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The third day, I go to class. Like a normal person. In an Escalade with tinted windows and a Russian driving.

Down the hill, through the gate, and I’m counting the whole way like I’m in a heist movie. Two in the booth. Two more up at the house. Cameras on every door. Cameras on the driveway. A camera over the pool. Who’s breaking into a pool?

Misha parks in the fire lane outside Rolfe Hall and just sits there. I come out three hours later, and he’s still sitting there. I go to the library, and he follows me in and sits two tables away reading a book about World War II. I go pee, and this grown man waits outside the women’s bathroom like a bouncer.

Girls are walking in there looking at him sideways. I’m walking out looking at the floor.

“Misha,” I say on the way home. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes, Miss Jackson.”

“What happens if I run?”

He looks at me in the rearview mirror. He doesn’t smile. He’s never once smiled at me.

“He’ll find you.”

“And then what?”

Misha looks back at the road.

The fourth day, I’m in the kitchen at two in the afternoon, eating the chef’s chicken salad standing up at the island in my Target T-shirt, when Sasha walks in from a phone call.

He doesn’t say anything. He walks straight up behind me, takes the fork out of my hand, sets it down, and bends me over the island.

“Sasha…” I’m hissing it, whispering. “Sasha, the chef…”

The chef’s at the stove. Ten feet away. With his back to us. Stirring something.

He doesn’t turn around.

Sasha yanks my leggings down and takes me right there on the marble, hard and fast, with my cheek pressed flat on the cold stone and my chicken salad pushed into my hair. The marble’s freezing on my nipples through my shirt. I’m biting my lip so hard I taste blood, trying not to make a sound, and I make a sound anyway. A lot of sounds. The chef stirs his pot faster.

When it’s over, Sasha pulls my leggings back up, smacks my ass so hard it echoes off the marble, and walks out of the kitchen to take another call.

The chef never turns around once. He just says, to the wall, “Dinner’s at seven, miss.”

I go upstairs and stand in that big glass shower and let the water run on me till it goes cold. It never goes cold.

* * *

That night, I wake up at two in the morning, and his side of the bed’s empty.

I’m thirsty. That’s what I tell myself. I put on his T-shirt, and it hangs to my knees, and I go down the stairs in my bare feet on that warm stone.

The living room lights are low. I hear his voice before I see anything. Low and calm and in Russian. I don’t understand one word.

I stop on the stairs.

He’s standing in the middle of the living room in his black sweats, no shirt, with his back to me. All that ink across his shoulders. Misha’s next to him with his arms crossed. And on the white rug in front of them, there’s a man on his knees.

He’s crying. His nose is bleeding all over his shirt. All over that white rug. His hands are zip-tied in front of him. He’s shaking so bad I can see it from the stairs.

Sasha’s talking to him. Not yelling. Just talking, quiet and slow, like he’s explaining something to a child. And the man’s nodding and nodding and crying harder.

Then Sasha crouches down in front of him. Real casual. Puts one big hand on the back of the man’s neck. The same way he holds mine.

The man stops breathing.