. “No one knows about this room.”
“Then why are you showing me?”
Because I’m a fucking idiot. Because I can’t stop myself. Because if I die, I want you to have something of me that wasn’t covered in blood.
“Emergency exit,” I say. “The panic room connects to a tunnel. Comes out half a kilometer into the forest. If something happens—”
“Roman.” She crosses the space between her hand and us and finds my chest, right over the scar from the bullet that almost killed me at nineteen. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.” Her eyes hold mine—grey and steady and too fucking certain. “I know what you’re capable of. I know you’ll burn the world before you let anything touch what’s yours.”
I grab her wrist—too hard, I know it’s too hard, but I can’t stop myself—and drag her hand up to my mouth, pressing my lips to her palm.
“You have no idea what I’m capable of,” I say against her skin. “What I’ve done. What I’ll do to keep you.”
* * *
I make her wait while I prepare.
The cabinet beside the wardrobe holds everything I selected for this moment: the steel plug, the warming lubricant, and restraints.
