23
Polina
Dmitri gives us separate rooms, separate guards, and enough rules to make one thing clear: we’re contained, not welcomed.
My room is on the east wing. Lev’s is on the west. I know because I asked, and I asked because not knowing was worse. The fact that he’s under the same roof at all is insane. Not that Dmitri is taking requests.
The first day, I sleep fourteen hours. My body was just waiting for permission to shut down. Before I pass out, I call Dr. Savin and tell him there’s a family emergency. He doesn’t ask questions. He just covers my shifts until I can return.
The second day, I eat the food they bring me and stare at the wall, trying to reduce this to something clinical. Doctors survive by compartmentalizing. We’re trained to set aside what we feel and focus on what we know.
What I know is simple: I’m in a secure compound outside Moscow. Dmitri controls where I go. Lev is still here. What Ifeel is harder to pin down, and every time I try to force it into something logical, it slips sideways.
I’ve been turning the word over in my mind since the moment he said it.Obsession.Not infatuation. Not interest. Not some prettier word a man might choose if he were trying to soften the damage. He said it plainly, the way he says everything, and I haven’t stopped hearing it since.
On the third morning, someone knocks on my door.
I assume it’s the guard with breakfast, so I stay in the chair I’ve been sitting in since six. “Leave it outside,” I call.
“If you think I drove two hours to leave breakfast outside a door, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”
I’m on my feet before she finishes the sentence.
Daria stands in the hallway with a duffel bag over one shoulder. Her eyes are red and glassy. She’s been crying, or she’s about to, and either way it undoes me. I start crying so hard my chest burns.
“How did you?—”
“Dmitri called me.” She steps inside without being invited. “I’ve been calling you for months, Polina, and all I’ve gotten is voicemail every single time.”
“I know.”
“You know?” She drops the bag and turns on me, both hands fisted at her hips. “That’s what you have for me? You know?”
“Daria—”
“I thought something happened to you. Like you were sick, or hurt, or that I’d done something so terrible you wouldn’t even tell me what it was.” Her voice breaks on the last word, and she presses her lips together until she has herself back under control. “Do you understand what that was like?”
I reach for her arm. “I do. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry,” she scoffs. Then she pulls me into a hug so sudden and fierce I stumble forward, and her arms lock around me before I lose my balance. She’s three inches shorter than me and at least twenty pounds lighter, but she holds on like she means to keep me from going anywhere.
Something in my chest splinters, and I hold on just as hard. We cry together, soaked in tears, gasping for air and choking out nonsense. It’s the first moment since I walked into this house that I’ve felt anything but fury or fear.
Eventually, she pulls back and studies my face. Then she takes my hand, leads me to the edge of the bed, and sits beside me. “Tell me everything.”
So I do.
I tell her all of it. Not the sanitized version I’ve been rehearsing. I knew this moment would come, and I meant to shield her from the worst of it, the way any older sister would. Instead, the truth comes tumbling out, and before I can stop myself, I’m telling her about the night Lev came through my doors and the choice I made.
The weeks of lying to my colleagues. The way I let him into my apartment, my kitchen, every corner of a life I’d spent years keeping empty. I tell her about the obsession. About the two years. About finding out I was never on equal footing.
Daria listens without interrupting once. She’s the only person I know who can do that—hold still while someone else bleeds out and not start applying pressure before they’re finished, without making it feel clinical.
When I stop talking, she brushes a strand of hair out of my face.
“You thought if you told me, you’d have to admit it was real,” she surmises. “That’s why you haven’t been answering.”
“Yes,” I admit with a sniffle.
