I tell her about my grandfather, who won the house in a card game in 1962 from Blackwood's bankrupt grandson. Who saw in its gothic bones something that suited our family's temperament—all shadows and sharp edges, built to intimidate.
I tell her about my parents, who tried to make it a home despite everything. Who filled the rooms with children's laughter and my mother's piano playing and, for a brief few years, something that almost resembled normalcy.
She listens without interrupting, her soup growing cold as I speak. When I finally stop, she's quiet for a long moment.
"And then they died," she says. "Your parents."
"Yes."
"How?"
I've told this story before, in clinical terms, stripped of emotion. The ambush. The roadside. The bullets. But something about the way she's looking at me—not with pity, but with a kind of cautious understanding—makes me want to give her more than the bare facts.
"They were coming home from a business dinner," I say slowly. "My father, my mother and Dmitri. Anna and me, we were at home with Mrs. Novak."
The candles flicker. Shadows dance on the walls.
"The Ivanovs hit them on a deserted stretch of road. Shot out the tires, then opened fire on the car. My father tried to shield my mother—" I stop, the memory rising like bile in my throat. "It didn't matter. They were both dead within seconds."
"But Dmitri survived."
"He played dead. Lay in their blood until the shooters left, then crawled to the road and flagged down help." I meet her eyes. "He was seventeen. By morning, he was the man of the house. By nightfall, we'd both sworn to destroy everyone responsible."
"And did you?"
"Eventually. It took years. But yes."
She absorbs this in silence. I wait for the judgment, the horror, the realization that she's sitting across from a man who's dedicated his life to vengeance and violence.
"I'm sorry," she says finally. "That you went through that."
"Don't feel sorry for me. I made my choices."
"Choices made at fifteen, after your parents died." She shakes her head. "That's not the same as choosing freely."
I don't have a response to that. No one has ever framed it that way before—as something done to me rather than something I became.
The main course comes and goes—lamb, roasted vegetables, food I barely taste. We talk about other things now. Lighter things, though nothing between us feels truly light.
She tells me about medical school. About the first time she held a human heart—removed from a cadaver, still andsilent, but miraculous in its complexity. About how she cried afterward, not from horror but from awe.
"It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen," she says, and her eyes glow in the candlelight. "This muscle that works every second of every day, keeping us alive without any conscious effort. That compensates and adapts and fights to survive even when we abuse it."
"You talk about hearts the way other people talk about art. Or music."
"Hearts are better than art. Art just hangs on walls. Hearts keep us alive."
"What made you choose cardiology?" I ask.
She's quiet for a moment, swirling the wine in her glass. "I'm not sure there was one moment. The heart just... fascinated me. How it works, how it fails, how it can be fixed." She pauses. "My professor in first year said I had an instinct for it. That some people understand the heart intuitively, and I was one of them."
"And now?"
The question lands heavily. Her expression shifts—something closing off behind her eyes.
"Now I don't know if I'll ever finish my degree." Her voice is flat. "I'm supposed to be studying for clinical rotations. Instead I'm trapped in a gothic mansion, hiding from a man who thinks he owns me."
The words sting, even though they shouldn't. Even though they're true.
