Misha and I didn’t leave for our home. We moved in, more or less, making our private wing a second home. He was with her day and night, always near her, but I was obligated to obey this distance she wanted between us.
More cracks spliced my heart with the time that passed, but I couldn’t ever consider giving up on her. Not even when the chance of earning her forgiveness felt slimmer and smaller despite how patient I tried to be.
24
KALINA
Thrust from the quiet of the cabin and back into this huge mansion with many people, I felt like I had left one world and entered another.
I was grateful that I hadn’t been taken back to the only world I thought I’d ever have to know, the oppressive conditioning that I had to endure under my brother’s order.
But the shift was jarring. Due to the big change of having to leave the cabin and be here again, I almost shut down completely again. Slipping into that mute nothingness was impossible, though. I couldn’t lock up when Misha wanted to cling to me for comfort.
As weeks passed and I tried to acclimate to being a longer-term guest here at the Dubinin mansion, I looked back and realized that the roles had been flipped. In the beginning, I had sought Misha’s company for comfort. Identifying him as someone who wouldn’t be a threat to me, I wanted to be near him as an offshoot of his innocence and safety.
Now, as we all tried to move on past the fire of the cabin and the thwarted kidnapping attempt, he saw me as an anchor. As someone who’d reassure him that we were okay. That we were alive and not under any present threat.
Misha was in my life. From morning to night, he would want to be with me. Meals were in my room. Aside from his lessons, I stayed in that one bedroom and didn’t plan to venture out of it.
Ironic.
I sat staring out the window, waiting for Misha to come back from his lessons.
I had spent fourteen years trapped in a room, and now I didn’t want to leave this one.
“Will you come walk with us?” Raisa asked after tapping on the door.
I could never bear to close it. Keeping it slightly ajar was just one facet of my insecurities, a fragment of how I feared beinglockedin again.
I turned to face my cousin, seeing her husband, Ivan, at her side.
I’d met them all. One by one, I was introduced to the extended family. Luka, the boss. Emil, who was Sadie’s husband. Gabriella came to check on me daily. Lev had come to say hello. Allan seemed like a stuffy old man but was the mastermind manager of this place.
Misha was instrumental in introducing everyone in the family to me, and he did it with a slight possessiveness, as if it was up to him to make the bridges.
My cousin and I had caught up, but I didn’t give too many details about the life Erik and Yusef had expected of me as I waited to be sold to my husband. I’d already let myself be vulnerable to tell Alexsei all of that, and I was sure he’d filled the others in.
What I hadn’t expected from her was the story of how her father, Konstantin Petrov, had almost killed her and her unborn son. She’d hidden from him, and Ivan, for years, only coming back when she feared for her life. As she—and Ivan—explained how Lev was conceived, more barriers were broken in my mind.
Perhaps she hadn’t been bred.
Maybe she’d fought to have this unplanned baby and spare him a life of violence in this Mafia world for as long as she could. Not because she was forced to be pregnant, but because she wanted to have a baby. All due to their being inlove.
A similar explanation was given by Sadie. She sat with me often, always in my room, and she told me how she and Emil had met. How she’d realized she was pregnant after he stranded her.
I asked Gabriella about how she and Luka started a family. She’d smiled secretly, as if she were waiting for me to appear interested and ask. She, compared to Raisa and Sadie, wanted to encourage me to feel comfortable here. To lose this meekness and speak up. It was very clear she had no compunction about speaking up. Not even to Luka.
Again, she painted a picture of love. That her children were conceived because she loved Luka and wanted a family with him.
“All I can say is that it washellto go into labor the same day that Sadie did,” she’d told me. “Verystressful.”
While they mentioned the babies, Carina and Helene, even Andre, none of them brought the youngest ones to see me. I gathered that they were waiting for me to ask to meet them instead of assuming I would want to.
Ivan and Raisa seemed the most down-to-earth of them all, but I might have been biased since I knew Raisa as a child.
“Has he come to talk to you?’ Raisa asked as she and Ivan came in to sit with me near the window. Misha wasn’t home yet.
“Who?” I looked at her, then him.
