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I need to bring Akim Gustev to his knees. And while I do that, I need to know Luna isn’t going to run around behind my back and get herself killed.
She didn’t give me another choice.
As I pass the living room, Gregory slinks out of the doors. He follows me down the hall and through the kitchen. And when I open my office door, he curls around the frame and slips inside.
Fine. He can stay.
The cat at least knows how to mind his own business.
35
LUNA
The fairytales left out the part where you tell a man you love him and he promptly locks you in a room for two days. Even if I had access to a library, they don’t make self-help books for this kind of thing. I’m on my own here.
Literally and figuratively.
I lie back on the guest bed and stare up at the ceiling.
When I first got here, I thought Yakov’s room was bare. The man isn’t big on sentimentality, clearly. Weeks spent in his house and the closest thing I’ve found to keepsakes are the pictures of his siblings stuffed in his desk drawer.
But the guest room is a new level of barren.
There are no photographs, no curated art. It looks and feels and smells beige. The meticulously dusted shelves are decorated with mindless knickknacks and decorative books about ancient botany and engine design that no one in their right mind would ever actually read.
Trapped as I am with nothing to do and no one to talk to, I’m obviously not in my right mind. If anyone comes to visit me, I could make their head spin with all the facts I know about Egyptian gardens and the first known illustrations of plants from the Neolithic Revolution.
Hell, give me Gregory. I’ll talk his fuzzy little ears off about the history of legumes. Which is probably exactly why Yakov didn’t give me Gregory. Can’t risk me getting too cozy in my prison cell.
The lock on the door shifts midafternoon and I don’t even sit up. There’s no point.
The only person to come in or out of this room for days has been Hope. The first day she came in with my dinner, I sprinted past her for the open door. A massive guard blocked my path. I bounced off of him like a racquetball.
“He thought you’d try that,” Hope sighed softly.
I tried to talk to her, to get her to talk to Yakov for me, to make sense of what was happening. Does he hate me? Will I be here forever? What’s going to happen?
Hope just shook her head.
When she came back in for breakfast the next day, she didn’t say anything to me. Same with lunch and dinner. Yakov instructed her to freeze me out, I’m sure.
So I keep staring at the ceiling as the door opens. What’s the point? Why bother?
“I’m going to go insane in here,” I mumble to no one in particular.
“I’ll pass that along to him,” a deep voice says.
I jolt up so fast I slip off the side of the bed. “Who are you?” Then it clicks. “You’re the driver.”
He grins. “Happy to hear I made an impression.”
It was dark the night that Yakov and I left the restaurant together. The driver never fully turned around, but it’s not the kind of profile you forget. As if the mixture of sharp cheekbones and dark, wavy hair isn’t enough, he also has vibrant green eyes. They’re the most interesting I’ve ever seen next to…
His mouth tips into a smirk as one more thing clicks in my head.
“You’re Yakov’s brother.”
“Nikandr Kulikov.” He gives a small wave as he drops into the armchair in the corner and crosses an ankle over the other knee. “Yakov said you were smart. Well… not recently. The last two days have mostly been about how you are stubborn and hellbent on your own destruction. But before that, I heard good things.”
