"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten in over twenty-four hours." She sets the tray on the small table by the window, her movements precise and unhurried. "Your body needs fuel, whatever your mind might think."
She sounds like one of my professors—practical, no-nonsense, uninterested in excuses. Despite everything, I feel a flicker of something that might be respect.
I sit down at the table and pick up a piece of toast. It tastes like sawdust, but I force myself to chew, to swallow. She's right. I need fuel.
Mrs. Novak moves around the room, straightening things that don't need straightening. I get the sense she's lingering deliberately, and I'm grateful for it. The silence in this house is oppressive, broken only by the creak of old wood and the distant sound of guards patrolling.
"How long have you worked here?" I ask.
"Twenty-three years. I came when Dmitri was eighteen, just after..." She pauses, something shifting in her expression. "Just after the family experienced a loss."
The parents. Misha mentioned them—said his mother taught him to dance, that she "was" a smart woman. Past tense.
"What happened to them?"
Mrs. Novak is quiet for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is careful. "That's not my story to tell. If Mr. Kashkin wishes you to know, he'll tell you himself."
Fair enough. I take another bite of toast, chewing mechanically.
"This house," I say. "It's very..."
"Gothic?" A hint of a smile crosses her face. "Yes. It was built in the 1890s by a shipping magnate with a taste for the dramatic. The Kashkin family acquired it forty years ago. Dmitri's father used to say it suited their temperament—all shadows and sharp edges."
I look around the room with new eyes. The heavy velvet curtains, the ornate moldings, the gargoyles at the windows. It does suit them, I realize. This house is beautiful the way a predator is beautiful—all elegance and danger wrapped in darkness.
"Misha," I say, and the name feels strange on my tongue. "What was he like? Before?"
Mrs. Novak pauses in her tidying. "Before?"
"Before whatever happened to his parents. Before he became..." I gesture vaguely, unable to find the right word.A killer. An enforcer. The man who bought me.
"He was softer," she says quietly. "Not soft—the Kashkin children were never that. But there was a lightness to him. He smiled more. Laughed, even." Her expression grows distant. "When his parents died, the lightness went out. He became theman you see now—all control, all discipline. The walls went up, and they never came down."
Until me, I think. Until he met me at that gala and something cracked.
But I don't say that. I'm not sure it's true, and even if it is, I don't know what it means.
"Thank you," I say instead. "For telling me."
Mrs. Novak nods and turns toward the door. "Is there anything else you need?"
"Yes." I set down the toast, my appetite gone. "Am I allowed to leave this room?"
She pauses, considering. "You can go anywhere inside the estate walls. The house, the gardens, the grounds. You're not a prisoner."
Just a bird in a very large cage.
"Thank you," I say again.
She leaves, and I'm alone with the gargoyles and the cold gray light.
***
The house is a labyrinth.
I spend an hour exploring it, committing the layout to memory the way I'd memorize the chambers of a heart. Entrance hall with its marble floors and sweeping staircase. East wing, west wing, a maze of corridors connecting them. Drawing rooms with furniture draped in white sheets, libraries thick with dust, a conservatory where dead plants wither in cracked pots.
