Page 64 of Marrying the Savage

“She is not Elena,” he says.

The room goes still.

Not because he has said something untrue, but because he has said something dangerous.

My first wife’s name does not live easily in this house. It hangs in certain rooms like smoke that never fully clears. Men know the story. Or they think they do. Sergei has likely already fed Sofia the ugliest version he could find. I imagine him saying it to her in that low, grave voice men use when they want lies to sound like wisdom.

Perhaps not entirely a lie.

That’s the part no one enjoys.

“No,” I say. “She is not Elena.”

Mikhail watches me carefully. “Then don’t make the mistake of treating her like a ghost you can bring back.”

My chest tightens. He’s wrong. Elena and Sofia are nothing alike.

“You think that’s what I am doing?”

“I think you saw a young woman trapped at an altar and decided her anger was a sign.”

“It was.”

“Of what?”

“That she didn’t belong there.”

“That doesn’t mean she belongs here.”

I look toward the closed study door. Sofia is upstairs.

My wife is upstairs.

She slept badly, according to the guard outside her room. Not that he put it that way. He said she was awake until nearly three, paced for an hour, opened the window twice, cursed at the sea once, and eventually slept with the lights on.

That made Grigori laugh when the report came in.

It didn’t make me laugh.

The sea is loud here, especially at night. The house is louder in its silence. For a woman taken from one cage and placed in another before she could catch her breath, Volodin House must feel less like rescue and more like a warning.

I’m not a soft place to land.

Still, the thought of her sleeping with the lights on doesn’t sit right with me.

“She’s scared of this place,” I say. “And I believe she may have been fed lies about me.”

“What kind of lies?”

“She compared me to Bluebeard,” I say.

“And lived to tell the tale?” Mikhail says. “Christ, we do have miracles after all.”

I shake my head. She didn’t directly accuse of me of anything, and I’ve heard worse from others.

“That girl has a death wish.”

“No,” I say. “She has a mouth.”