14
ANA
Present time
Night at the safehouse kitchen
“Marry me,” Dominik says. The words land hard and pull me back to the night everything split and never settled right again.
Since Vadim Markov died, I haven’t owned my future. I ran. I crossed into another region, kept my head down, and tried to build something for Mila and me that wouldn’t draw attention. That choice cost me.
I cut myself out of Dominik’s life. I started over in a town where I knew no one and no one cared about lineage or last names. I built something small and stubborn. Mila learned to walk on cracked pavement. She laughed in grocery store aisles. I worked. I kept a schedule. I stayed forgettable on purpose.
It held because I made it hold.
Then I stepped back into the system.
I didn’t go back for longing. I went back because survival doesn’t end just because you hide.
I went to collect what was mine on paper. Something plain. Something owed to my daughter. A pension. Money already accounted for.
The machine woke up the second I touched it. Now I’m back under the same rules, watched by the same system that keeps records longer than it keeps grudges.
I didn’t return to the past. The past reached for me because it never stopped keeping score.
Men still sit in rooms and speak about me like I'm an asset left in a file cabinet. They weigh value. They discuss alliances. They talk about placement and timing and who benefits most.
They never say resale.
They don't have to.
The rules are clear. A widow gets reassigned. That’s what they call mercy.
“You don’t get to decide my life for me,” I say, keeping my voice steady because I have to.
Mila is asleep in the next room, her breathing finally settling into that deep, even rhythm that means she won’t wake unless there’s a sudden sound sharp enough to break it or a nightmare that pulls her under.
If she wakes and finds me shouting, she’ll panic. She’ll cry and cling and refuse to let go, afraid that if she does, I’ll disappear the way her father did long before she was born. That’s the storyI gave her, because children ask about fathers even when they don’t have one, and they deserve an answer they can live with.
It’s the only reason I keep my voice measured when I turn back to Dominik, the only thing anchoring me to restraint when everything in me wants to shout.
“You don’t get to find me, kill men in front of my child, and then tell me to marry you like it’s paperwork,” I say.
He doesn’t sit. He doesn’t lean. He stands the way he always does when he’s holding the line inside himself, shoulders squared, weight balanced on his feet, eyes fixed on me like I’m a problem he intends to solve without compromise.
“I didn’t decide your life,” he says. “I kept it from ending in a parking garage. And Mila’s.”
“You bring her into it,” I say, my hand tightening around the edge of the counter. “She heard the shots. She saw the blood on my hands. And yours. And we followed you into the car.”
“She’s alive,” he says. “You were thirty seconds from losing her. From being pushed back into the system you were running from. Worse.”
The words land harder than anything else he’s said. I hate the part of me that believes him without question. I hate that another part of me already knew.
“You still don’t own me,” I say.
His face loosens. “I never said I did.”
“You act as if you do.”
