I press my hand to my chest, something aching beneath my ribs.
This is what the Kashkin family was, before the ambush destroyed everything. Not just violence and strategy. Love. Real love, messy and complicated and fierce.
Misha had this once. Parents who adored each other, who built a family in the middle of chaos, who found something beautiful in soil this bloody.
And then it was taken from him. Violently, brutally, in a hail of bullets on a deserted road.
No wonder he's the way he is. No wonder he built walls so high nothing could penetrate them. He lost everything that mattered, and the only way to survive was to stop feeling anything at all.
Until me.
I never stopped, he told me.Not for a single day.
I thought that was obsession. Maybe it was. But maybe it was also the only way he knew how to feel something again.
I don't know what to do with that. Don't know how to fit it into the neat categories I've been trying to build—monster and victim, captor and captive. He's more complicated than that. We both are.
The rain starts around noon, just as Mrs. Novak predicted. Heavy drops hammering against the glass roof, turning the world outside into a gray blur. I stay in the greenhouse, surrounded by letters and dead plants and the ghost of a love story that ended in blood.
I read every letter twice. By the time I finish, the rain has intensified, drumming so loudly against the glass that I can barely hear myself think. But I don't mind. The noise is almost soothing, drowning out the chaos in my head.
Alexander loved Maria. Loved her desperately, completely, in spite of everything they were. And she must have loved him too, or she wouldn't have hidden these letters here, in her sanctuary, where she could read them whenever she missed him.
They found something real in the middle of something terrible. They made it work.
Does that mean I could too?
The thought ambushes me, unwanted and dangerous. I push it away, but it keeps creeping back. If Alexander and Maria could love each other in this world, if they could build something beautiful despite the blood and violence... what does that mean for me and Misha?
Nothing, I tell myself firmly. It means nothing. Their story ended in tragedy. They both died, gunned down on a roadside, leaving their children orphaned and broken. That's not a love story. That's a cautionary tale.
But my heart doesn't seem to be listening.
***
The rain has slowed to a drizzle by late afternoon when I hear a car on the gravel drive.
I look up, my heart suddenly pounding. Through the grimy glass, I can just make out the shape of a black SUV pulling up to the front of the house. The driver's door opens, and a figure emerges.
Misha.
Even from this distance, I can see the tension in his shoulders, the darkness that clings to him like a second skin. He moves like a man carrying something heavy—not physically, butsomewhere deeper. Whatever business he handled today, it's left a mark.
I should stay here. Should maintain distance, protect myself, remember all the reasons I need to keep him at arm's length.
But I'm already standing. Already walking toward the greenhouse door.
The letters are still in my hands—Alexander's words to Maria, evidence of a love that survived impossible circumstances. I think about Misha at seventeen, standing over his parents' coffins, swearing vengeance. About the boy in those letters—the sensitive one, his father called him.
About the man who touched my face last night and then let me go.
I don't know what I'm feeling. Don't know if it's real or just trauma dressed up as connection. But I'm tired of running from the question. Tired of pretending I don't feel the pull between us, the gravity that draws me toward him even when I'm trying to stay away.
I push open the greenhouse door and step out into the rain.
He's halfway to the house when he sees me. He stops, his eyes finding mine across the wet gravel.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. The rain mists down between us, cold on my skin, plastering my hair to my face. He looks exhausted, haunted, like whatever he did today cost him something he can't get back.
