Alya, oblivious to the undercurrents, beams at her grandfather.
“Dedushka! You should laugh more. Your face looks prettier.”
If anyone else had dared suggest Anatoly Belov should be “prettier,” they’d be feeding fish in the Pacific by dawn. But Alya—she gets away with it.
My father actually winks at her.
“This is fun,” she says, stabbing her fork triumphantly into a piece of duck. “I love family dinner!”
53
Bella
The lavender hits first.
Not in a subtle, spa-day kind of way. No. This is more like an aggressive olfactory slap to the face. The kind of thing that says,“You will relax, even if your ribs are still cracked and your arm’s strapped to your chest like an emotional support limb.”
I lean back into the tub, careful not to jostle the arm strapped across my chest. One good leg stretches out; the other rests on the rim, still a war zone of stitches. Twenty-seven, to be exact. I counted. Twice. Because I had time. Because apparently, being kidnapped, nearly killed, and then force-fed duck breast in front of an entire mafia family resets your entire sense of what counts as a “busy week.”
“You sound weirdly calm for someone who was zip-tied to a car frame, babe.” Elena’s voice floats through my earbuds, the only piece of normal I’ve had all week.
The phone’s perched on a towel nearby, far from any electrocution hazard but close enough that I can pretend she’s sitting right here, gripping a bottle of overpriced mineral water, judging my bath products like a sommelier of sadness.
“Calm is a strong word,” I murmur, blowing a strand of damp hair off my forehead. “Let’s go with ‘selectively disassociating.’ Or maybe it’s the lavender. I’m 90% sure this bath bomb is laced with Xanax.”
“You’d still be the most functioning trauma survivor I know.” Elena exhales. “Jesus, when you didn’t pick up for two days, I thought you were dead. Or worse—converting to barefoot-homesteading-wife TikTok.”
“Both still possible,” I say. “Except the barefoot part. Pretty sure I’ll have a limp for the next decade.”
She goes quiet. That Elena silence—the one that only ever lasts a beat but holds a thousand unsaid things.
“I want to come see you,” she says finally. “I know you keep saying you’re okay, but I hear it. In your voice. You sound like you’re floating just above everything. Like if you stop for two seconds, you’ll crash.”
I stare at the ceiling. White marble. Gold fixtures. The kind of bathroom that belongs in some overpriced hotel suite or a mafia wife’s Pinterest board.
Oh, wait.
My throat tightens. “I had dinner with the kids. Helped Lev and Nikolai with their writing assignments, and Alya fell asleep on my lap while we were drawing. They make it easy to pretend things are fine.”
I pause.
“But I can’t pretend with Julian and Lila. Not about this. They’d freak if they found out.”
She exhales like she’s trying not to argue, but she’s also not agreeing either.
“Still think you can keep it from them?”
“They’re on their class trip, remember? Some eco-immersion program in Monterey with beach cleanups and whale-watching and— God, I hope someone packed Lila’s allergy meds. I lied to them, Elena. I said I slipped on the stairs.”
“Technically not untrue. You just didn’t specify it was the stairs of a moving car.”
I snort. Which hurts. Which I immediately regret.
“Anyway,” I shift in the tub, water sloshing gently around me, “Anya helped me strip down like I’m eighty-seven. But I made her leave before the actual bathing. So I’m half-proud, half-exhausted, and maybe mildly concussed. But clean.”
Elena makes a humming sound. “You always did prefer a solo mission. Even when you had pneumonia in college and refused to let me help you shower.”
“That’s because you tried to wash my hair with body wash.”
