His hand moves to my throat.
I breathe.
He doesn't grip. He doesn't press. He simply rests his hand there, in the specific way of someone who has decided to take an inventory rather than demonstrate force — his thumb against my pulse, which is going at a pace I would very much like it not to be going. He can feel it. He knows he can feel it. His expression doesn't change.
"Your brother is a businessman," he says. "He sold a depreciating asset to cover a bad investment." His thumb presses fractionally — not a threat, a measurement. "You are the receipt, Sofia. And receipts don't speak."
"I am not a?—"
"Shh."
The sound is soft. Almost gentle. It operates on me the same way thecome heredid — not because I want to comply, but because the voice saying it has the quality of something that expects to be heard.
"You are here to be seen," he says. His eyes move over my face with the unhurried precision of someone who is used tohaving time for thorough observation. "To be worn. To be kept. You will attend classes because I require an educated partner, not a bore. You will attend events because I require a presence." He pauses onpresence, as if weighing the word. "And when we are here?—"
He leans down.
His mouth is at my ear, and his height means he has to bend slightly to reach it, and the closeness, the deliberateness of it, the warmth — sends a full-body reaction through me that I have no way to stop and absolutely refuse to show.
"When we are here, you will be silent. You will exist only when I acknowledge you."
He holds there for a moment that is longer than necessary to deliver those words.
Then he pulls back.
His face is a mask of bored indifference. He walks away from me the way he walked toward me — without urgency, without looking back — and sits back down in the chair and picks up the gun.
I stand there.
I stand there — furious, frightened, and something else underneath both that I am not going to examine right now or possibly ever — and turn for the door. One breath of air that doesn't smell like cedar and iron and this situation.
I grab the handle.
It doesn't turn.
I pull harder. I try the handle the other way, I try it harder, I try it the way you try things when the answer is no and you already know it but your hands need to be told. The door doesn't move.
"Aleksei." His name in my mouth tastes like something I've been handed without asking for. "Unlock the door."
He reassembles the gun with a series of soft mechanical sounds. He doesn't look up.
"Aleksei—"
"It's biometric," he says to the room, not to me. Conversational. Informational. "My prints only."
I stare at the matte black panel.
My prints only.
Not: there's a code. Not: here's the emergency exit. Not: the door opens from the outside at certain hours. My prints only. Which means: you are in this room because I have placed you in this room, and you will leave this room when I decide you will leave, and the door being locked is not a circumstance but a structure.
I look at the biometric panel.
I look at him.
He's watching me now. The gun rests on his knee and his steel-gray eyes are on me and there's no triumph in them — no satisfaction, no cruelty. Just the weight of absolute ownership, which is worse than cruelty because cruelty has an affect you can hold onto. This is simply the way things are.
"Welcome home,Orphan," he says.
