Page 28 of Captured By the Pakhan

This time the whiskey stops halfway to my mouth. That confirms it, he was watching.

"I want to ask you about the staff," I say after another sip, because I'm not going near that other topic tonight. "There's six men on this property and none of them are for him. Karina goes home at seven. He's alone in his own wing with one adult, whoever you've hired that month. That's not a security posture, that's a gapping hole, and I've been trying for a week to work out whether you know that or not."

"I know it."

"Then—"

"Every person in this house is a person he has to survive." He says it flatly. "Six men in a corridor is not protection to him, it is six men in a corridor. The last time this house was full of staff he was six years old, and he stopped speaking for months, the doctors used a great deal of language to tell me what I already knew, which is that people frighten him and the number of people that were in this house is what frightens him."

He drinks, then continues. "So I have chosen the smaller risk. One person. The right person. Everyone else outside his side of the house."

"That's a hell of a bet."

"I suppose."

"And when the right person turns out to be the wrong one?"

"Then it was the wrong person," Ilya says, "and I am aware of the risk, Miss West, I have run it more often than you have."

"Okay. Then tell me the rest of it. Because I see a kid who has panic attacks two or three times a week, who's had them for years, who doesn't like to go outside, and who has a shrine in his room that nobody's allowed to touch — and I'm supposed to keep him alive, and I'm doing it blind."

He's quiet for long enough that I think he's going to refuse to answer. Surprising me when he does.

"His mother took her own life," he says after drinking the rest of his tumbler and moving to refill it. "Four years ago, in the bathroom at the end of that corridor. She was thirty-one."

I don't say anything. Dumbfounded.

"Sergei found her."

Oh my God.

"He was six," Ilya keeps going. The dam that had been intact until now broken between us. "He went to find her because he had been calling for her, and she hadn’t answered, the door was locked. Andrei broke it the rest of the way open about ninety seconds later, and carried her out past him."

And a piece of this house drops into place with a sound I can almost hear.

"That's why Andrei won't guard him."

"Andrei has never once said that to me." He turns his glass. "But yes. I suppose it is."

"Does Sergei know he was the one who⁠—"

"Sergei was standing in the corridor. He knows precisely what he saw." Ilya looks at the wall. "They have not been able to be in a room comfortably since. Neither of them has ever mentioned it. It is, I think, the single greatest act of politeness I have witnessed between two people."

I put my glass down because my hand isn't entirely steady now.

"So he's more comfortable around women."

"His mother was the only person he was close to for the first six years of his life. That was — " and here something goes across his face that I file for later " — that was arranged. Not by him."

"Arranged how?"

"She didn’t want me near him." He says it without any judgement. "Ours was a marriage of alliance. She was given to me at twenty-four by a father who had already done a great deal of damage, and she wanted nothing from me besides a child.”

He pauses then, looking deep into the amber liquid in his glass as he leans back against the desk. “I decided the kindest thing I could do was be absent. So I was absent. My presence upset her, so I removed my presence, including from the nursery, I told myself for six years that was a form of respect."

He drinks. "It was not respect. It was convenience wearing respect's coat. She was drowning in this house while I was in the city being considerate, and by the time I understood that, she’d already been dead a year."

"And now you can't go into his room."