My skin tugs tight when my fingers unfurl, the cuts along my knuckles pulling as they stretch. The doctor who came late lastnight had spread salve across every scrape, every blister, every raw place where glass tore into me.
The ointment I put on this morning when I got up still glistens faintly under the lights, making my skin look wet even though it isn’t.
When my father finally comes back, he looks even more distraught than when he left.
It’s an expression I’ve only seen on him once, and that was at my mother’s funeral. Even then, it was muted and controlled, practiced in a way that carved my heart out because I was the only one falling apart the entire day and had no one else to lean on.
This is different, though. This is raw in a way that unsettles me.
“I’m moving you somewhere safe,” he says.
His eyes are unfocused as he scans the room. The hand holding his phone trembles ever so slightly, and when he tries to slide it into his pocket, he misses the first time.
I blink at him. “Where?”
Instead of answering me, he crosses the room in three long strides and takes my hand, something he hasn’t done since I was seven. Back when my small fingers used to grip his as we crossed busy Moscow streets after school and on our way to stop by the ice cream shop before returning home, back before I learned what he truly was, before I learned what it meant to be a Morozov.
His palm is cold.
He squeezes once. Hard. “Do as I say, Alina. Please.”
Thepleaseis what breaks me.
Papa doesn’t beg.
Ever.
He commands.
He dictates.
He bends the world until it fits the shape of his will.
But now he looks like a man cornered and the walls are closing in on him. Whatever voice was on the other end of that call didn’t just threaten him. It has completely unraveled him.
“Papa…” I whisper.
His eyes lift to mine, and for the first time in my life, I see him the way no one else has—a powerful man who is suddenly, terrifyingly, out of options.
“You must trust me,” he says, squeezing my hand again. “You must. There is no time, Alina.”
My voice shakes. “Tell me what’s going on. Tell me who called you.”
Tell me it’s not who I think it is.
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “It doesn’t matter. We’re leaving in an hour. Go pack your things. You’ll be staying there for a while. Don’t argue with me. Just do as I say.”
An hour later,I’m in the back of another SUV, this one heading out of the city.
My bags sit on the seat next to me. Two weeks’ worth of clothes sit inside them, along with my passport, my mother’s rosary, and a stack of cash I’ve had hidden under my mattress for over a year.
The sky outside has turned the color of ripe plums, that peculiar shade between dusk and a storm front coming in. Low clouds hang heavy over the skyline, pressing down on the city with a weight that mirrors the pressure in my chest.
I watch Moscow recede in the side mirror, shrinking inch by inch the farther we drive. The onion domes of St. Basil’s glow faintly beneath the grey sky before the distance swallows them completely. The towers and lights blur into a smear of memory.
Yuri sits in the driver’s seat and my father is in the passenger’s. Their bodies are rigid, both of them hardly moving at all. No one speaks. The tension sits thick between all of us, pulsing with every passing kilometer.
Sleet begins to tap against the window, soft at first, then harder. It blurs the world outside until everything becomes a wash of color and motion, like the city is weeping as I leave it behind. The farther we drive, the more the landscape changes. Urban sprawl gives way to quiet roads flanked by tall trees, their canopies dusted with snow.
