"Threatening? No," Mikhail smiles almost sweetly as he straightens up, adjusting his cuffs with a calm that is scarier than the shouting. "That’s just a family-friendly warning. Just so we’re all on the same page."
"Are you okay?" he turns to me. His voice is softer, but the edge is still there.
"I-I'm fine, I just––I need a bathroom first," I say, my voice sounding more tired than I want it to.
"Go," he says, already turning back to his food.
I stand immediately not bothering to announce my excuse to anyone else. I start walking down the hall, my sneakers silent on the runners. I want to disappear into the house for a minute, to just exist without a man telling me who I am.
I take a wrong turn at the end of the east wing. The lighting is dimmer here, the air smelling of old paper and dust. This part of the house feels different—less like a museum and more like a graveyard. I push open a door at the end of the corridor, expecting a storage closet.
It is a bedroom.
I stop in the doorway, my hand still on the brass handle. This isn't like the rest of the estate. There are no gilded mirrors or cold marble here.
It's almost like I’ve been in a time capsule. A twin-sized bed with a faded navy comforter. A desk littered with old notebooks and dried-out pens.
What is this?
I walk into the room, my eyes moving through it, and then I see the books.
I walk toward the shelves, my fingers trailing over the spines. I expect to find books on military history or Russian law—the kind of things they beat into us as kids. Instead, I seeCosmos.A Brief History of Time.The Atlas of the Universe.
There is a telescope in the corner, covered in a thin layer of dust, its lens pointed toward a window that looks out over the darkened woods of the estate. I pick up a book from the nightstand, its cover worn and soft. It is a guide to the constellations.
Could this… could this be the madman’s childhood room?
CHAPTER TWENTY
IRINA
"Looking for something?"
I nearly drop the guide to the constellation as I spin around, the book clutched to my chest like a shield. Mikhail is leaning against the doorframe, his suit jacket gone, his white shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. He doesn't look like the man who just threatened to burn an estate down. He looks… smaller. Still massive, still dangerous, but somehow smaller.
Great. I’m caught snooping in his childhood lair.
"This was your room," I clear my throat, trying to act nonchalant like I didn’t just lose my cool.
Mikhail walks in, and the floorboards groan under his weight. He looks at the telescope, then at the maps of the moon tacked tothe wall with yellowing tape. He looks genuinely uncomfortable, shifting his shoulders as if the air in here is too thin.
"A long time ago," he breathes, shoving his hands in his pocket.
"Astronomy?" I gesture to the shelves. "I figured you’d have been reading about how to break bones or run empires. Not the Apollo missions."
Mikhail lets out a short, dry laugh. He walks up to me, takes the book from my hand. For a second, he looks at the page, a diagram of a lunar module, and I see an emotion flash through his eyes.
I don't think it lasts more than a second and he is back to his unreadable self.
"I wanted to be an astronaut," he says. He says it like he’s admitting to a crime. "When I was ten, I thought if I went high enough, I wouldn't…" He pauses for a while and I fight the urge to tell him to tell me.
He then tosses the book back onto the shelf with a dismissive flick of his wrist. "But then I turned twelve, and my father reminded me that people like us don't reach for the stars. We just own the ground they fall on. It was a fantasy, Irina. A childhood mistake."
An astronaut? The man who kills people for fun wanted to wear a spacesuit? My head is spinning.
"It’s not a mistake to want something else, Mikhail," I say.
"In our world, it is." He steps into my space. The vulnerability from a second ago has vanished and is now being crowded out by the heavy, familiar tension that always follows him. "I didn't expect to find you here."
