Page 78 of The Marriage

Most of the time, Karine forgot how much Masha actually knew about what happened that fateful day when her sister was killed. Mostly because they never discussed it in real depth, and Masha had come along after it happened. Too many pills, a bit too much liquor, and she spilled the secrets in slurred words that she hadn’t even thought her caretaker truly heard one evening. She wanted to hide away from the world and never talk about it again. The shame that she kept close to her heart because she continued to be abused by a monster and never had the courage to say a thing about it.

Masha created the perfect safe-space for her where she could continue to live in a dulled state of mind, always at the ready to make any bad feelings disappear the only way she knew how where Karine was concerned.

Of course, she told her.

“I wish I knew about it sooner, Karine. I wish you had told me—”

“Why?”

“Because I would have done something about it. I never would have let Dima or Leonid continue with their position in our bratva. Hell, I could have buried them in the basement the same fucking night, what difference would it make?”

“You practically fed me to him.”

Dima, she meant.

Maybe her father didn’t realize it, but she was willing to give him a wake-up call.

“So many times you sent me away crying, just for being near you, and he’d be there waiting ... pinning me into corners, covering my mouth, so you couldn’t hear me just twenty feet away, but I could still hear you angry and raging. Once he hurt me so bad, just outside the door of your study, that I passed out. You had a maid clean up the blood. You never even asked where it came from, Daddy.”

“I didn’t know,” he said lowly.

“But you should have. You should have known.”

“I’m sorry—you’re right. I should have known, Karine.”

Was he?

Did it even matter?

Karine couldn’t make herself look at her father. It was too painful to acknowledge all the wasted time of her childhood, and the way he’d—unknowingly or not—facilitated her loss of innocence and constant torment.

What if she had told her father instead of Masha? Would her life have looked completely different then?

She doubted it.

Maybe he cared now, but he never did then—and that was the only time she’d actually needed him.

“So, you’re saying this is all my fault?” she asked. “That I did this to myself?”

Maxim drew closer to her, his two steps taking away most of the space between them. Startled by his movement, she glared at him, forcing him to moved back again.

“I apologize,” he muttered, “I just ... can’t stand to hear you say that. None of this is your fault. I can’t blame you for surviving, even if in the end that meant you—”

“Tried to kill you,” she finished for him in a whisper.

Maxi sighed. “Yes. The plot ... the one she made with Leonid.”

Karine heard how he said she—the way he twisted the word a bit, his displeasure coating the pronoun like he couldn’t manage to say her alter’s name. Or simply didn’t want to.

“Does she scare you?” Karine asked, honestly wanting to know.

He didn’t answer right away. Karine waited him out; they had the time.

“I think she’s scared, actually,” he eventually said. “Angry and scared.”

“You’re not entirely wrong.”

“But I never knew how to handle it—you, I mean. Like that.”